Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

Paolo Roversi: Doubts

Posted on February 12, 2019

Roos, Paris, 2017 © Paolo Roversi; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

“For me to take a picture is an act of love, something to connect with the rest of the world and… voila!” Italian photographer and AnOther Magazine contributor Paolo Roversi says on the phone from his Paris studio of nearly four decades. “It’s like a kiss. It is to exchange a regard. It is very simple.”

Very simple – and pure. For Roversi, the photograph is an invitation to discover what lies beyond the known, creating a space where anything is possible. “I like to be lost in mysteries. I don’t like to explain everything. I don’t like to ask. I do not look for the answer in fact. I am happy with only the question,” he says.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Molly, Paris, 2015.© Paolo Roversi; courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics & Black Futures

Posted on February 8, 2019

Pirkle Jones, Free Huey rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park (formerly DeFremery Park) © Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz.

Pirkle Jones, Black Panthers discussing their reading material, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, CA, #101 from A Photographic Essay on The Black Panthers. Commissioned by Swedish magazine, Vi. © Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz.

In 1968, the Black Panther Party (BPP) stood 2,000 strong; armed not just with firearms, but a knowledge of the Constitution, state, and local laws. Initially organised to fight police brutality, the group quickly organised to institute community social programs. Leadership understood the power of the press and began working with writers, artists, and photographers to get the word out.

That year, Kathleen Cleaver met husband and wife photographers Pirkle Jones (1914-2009) and Ruth-Marion Baruch (1922-1997), and gave them unprecedented access to the inner circle of the BPP. Of the work they made, Baruch said: “We can only tell you: This is what we saw. This is what we felt. These are the people.”

The photographs – first printed in The Black Panther weekly newspaper – were immediately well-received, and an exhibition of the work, Black Panthers: A Photo Essay, opened at San Francisco’s de Young Museum shortly after. More than 100,000 people attended the show, despite City Hall’s best efforts to pressure the photographers to delay or cancel it.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

How Art Changed the Prison: The Work of CPA’s Prison Arts Program

Posted on February 5, 2019

Lee Jupina. Game Day, 2015. 7 x 8 1⁄2 inches. Pen on Bristol board. Collection of Jeffrey Greene

The United States prison industrial complex is firmly rooted in the legalisation of slavery. For over 150 years, those rightfully and wrongfully imprisoned have been forced to endure conditions that violate human rights, their fates given over to the government and private corporations.

In the past week, stories of egregious violations at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn and Cook County Jail in Chicago have gone viral, revealing just a fraction of the brutality that largely goes unreported in the news. In much the same way, there are also successful rehabilitation stories that rarely get told.

Jeffrey Green, manager of the Prison Arts Program for the Community Partners in Action (CPA), is aiming to rectify this problem – creating a non-profit organisation that works with current and former inmates in Connecticut’s prison system.

The CPA was originally founded in 1875 as the Prisoners’ Friends Society by a group of notable citizens invested in social reform. This included Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who called out the school-to-prison pipeline by astutely observing: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Joseph Castellano. When I Was Young, 2007. 8 1⁄2 x 11 inches. Pen, colored pencil on paper. Collection of Jeffrey Greene.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck

The Black Image Corporation

Posted on February 4, 2019

“Buy Black” is a powerful sentiment, one that underscores the radical racial disparity in business ownership throughout American history. Political capital has long been gained by catering to the economic interests of various groups, except Black communities — which have been historically met with violence.

“I do not expect the white media to create positive Black male images,” Huey Newton sagely observed, witnessing the impact of centuries of image making on the minds of the populace, whether wholly erasing histories, or revising them resale so that nothing in the new version resembled the truth.

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” journalist A.J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker in 1960, acknowledging a lifetime’s wisdom in a dozen words. Representation and visibility or only half the story being told: it’s not just the who, what, and where that matter but the how and the why that tell you everything you need to know.

Defamed by fake news long before the term became popular, Black America always finds a way to transcend the limitations constantly imposed. In 1942, businessman John J. Johnson founded the Johnson Publishing Company in Chicago, premiering its flagship publication, Ebony, three years later. In 1951, Jet, a weekly digest, debuted. Together, Ebony and Jet, creating the defining image of Black America during the tumultuous years of the twentieth-century, creating a space wholly for itself that drew a loyal audience excited to catch the latest in the glossies. In 2016, Johnson sold both magazine, marking the end of an era.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Dawoud Bey: Night Coming Tenderly, Black

Posted on January 31, 2019

Untitled #14 (Site of John Brown’s Tannery), 2017. ©Dawoud Bey

In 1926, poet Langston Hughes (1901-1967) published “Dream Variations,” a poem that imagines a time and place where African-Americans could finally be free. For Hughes, this could come when the sun had finally set, when “the white day is done,” when the cover of darkness illuminated by the twinkling of distant stars, gave him a feeling of ecstatic peace made possible by “Night coming tenderly / Black like me.”

These words spoke to African-American photographer Dawoud Bey, the recent recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. As Bey approached his 60th birthday, he decided to make a fundamental change in his work. Moving away from the urban scenes of and people that had documented for over four decades, as magnificently catalogued in the new monograph, Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press), Bey began a new series of work that offered the artist a new way of exploring Black history through the photograph.

In Night Coming Tenderly, Black, now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through April 14, 2019, Bey imagines what American landscape looked like under the cover of night to those who followed the Underground Railroad to freedom in a series of 25 prints. His photographs, a lush symphony of blacks on blacks, pay homage to the work of Roy DeCarava (1919–2009), whose mastery of dark tones illustrates the exquisite sensitivity to his subjects, who have largely gone unseen or overlooked.

In reimagining how the American landscape looked to those fleeing slavery, Bey invites us to consider the story of this nation from the perspective of those who built it. Here, Bey shares his journey.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Untitled #4 (Leaves and Porch), 2017. ©Dawoud Bey

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now

Posted on January 25, 2019

Robert Mapplethorpe Pictures / Self Portrait, 1977 Gelatin silver print, 35.1 x 34.6 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation 93.4281 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Just 42 years old at the time of his death, Robert Mapplethorpe’s legacy was already set. A visionary with impeccable instincts and a taste for the extreme, Mapplethorpe was driven by the desire to reveal beauty in its many forms: be it in flowers or fetishes.

For Mapplethorpe, the photograph was a space for transformation, liberation, and freedom to subvert, transgress, and ultimately reclaim gender and sexuality for himself, and by extension, the world. His early collaborations with Patti Smith established them as icons of an emerging avant-garde scene in the New York underground. When he met curator Sam Wagstaff in 1972, they became engaged in a personal and professional relationship that would bind them together until death.

With both homosexuality and pornography being decriminalised in the United States, Mapplethorpe deftly centred the margins in his work, taking domination to new heights by making the viewer submit to his terms. 30 years after his death, Mapplethorpe’s mastery reveals itself to be a prescient, powerful force that is particularly poignant in recognition of all that was lost.

On January 25, Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In celebration of the exhibition, we spoke with artists, journalists, and filmmakers who share their encounters with Mapplethorpe over the years.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

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

In Transit

Posted on January 23, 2019

In 2016, more than one million people fled Asia, Africa and the Middle East to arrive in Europe. It was a continent largely unprepared (or unwilling) to take on the challenges of helping refugees and migrants adjust to life in a new land. While the news was filled with devastating images of sunken ships, sick children and desolate camps, few of the individual stories behind the headlines ever reached the outside world.

When invited to curate an exhibition to East Wing, a photography platform founded in Qatar, Artistic Director Peggy Sue Amison decided it was time “to uncover the ignorance.” This led to In Transit, a multidisciplinary group exhibition of artists including George Awde, Daniel Castro Garcia, Gohar Dashti, Tanya Habjouqa, and Stefanie Zofia Schulz — who themselves are refugees, immigrants, and first-generation citizens.

In Transit takes us to Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Italy, and Iran to look at the day-to-day lives of men, women, and children trying to survive in a foreign, often hostile world. “We’re not trying to solve a problem,” Amison explains. “The exhibition gives these migrants a face and puts the viewer in their position in an intimate way.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985

Posted on January 22, 2019

Ruby Ray, Penelope on Leopard, 1977, Pigment Print. Courtesy of the artist

“If punk had to have a motto, it wouldn’t have been ‘let’s fuck,’ but ‘fuck you,’” cultural critic Carlo McCormick writes in the introduction to Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985, the exhibition he has co-curated with writer Vivien Goldman and Lissa Rivera, Curator at the Museum of Sex in New York. “Forget the romance, this was urgency, necessity, born as much of boredom as from desire.”

Featuring over 300 artifacts drawn from galleries and collectors around the globe, Punk Lust features work from photographers Adrian Boot, Bob Gruen, GODLIS, Janette Beckman, Jenny Lens, Ruby Ray, Marcia Resnick, and Roberta Bayley; fashion designers BOY, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and Maripol; artists and filmmakers Amos Poe, Jamie Reid, Arturo Vega, Linder Sterling, and Raymond Pettibon, among many others. Despite the massive scope of the project, Rivera says that “everything wove together beautifully.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Sniffin’ Glue, No. 8, March 1977, Fanzine. Toby Mott/Mott Collection, London

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

Patty Carroll: Domestic Demise

Posted on January 18, 2019

Over the past four years, American artist Patty Carroll’s life has been in a state of flux as the question of home has had her turned upside down. While managing a move from her primary residence in Indiana to a new apartment and studio in Chicago, Carroll was simultaneously doing renovations on a place in Miami.

“Home became an overwhelming situation of ‘What the hell am I doing?’ and ‘Where am I today?’” Carroll laughs. “It was more than I could deal with. Houses were doing me in.”

But rather than go under, Carroll transformed the sensation of chaos and impending doom into a series of photographs entitled Domestic Demise, which opens at Catherine Couturier Gallery in Houston on January 19.

The latest chapter in Carroll’s ongoing Anonymous Women project, Domestic Demise takes the game of Cluedo as its departure point, staging lavishly decorated scenes inside rooms like the Conservatory, Library, Kitchen, and Hall. Here, the titular ‘Anonymous Woman’ meets her untimely end. The moral of the story: The perfect home is a catastrophe in the making – but at least you will go out in style. You might even say, “Death becomes her”.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Patti Smith: Wing

Posted on January 15, 2019

Patti Smith (1946) Patti at William Burroughs Grave, Lawrence, Kansas, May 2013 Silver gelatin print Photo by Lenny Kaye. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.

In the early 1970s, Patti Smith travelled to Mexico with a Polaroid camera in hand, making photographs as components for collages, most of which have been lost to history. In the decades since, Smith returned time and again, creating a series of images and poems inspired by a feeling of kinship with the nation and its flourishing artistic community.

Now, a selection of 30 photographs is on view in Patti Smith: Wing, a celebration of creation and communion. Wing is also the title of a poem about freedom, both physical and spiritual, as well as the act of travelling independently to distant lands.

“I am not a photographer, yet taking pictures has given me a sense of unity and personal satisfaction,” Smith writes in Land 250. “They are relics of my life. Souvenirs of my wandering. All that I have learned concerning light and composition is contained within them.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Patti Smith (1946) Frida Kahlo’s corset 2, Casa Azul, Coyoacan, 2012 Gelatin silver print. Image courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

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

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

Posted on January 15, 2019

Photo: James Baldwin, writer, Harlem, New York, 1945. hotography by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation, Courtesy David Zwirner

The work of James Baldwin (1924–1987) speaks not only to his time, but that of our own – calling out abuses of power while painting a heartfelt portrait of those they harm. Yet in becoming a public figure, Baldwin’s fame became a double-edged sword, amplifying the impact of his ideas while simultaneously draining him of his creative resources.

In a new exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writer, and curator Hilton Als explores Baldwin’s life as both inspiration and cautionary tale. Featuring the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Richard Avedon, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, Anthony Barboza, Kara Walker, and James Welling, the exhibition also includes a wealth of archival materials including a vinyl recording of Baldwin singing, Precious Lord, Take My Hand – which Als first heard inside the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine during Baldwin’s funeral.

Here, speaking to AnOther, Als reflects on his relationship with Baldwin, one that came about as Als began his journey just as Baldwin was concluding his.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography