Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop

Posted on August 8, 2019

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male couple), n.d. (1975-1986)

In the brief window between the Stonewall Rebellion and the advent of AIDS, New York City became a wonderland for the sexually adventurous. As the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, the spirit of anarchy arose among the dilapidated ruins of the bustling metropolis. Raised on free love, a new gay underground emerged in the bars and clubs, as well as on Manhattan’s West Side Piers where encounters with rough trade in derelict warehouses flourished in broad daylight.

From 1975 to 1986, African-American artist and Bronx native Alvin Baltrop (1948-2004) dedicated his life to documenting this little-known chapter of gay history, amassing a singular archive of work that preserves the era perfectly. At a time when the nearby Meatpacking District still ran red with fresh blood, Baltrop captured the grit, grime, and humanity that thrived in an enclave of illicit pleasures of the flesh.

Largely excluded from the art world during his life, Baltrop is finally receiving his due with a major exhibition, The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, opening August 7 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The museum is home to the Baltrop Archive, a trove of personal documents, photographs, and ephemera that provides a first-hand account of the challenges he faced throughout his life.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (male portrait), n.d. (1975-1986)

Bottom: Alvin Baltrop. The Piers (sunbathing platform with Tava mural), n.d. (1975-1986)

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Document Journal, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

April Dawn Alison

Posted on August 8, 2019

“Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life,” the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez knowingly remarked, reminding us that what we see and what we believe is often just an illusion of sorts. Beneath it all, lays the true self, an identity we often keep hidden from the world — including ourselves.

But there are those who dare to delve into the person they are we no one else is there to witness it. These moments are a manifestation of something beyond the person others see: it is the self that exists within our deepest being. To record this, to document it, to create evidence of that which exists for no one else — this takes nerve. It is here our story of April Dawn Alison begins.

In 2017, a painter named Andrew Masulio donated an archive of over 8,000 Polaroids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) — previously unseen self-portraits of April Dawn Alison, the female persona of Alan Schaefer (1941-2008), an Oakland-based photographer who lived in the world as a man. The archive reveals to us a fully-realized secret life beautifully revealed in the exquisite monograph, April Dawn Alison (MACK), selections from which are currently on view at SFMOMA through December 1, 2019.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Karey Maurice Counts: Remembering Keith Haring

Posted on July 31, 2019

Joseph Szkodzinski Keith Haring Drawing Series January 1982 © Joseph Szkodzinski 2018

As a teen growing up in New Jersey during the 1980s, artist Karey Maurice Counts set his sights on the downtown New York art scene. “I was looking for Andy Warhol, just like everyone else,” he remembers.

Counts began travelling into Manhattan, following the nightclub and art gallery scene through publications like The Village Voice. While taking the subway around town, Keith Haring’s chalk drawings works soon caught his eye. In conjunction with the exhibition Keith Haring at the Tate Liverpool, Counts shares his memories of their first encounter, which would forever change his life.

After learning about Haring’s Pop Shop, Counts headed into the Village to search him out. Bipo, the store manager, tipped Counts off to a photo shoot for a song titled “Crack is Wack”, which was going to be shot in front of the famed Harlem mural on April 22, 1987. He told him to bring some photographs of his paintings to show Haring.

Read the Fill Story at Huck Online

Tseng Kwong Chi Keith Haring in subway car, (New York), circa 1983. Photo © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. Art © Keith Haring Foundation

Karey Maurice Counts, Self-Portrait

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck

Christine Osinski: Summer Days Staten Island

Posted on July 15, 2019

Two Girls with Matching Outfits © Christine Osinski

In 1982, photographer Christine Osinski and her husband experienced the first wave of gentrification that would come to destroy New York. A real estate developer bought the downtown Manhattan building that they called home and priced them out, forcing them to move to Staten Island – a place which has long been considered the city’s “forgotten borough.”

“When you take the ferry, it’s like you are leaving the city behind,” Osinski says. “Staten Island was a place you weren’t noticed and people left you alone. There was a sense of being surrounded by water and being far away from things.”

To acclimate to her new environment, Osinski set out to take photographs of locals on the streets during the summers of 1983 and ’84. The photographs, now on view in Summer Days Staten Island, capture a chapter in New York history that has all but disappeared.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Young Man Pulling a Go-Kart © Christine Osinski

Two Girls with Big Wheels © Christine Osinski

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Lee Stuart: Street Dreams – How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion

Posted on July 7, 2019

Jamel Shabazz. Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC 1981

“Rap is something you do! Hip hop is something you live!” KRS-One memorably said. Born in the Bronx in 1973, hip hop is not just music, dance, and art; it is a way of being in the world.

“I am a child of hip hop,” says Lee Stuart, Brand Director of Patta, a Dutch streetwear brand, who has curated the new exhibition Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion. Organised chronologically, the exhibition presents the visual legacy of hip hop through a series of 30 songs and illustrates them with the art, fashion, and photography that defined the era.

“We’re not trying to be historians,” Stuart says. “We are trying to immerse people in these images, show them and make them part of this energy.”

To select the songs, Stuart did what all heads love: he gathered his team and debated the merits of each track. He then chose corresponding work by artists including Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Dana Lixenberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Earlie Hudnall.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990 Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Jamel Shabazz. Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC 1981.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Music, Photography

Zak Ové: Get Up, Stand Up Now

Posted on June 27, 2019

Armet Francis, ‘Fashion Shoot Brixton Market’, 1973.

Jenn Nkiru, ‘Still from Neneh Cherry, Kong’, 2018.

“I was raised by a village,” says artist Zak Ové of his upbringing in West London. “It was a very outspoken black and West Indian community, [and I was] understanding how assertive one had to be to be seen.”

As the son of an Irish Socialist mum and acclaimed black filmmaker Horace Ové, the artist was raised with strong ideals that have guided him throughout his career: “Politics within the arts has always been very integral from my father’s generation onwards. [It helps us] attain equality, honesty, and perspective towards our own history.”

Now, Ové is honouring those who laid these foundations in Get Up, Stand Up Now, a new landmark exhibition which celebrates 50 years of Black creativity in the UK. The exhibition features historic artworks, new commissions, and never-before-seen work by 100 artists working in art, film, photography, music, literature, design and fashion. This includes the Black Audio Film Collective, Chris Ofili, David Hammons, Ebony G. Patterson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Althea McNish, Steve McQueen, and Yinka Shonibare.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ajamu, from ‘Circus Master Series’, 1997

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Painting, Photography

Collier Schorr: Stonewall at 50

Posted on June 26, 2019

Chella Man © Collier Schorr, courtesy of the Alice Austen House

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, gay men, and allies faced down the police during a raid at New York City’s Stonewall Inn – kicking off a rebellion on the streets of Greenwich Village and igniting the global Gay Liberation Movement.

Half a century after this historic uprising, American photographer Collier Schorr pays homage to 15 leading intergenerational LGBTQ activists and artists – including Eileen Myles, Zackary Drucker, and Judy Bowen – in a series of black and white portraits now on view in Stonewall at 50.

Native New Yorker Karla Jay was an early member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). “Stonewall came along in this age of rebellion against societal norms,” she says. “There were so many things happening in 1969: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Women’s Movement. I was a radical feminist and belonged to a group called Redstockings. We didn’t invent rebellion, but we ran with it because we were sex radicals.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Agosto Machado © Collier Schorr, courtesy of the Alice Austen House

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography from 1959 to 2017

Posted on June 26, 2019

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Flying low, Mexico City, 1989 © Pablo Ortiz Monasterio Courtesy of the artist

“I am not a liberator,” said Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1958, just one year before the Cuban Revolution transformed the landscape of Latin America. “Liberators do not exist. It exists when people liberate themselves.”

This historic movement for independence from western imperialism marks the starting point of the new exhibition Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography from 1959 to 2017. Curated by María Wills Londoño and Alexis Fabry, the show features more than 200 works by over 70 artists; including masters of the medium Alberto Korda, Graciela Iturbide, Sergio Larrain, as well as lesser-known artists such as Enrique Zamudio, Beatriz Jaramillo, and Yolanda Andrade.

“The purpose of the show is to bring a counterpoint to Latin American photography beyond gazes that have an exoticising point of view,” says Londoño. “We want to introduce new perspectives focusing on the chaos and crisis of utopian models of modernity.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Álvaro Hoppe. Calle Alameda, Santiago, 1983

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Exhibitions, Huck, Latin America, Photography

Roger Gastman: Beyond the Streets

Posted on June 20, 2019

Lil’ Crazy Legs during shoot for Wild Style. Riverside Park NY, 1983. Photo Martha Cooper

Graffiti first emerged on the streets of New York and Philadelphia half a century ago as marker tags by young teens with a desire to make their mark. A new art form emerged, and from it styles bloomed, transforming the age-old desire to mark our territory in the most literal way.

Graffiti hit like a bomb, leaving cities covered with the most electric kind of public art: one done for love, not money, at the risk of arrest, fines, and imprisonment. It spread from city to city like a virus through movies like Wild Style and Style Wars, books like Subway Art, and art exhibitions dating back to 1973. It inspired generations of artists from all around the globe to create, innovate, and leave their mark on society in a manner that was nothing short of in your face.

Although New York has largely been scrubbed clean of the art form it unleashed upon the world, “it is still considered the number one graffiti tourism destination,” says Roger Gastman, curator of Beyond the Streets. The exhibition features hundreds of large scale works by over 150 contemporary artists, including Charlie Ahearn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, the Guerilla Girls, Eric HAZE, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, and Dash Snow.

Read he Full Story at Huck Online

Style Wars car by NOC 167 with door open, man reading newspaper. 96th Street Station, New York, NY, 1981. Photo Martha Cooper

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Huck, Photography

Motherward, 1985: Photographs by Elbert Howze

Posted on June 14, 2019

A few months after Elbert D. Howze died in 2015, his widow Barbara Howze paid a visit to the Houston Centre for Photography. The photographer had requested that his archive was donated to the centre, and she wanted to honour his final wishes.

Director and curator Ashlyn Davis remembers Mrs. Howze’s distress after learning that the Centre was not a collecting institution. “She said, ‘But I have a whole trunk full!’ So we went and got six portfolio boxes with hundreds of photos,” Davis recalls.

That summer, Davis went through the boxes and discovered a spiral-bound maquette for a photo book Howze had titled Fourth Ward. The book featured a collection of portraits made 1985 of the residents of Freedmen’s Town, a historically black community founded in 1866 by people finally liberated from the shackles of chattel slavery.

Rather than move north, residents built at least 558 settlements that formed the heart and soul of black Houston. Originally built on swamps no one wanted, Freedmen’s Town occupied prime real estate in the centre of the city – and in due time began attracting developers and gentrifiers who wanted a stronghold downtown as the city began to rapidly expand during the 20th century.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Robert Giard: Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s

Posted on June 6, 2019

Robert Giard. Pamela Sneed, NYC 1992.

In 1985, Robert Giard (1939-2002) went to see The Normal Heart – Larry Kramer’s largely autobiographical play about the rise of the AIDS crisis. The set was austere. Newspaper headlines, statistics, and the names of those who had died were painted on the walls of The Public Theater.

“The fact that we knew so many of those people was deeply moving and motivating,” remembers Jonathan Silin, Giard’s life partner, co-president of the Robert Giard Foundation, and executor of the Robert Giard Estate.

Inspired, Giard set forth on a journey to photograph LGBTQ writers, artists and activists across the United States, creating over 600 portraits between 1985 and 2002. Giard’s sitters include Stonewall veterans Stormé DeLarverie and Sylvia Rivera, Samuel R. Delany, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Eileen Myles, Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, Jacqueline Woodson, and Gertrude Stein, among many others.

A new exhibition, Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s, presents a selection of 53 portraits from Giard’s archive, curated to illustrate the photographer’s inclusive spirit, inquisitive mind, and generous heart.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Robert Giard. Sylvia Rivera, Brooklyn, 1999.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography