Posts from the “Crave” Category

Julio Larraz: Epic Daydreams

Posted on November 12, 2015

“Sunset at Cape Laplace”, 2014 Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 152.4 x 182.9 cm © Julio Larraz

“J. Campamento y Madrigales”, 2015 Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 152.4 x 182.9 cm © Julio Larraz

Julio Larraz describes the vivid images that he paints as visions that come to him as dreams he sees during the day. These images may come on and off over the years, though some, Larraz reveals, “are recent ones, other are long-time friends. There is a mixture of it. I don’t like to do theme works. I prefer to take something and see it from fresh eyes, rather than see it forever.”

The result is a distinctive mélange of dynamic imagery that makes for an incredible collection of work, offering something for everyone in a delightful compendium of endless innovation. From seascapes, landscapes, and aerial views to still lifes, imaginary portraits, and other figurative works, the work of Julio Larraz takes us into a fantastic world brimming with an elegance, grace, wit, and charm.

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“J. Campamento y Madrigales”, 2015 Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 152.4 x 182.9 cm © Julio Larraz

“Sunset at Cape Laplace”, 2014 Oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 152.4 x 182.9 cm © Julio Larraz

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Latin America, Manhattan, Painting

Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls

Posted on November 11, 2015

Photo: Andy Warhol, Camouflage Self- Portrait , 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, with a partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1994.12.1. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Artwork Andy Warhol, Camouflage Self- Portrait , 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, with a partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1994.12.1. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979. Gelatin silver print, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, N.Y. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

New York City in the 1970s and ‘80s was a deliciously decadent time and place where art, gender, and sexuality came together in a miasma of creative energies. As the gay rights movement ushered in a new era, a new sense of expression took hold as gender became an area ripe for exploration. The ideas of masculine, feminine, and androgynous began to capture the imagination of visual and performing artists. Musicians lead the way, as crossdressing came out of the closet and groups like the New York Dolls took advantage of it’s curious effect on their female fans. It was an era of gender fluidity and sexual freedom which held to a deep abiding sense of “anything goes” as bath houses and clubs like Plato’s Retreat flourished in the city.

Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe were two of the most significant artists in New York at this time. As portrait artists, both engaged with gender, identity, sexuality, beauty, performance, and disguise in their lives and their work, revealing the intricacies and nuances of the many-splendored personalities that populated the city then. Each artist focused on their subjects as a means to discovering their truth in a complex series of questions that directly and comfortably challenge the viewer.

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Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts, 2002.4.22. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Joseph Rodriguez: Mi Gente

Posted on November 10, 2015

Photo: Friday night at the Dominoe Social Club, 1987 © Joseph Rodriguez

Spanish Harlem. It’s an attitude, a mood, a way of living that is open, emotional, and warm. It is dominoes on the street as the sun sets as the music of Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri wafts through the air from passing car stereos. It’s a place where open bottles and open fire hydrants are welcome in equal measure. Spanish Harlem is the city’s oldest barrio, dating back to the 1940s, when Puerto Ricans first established themselves in this little corner of upper eastside New York. Home to 120,000 people, half of which are Latino, the neighborhood has been forced to confront some of the city’s endemic problems of crime, drugs, AIDS, and chronic unemployment, many times as a result of systemic racism. Yet, like most true Yorkers, the people have a spirit and a will to survive.

For photographer Joseph Rodriguez, Spanish Harlem is sacred ground, a place he has returned to throughout his life to engage with the community. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rodriguez first went uptown to visit his uncle who had a candy store in el barrio. Then, in 1984, as a student at the International Center of Photography, he was given the assignment of documenting the gentrification of East Harlem.

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Photo: Vietnam Veteran, 1988 © Joseph Rodriguez

Photo: Night scene, 1988 © Joseph Rodriguez

Categories: 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is…

Posted on November 2, 2015

Art Is… (Girlfriends Times Two), 1983/2009 Chromogenic color print 16 × 20 in. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Quiet as kept, the annual African-American Day Parade attracts millions of people each year as it arches through the heart of Harlem, beginning at Central Park North, and marching up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd to 136 Street. Founded in 1968 as an independent organization, the parade does not accept contributions. Instead, it was developed with the sprit of volunteerism and honoring the community. Featuring fire, police, and corrections departments, veterans associations, grand lodges, fraternities and sororities, step and drill teams, the African-American Day Parade is like Harlem Homecoming to the nation.

It was with in this spirit that conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady stages a performance piece, “Art Is…”, which she entered her own float into the September 1983 African-American Day Parade with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. At the top of the float was a gilded gold frame, enormous and ornate, like the type you’d find in a museum around a masterpiece. As the float went up the boulevard, it framed everyone it passed, providing a moving snapshot of the treasures of life. The words “Art Is…” were emblazoned on he float’s skirt, offering an open-ended point of view. “Art is anything you can get away with,” said Andy Warhol.

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home,” said Twyla Tharp. “Art is the most intense mode of individualism the world has ever known,” said Oscar Wilde. Art is any possibility you can imagine, even the idea that those two words could inspire countless ideas from all points of view. Just try it at home. Ask yourself to fill in the blanks. What is art to you?

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Art Is… (Girl Pointing), 1983/2009 Chromogenic color print 20 × 16 in. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Art Is… (Line of Floats), 1983/2009 Chromogenic color print 16 × 20 in. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Categories: 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Thomas Roma: In the Vale of Cashmere

Posted on October 22, 2015

Photo: Thomas Roma, “Untitled (from the series In The Vale Of Cashmere), 2010. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 in.

With In the Vale of Cashmere, Thomas Roma brings us into a little known Eden, one that has been quietly thriving for decades in the New York underground. The Vale of Cashmere is a secluded section of Prospect Park where black gay men cruise for sexual partners. Roma’s portraits of men set in an uncanny urban wooded landscape carry a history of New York and Brooklyn that predates and parallels the gay rights and civil rights movements.

A bard of Brooklyn, Roma is a poet-photographer who has been making profound images of the people of his native city since 1969. The founder and director of the photography program at Columbia, Roma works in a studio which he hand built in his Prospect Park South home, overseeing all aspects of production, from the development of the photographs to the design of his books.

In the Vale of Cashmere (powerHouse Books), Roma’s fourteenth monograph, will release to time with his inaugural exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, from October 29–December 19, 2015. This is Roma’s first major New York exhibition of new photographs since his acclaimed solo exhibition Come Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in 1996.

In the Vale of Cashmere was created as a memoriam to Carl Spinella, one of Roma’s closest friends, who died in Tom’s arms of AIDS in 1992. Roma first met Spinella in 1974; a year later they were roommates living on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Spinella had been instrumental in bringing Roma to his native Sicily in 1978 so that Roma could discover his ancestral roots. (These images were later published as the book Sicilian Passage.) Their bond was so close that Tom often would drive Spinella to the Vale of Cashmere and sometimes pick him up at the drop-off site, an act of faith in a time before cell phones, when who knows what could happen in the woods.

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Categories: Art, Books, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Glenn Ligon: A People on the Cover

Posted on October 19, 2015

Lorrie Davis with Rachel Gallagher, Letting Down My Hair: Two Years with the Love Rock Tribe – From Dawning to Downing of Aquarius. Published by Arthur Fields Books, New York, 1973.

While doing a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, artist Glenn Ligon began collaborating with the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota. Without a clear plan for the partnership, Ligon began wandering the stacks, perusing their holdings, and looking at books he randomly pulled off the shelves. As he did so he discovered the project he would create, the telling of the history of black people in the United States as represented on the covers of books. The result is an intimate white paperback quietly titled A People on the Cover (Ridinghouse).

The book begins with an introduction by Ligon, in which he recounts a brief history of his readings from 1960-1978. He begins with the formative memory of the day a white man came to his South Bronx home, going door-to-door trying to sell the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the housing projects. Ligon’s mother, who worked as a nurse’s aide at a psychiatric hospital, purchased that set of books that was the equivalent of almost an entire month’s rent, believing that education was the best way to get her children out of the hood.

Ligon, who was subsequently transferred to a private school, remembers the way that books became status symbols of white culture, and reinforced their ideals, and found himself in a precarious position of being a young teenage boy living in two worlds. In his earlier years, he recounts an interest in the pretenses of white culture, but grew out of that pose on his first trip to the Eighth Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village. He spotted James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in the store window, and became transfixed by the red, black, and orange cover of the book. As Ligon writes, “I felt, in that moment, that in those four words on the cover, I had found myself.”

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Bronx, Crave

Nicola Lo Calzo: Obia

Posted on October 18, 2015

Photo: Banai Meklien, from Kourou in French Guiana, with a parrot, participant in Gaama’s funeral in Asindoopo, Suriname. © Nicola Lo Calzo/L’agence à paris.

Nicola Lo Calzo has dedicated himself to Cham, a long-term photographic project exploring the living memories of colonial slavery and anti-slavery struggles around the world. From this larger undertaking, Lo Calzo has just released Obia (Kehrer Verlag), a powerful study of the Maroon peoples of Suriname and French Guiana.

Maroons (from the Latin American Spanish word cimarrón: “feral animal, fugitive, runaway”) were African refugees who escaped from slavery in the Americas and formed independent settlements on both continents. The Maroon people of Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) escaped plantations and settled in the forests, surviving against the odds. They defended themselves against armed troops sent by the government, defying colonial order and the system of slavery. Maroons who were captured suffered dire consequences, yet despite the repression, the Maroon communities retained their sovereignty and signed their first treat in 1760.

The history of the Maroon peoples remains one hidden from public view, yet they flourished across the Americas with communities in Louisiana, Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, and Brazil. The word Obia is originally an Akan word, specifically attributed to the Fanti, and points to a belief system of the Maroon peoples since their arrival from West Africa. With Obia, Lo Calzo considers the relationship between the past and the present, exploring the magical-religious legacy of the culture and the new challenges that stem from modernity.

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Photo: Ndyuka Maroon girl shows off her Marilyn Monroe t-shirt. Maroon Day celebrations, October 10, 2014, Albina, Suriname. © Nicola Lo Calzo/L’agence à paris.

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Latin America, Photography

Girls on Film: 70s Punk Legends by Jim Jocoy

Posted on October 7, 2015

Photo: Debbie Harry by Jim Jocoy

Picture it: San Francisco, late 1970s. The punk scene was in full swing and Do It Yourself was in the air. It was a time of youthful ingenuity and rebelliousness that was one part F the system and one part self-indulgence. It was at this time that photographer Jim Jocoy came upon an ingenious plan that resulted in some of the most iconic photographs taken at the time.

The 1970s was a time of Quaaludes. Inhibitions slipped and bold actions were taken without thought to consequence. Jocoy made regular trips to the 7-11 for Kodak color slide film. He loaded his camera, then headed on out to the clubs where he photographed everyone from Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith to Darby Crash, Exene Cervenka, and Sid Vicious. He also photographed the habitués of the scene, the young men and women that shined brighter than life, each radiating with some much pure and wild energy.

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Muriel Cervenka, photographed by Jim Jocoy

Categories: 1970s, Art, Crave, Music, Photography, Women

Training Days: The Subways Artists Then & Now

Posted on October 5, 2015

Photo: Bil Rock, Min, and Kel in the City Hall lay-up at night, 1983 ©Henry Chalfant

Graffiti is like a virus of the best kind. It resides deep in the heart and it makes its presence known in ways large and small. It travels from writer to writer around the world, bringing different handstyles, letterforms, color combinations, and placements to life. It is here today, gone tomorrow, one of the most ephemeral of all the arts.

Were it not for the photograph, some of the greatest masterpieces of graffiti would be unknown, and so it is with great fortune that Henry Chalfant began taking pictures of New York City trains between the years of 1977-1984. In total he amassed of 800 photographs of full trains from some of the greatest writers working during those years. “I have always been attracted to youthful rebellion and mischief,” Chalfant observes with a gentle laugh.

In order to photograph a full car when it arrived in the station, Chalfant stood on the platform on the opposite side, so that he could have enough distance to get 15-foot sections of the train inside his viewfinder. Using a 50mm lens, Chalfant took four or five photographs of each car, and then spliced them together using a razor and adhesive tape. As a sculptor, Chalfant’s hand was flawless, as he was able to translate the scale of each train to the photographic image. But the skill needed to get these shots? That was like stalking big game.

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Graffiti, Manhattan, Photography

NY Art Book Fair: Best of the Zines

Posted on September 23, 2015

Sean Maung, Photo by Miss Rosen

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” observed journalist A.J. Liebling, his years in the media serving him well with the knowledge that the publisher is the king or queen of a domain that may or may not be based in fact or any other kind of objective reality. As a result, the Constitution offers rights and protections for any man or woman willing to pay their own way. Liebling wrote at a time that predated the zine, thus unable to foresee that a day would come when Do It Yourself would become a publishing ethos that reigned supreme.

Zines have existed in one form or another since the days of the American Revolution, when people like Thomas Paine self-published his 1775 pamphlet, Common Sense. But it was not until the 1970s that zines emerged as a movement of their very own, as the punk scene incorporated the highly advantageous ability to use the photocopier to reproduce visual and literary work.

The New York Art Book Fair presents some of the most exciting and innovative zine publishers working in a variety of formats, papers, and genres. Highlights from this year include 8 Ball Zines, Jennifer Calandra, La Chamba Press, Sean Maung, and WIZARD SKULL (New York); Hamburger Eyes (San Francisco); 4478ZINE (Netherlands), among many others.

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Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Crave, Photography

Devin Allen: New Awakenings, In a New Light

Posted on September 4, 2015

© Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/897723-exhibit-devin-allen-awakenings-new-light#HCRoIrR5UIJy23Lw.99

“People don’t understand Baltimore. They only think of ‘The Wire’…it’s worse than that. But we have a strong community. My city is real. There’s no sugar coating. It’s a small city. In twenty, thirty minutes I can be anywhere. You see the issues the people face. That’s why I love it so much. If you’re from Baltimore you can make it anywhere,” says Devin Allen, a 27-year-old amateur photographer whose pictures of the Baltimore uprising following the death of Freddie Gray in April of this year became iconic of the Black Liberation Movement born again.

The photographs, which began as a viral sensation, made it to the cover of Time Magazine, making Allen only the third amateur photographer to do so. Allen, a Baltimore native, grew up just five minutes away from the site of Freddie Gray’s fatal encounter with local police on April 12.

Allen photographed the uprising, which began April 18, and continued over the course of ten days. With an ongoing cycle of protests, arrests, and injuries, the tension increased until it reached the breaking point when the police refused high school students access to public transportation, preventing them from going home. Violence erupted, with police cars destroyed and a CVS Pharmacy burned and looted. A state of emergency was declared and the National Guard was sent in—but when it was all over, it was the people of Baltimore who came together to clean up the streets, maintaining the unity that they had created throughout the month.

In Allen’s eyes, the Baltimore uprising created, “Unity and love. In my city, that’s rare. People have difficulties. But we all united in one goal. We have to keep that up. We united for the protest, and once it stops, what do you do then? We love one another. There are multiple ways to fight. You can’t fix other issues if your home is not straight. I am a true activist for my city.”

Indeed, Allen has partnered with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, for the first solo show of his photographs titled Devin Allen: New Awakenings, In a New Light, now on view through December 7, in a new community space inside the museum called Lewis Now. The exhibition is free to the public, and has been designed to have interactive components. A number of the images have been enlarged to 20-feet wide and have been wheat pasted onto the wall by Allen, in a nod to the street origins of the images. Visitors can also write responses to the prompt, “Where were you?” on a timeline that shows a number of the events Allen captured in the photographs.

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© Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/897723-exhibit-devin-allen-awakenings-new-light#HCRoIrR5UIJy23Lw.99

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography