Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

1947, Simone de Beauvoir in America

Posted on January 10, 2019

Louis Faurer, New York, NY, 1947 (profile head in El window), Courtesy Deborah Bell Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery

Esher Bubley, Coast to Coast, SONJ, 1947, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery.

In January of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) arrived in New York from her native France to begin a four-month speaking tour at colleges across the United States. Over a period of 116 days, she crossed 19 states and 56 cities by trains, cars, and Greyhound buses, immersing herself in the nation’s landscape and keeping a detailed diary of all that she witnessed.

First published in France in 1948, America Day by Day shows us America through de Beauvoir’s eyes, giving us a taste of life for the young writer and intellectual just two years before she published her landmark work, The Second Sex.

“This is a very photographic book,” says Corinne Tapia, director of Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in New York. “The writing is so precise. She is determined to tell her truth and what she sees. You can easily point out the fact by the descriptions of the cities: where she is, where she goes, and what she hears.”

Tapia first read the book 15 years ago, returning to it periodically and therein discovering a desire all her own: to curate an exhibition of photographs illustrating the world de Beauvoir’s encountered.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Wayne Miller, From ” The Way of Life of the Northern Negro,” Chicago (Afternoon Game at Table 2), 1946-1948 courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery.

Fred Lyon, Post & Powell, Union Square, San Francisco, 1947, courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery/ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me

Posted on January 2, 2019

Mickalene Thomas. Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, 2009. Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel. 82 x 72 in. Private collection

Mickalene Thomas. Afro Goddess Looking Forward , 2015. Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. 60 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Look, but don’t touch, just imagine how it feels as your eyes caress the surface of a work of art by Mickalene Thomas. Painting, photograph, and collage commingle effortlessly as sequins, rhinestones, and glitter every hue imaginable make their way across the picture plane. Spellbound, you stand there and breathe it all in, taking refuge in the infinite glory of the sublime.

At the heart of Thomas’s work is an intoxicating sense of intimacy, a sensual embrace that that seems to embody the very air we breathe. One is immediately seduced and disarmed, overwhelmed by the feeling of being welcomed into this milieu, a space that suggests a boudoir filled with velvet and lace, with veils that cover and reveal, of secrets to be shared.

At its very center, it is about relationship, about the dynamic that exists between artist, model, and viewer that dances into the timeless sunsets of an infinite land. It is rooted in the connections Thomas holds with the women who inspire her to create a wonderland.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Mickalene Thomas. Racquel: Come to Me, 2017. Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, oil stick, and glitter on wood panel. 108 x 84 in. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Women

A Guide to Judy Chicago’s Most Boundary Shifting Works

Posted on December 18, 2018

“Heaven is for White Men Only” (1973). Courtesy of Judy Chicago.

Judy Chicago has spent the better part of her career using confrontation and provocation to blow the roof off this place. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939, the artist announced her new name with a sign posted inside her 1970 exhibition at California State College, Fullerton, that stated: “Judy Gerowitz (her first husband’s name) hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago.”

The new surname signalled a change had come, one fuelled by the fires of liberation and self-determination. For the past 50 years, Chicago has been on the front lines for over half a century, calling out sexism, misogyny, and the abuses of the patriarchy – while honouring women who have forged a path through history against the odds.

Now, at the age of 79, Chicago is enjoying a renaissance, beginning with Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making at the Brooklyn Museum – a return to her most infamous work, a lightning rod for controversy sure as the day is long. Most recently, Chicago opened two shows in Miami in conjunction with Art Week, including a new exploration of Atmospheres and A Reckoning, a major survey spanning four decades. Here we look back at some Chicago’s most controversial works.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Pink Atmosphere, 1971, Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, 2018. Judy Chicago’s Atmosphere

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Painting, Women

Tschabalala Self: Free Range Miami x Bodega Run

Posted on December 13, 2018

Free Range Miami, Photography Tschabalala Self

Free Range Miami, Photography Tschabalala Self

Last Friday night, as part of the 777 International Mall at Free Range Miami during the city’s annual Art Week, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist RAFiA Santana took to the stage. She wore a black bustier and thigh high boots, her bright, tight cropped curls accented by touches of fuschia coloured fluff at her wrists and around her waist, as she performed a six-song set in front of vibrant projections of pink and purple audio-reactive geometric patterns that she designed for a show.

“It was a crazy Miami night, and there was so much going on that there was a crazy ebb and flow, and every thirty minutes there would be almost a different crowd of people,” RAFiA says. “There was a separate private birthday party going on upstairs with older white people who kept poking their head down, and I was like, ‘Bring your friends, bring them down!”

The sounds of Fela Kuti, James Brown, and Soul || Soul filled the air, as DJs including Fulathela, Young Wavy Fox, Loka, and Michael Mosby kept the vibes going for a steady ebb and flow of guests making their way through the converted mall that is now home to Mana Contemporary Miami, a community-based arts center hosting numerous events throughout Art Week.

“The week has been so exhausting,” laughs African-American artist Tschabalala Self, who is in town to present Lee’s Oriental Deli & Market, the latest work from her ongoing Bodega Run series: a site-specific installation for Fringe Projects Miami located inside a store owned by a Filipino local.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Tschabalala Self’s Bodega Run

Tschabalala Self’s Bodega Run

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music

Jamie Reid: XXXXX – Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit.

Posted on December 12, 2018

Anarchy In The UK, 1976 © Jamie Reid.

For half a century, Jamie Reid has done it his way, on his own terms, refusing to kowtow to the establishment and its pompous self-regard. Under his careful eye, art becomes a vehicle for anarchy, subversion, and resistance against the powers that be.

Now, for the first time in his career, Reid is the subject of a major retrospective: XXXXX: Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit. The show brings together collage, drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film, and installation work made over half a century. So why now? “I haven’t been asked before,” Reid says, before casually adding that he did not begin selling his work until a decade ago.

Most famous for sticking a safety pin through the Queen’s nose, desecrating the Union Jack, and crafting the ransom note letter styling of the Sex Pistols’ graphics, Reid has been a pivotal figure in the establishment of punk. His work helped shape the movement into not only a form of music, fashion and art, but into a philosophy predicated on the notion that capitalism is the biggest scam going today.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Be Aware, Fight Back, 1994. Courtesy John Marchant Gallery. © Jamie Reid

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

Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time

Posted on December 7, 2018

Eugene Richards, Grandmother, Brooklyn, New York, 1993. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

More than half a century ago: the New Journalism came of age — a style of reportage so wholly unlike what came before that made it clear the seeming “objectivity” espoused by the Western eye was blind to its own innate biases. Rather than continue to presuppose one could be disinterested in covering subjects like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, many journalists took a stand, opting to explore the complex truths of human life during the final half of the twentieth century — including their own.

Like W. Eugene Smith before him, photographer Eugene Richards (b. 1944) used the photo essay as a means to engage with his subjects through the profound transformation that comes when human beings not only connect, but are seen, heard, understood, and able to share their lives in a holistic way.

Throughout the course of his career, Richards has focused on the essential experiences of life that are daily fodder for headlines including birth, death, poverty, prejudice, war, and terrorism. But through Richards’s lens, we come to understand just how little we know — and how deeply reliant we are upon those who do the reporting in our stead.

In Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time, now on view at the International Center of Photography through January 6, 2019, we are given a stunning trip through Richards’s life in photography. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue distributed by Yale University Press serve to remind us that we are responsible for evaluating not only the content but also the quality and caliber of the source itself. It is not enough to be talented and to have mastered technique; one must stand for something, and in doing so, use their skills in the service of the greater good.

Here, Richards shares his extraordinary journey, that includes a healthy dose of skepticism about the photograph itself.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Eugene Richards, Snow globe of the city as it once was, New York, New York, 2001. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

Eugene Richards, Wonder Bread, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1975.
Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

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

Nathan Benn: A Peculiar Paradise

Posted on November 25, 2018

Sugar cane cutters from Jamaica prepare to go home after harvest season, Miami International Airport. © Nathan Benn

The image of Florida is a curious mélange of palm trees and sandy beaches, gators and golfers on the green, and something darker lying in wait, ready to take the bait — best known to in the headlines as “Florida Man.” Peel back the cheerful veneer of “the happiest place on earth,” and what you find is something far more unusual.

Perhaps it is the draw of living in the Sunshine State that has cast Florida as the dream destination for people living across the Americas. “Whether they were snowbirds moving from the north into retirement or whether they were refugees, economic or political, from the Caribbean, Florida has always had this allure as a place of opportunity,” says Florida native Nathan Benn, who is showing photographs from his new book A Peculiar Paradise (powerHouse) at HistoryMiami Museum this winter.

“This is not like any other celebration of the state: other Florida picture books have sunsets, palm trees and beaches, and pink stucco,” Benn adds. Here, we have everything from Dundee’s 5th Street Gym, where Muhammad Ali famously trained, to Benn’s work with Frank White (a.k.a. “Dirty Harry”) at the Drug Enforcement Agency during the early days of the Drug War.

Drawing from an archive of more than 27,000 photographs taken of his home state while photographing for National Geographic Magazine over a period of 20 years, A Peculiar Paradise is a love letter to a most unusual land.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Sully Emmett collected the gym’s membership dues. 5th Street Gym, Miami Beach, 1981. © Nathan Benn

Fountainbleau Hotel, Miami Beach. © Nathan Benn

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

Judy Chicago: Atmospheres

Posted on November 19, 2018

Smoke Holes #2, 1969, 2018. Courtesy Nina Johnson and the artist

Fifty years ago, Judy Chicago set the world aflame, unleashing Atmospheres into the air we breathe and igniting a passion for pyrotechnics that continues to this very day. Yesterday, Miami gallery Nina Johnson opened an exhibition of never-before-seen photo prints documenting this prescient series of landscape installations and performances made staged between 1968–1974, concurrent to Chicago’s major survey, A Reckoning at The Institute of Contemporary Art.

“It is not unusual for it to take decades for people to understand my work,” Chicago explains. It is not at all surprising, considering the ways in which Atmospheres bridges the divides between the timeless and the temporal by making art an action, rather than an object, to behold – as the ultimate expression of the sacred feminine principles of Mother Earth.

Atmospheres first found expression on the streets of Pasadena, California, where Chicago lived and worked, several years after graduating with an MFA from UCLA. “Using a colour system I had developed for emotive purposes, I did a series of dimensional domes, in which the colour was trapped inside the transparent shapes,” Chicago recalls.

Then, working with other artists, she built a large colour wheel to cover klieg lights and lined the street with billowing fog machines. “When the fog began to fill the street, the colour wheels turned, and I saw the entrapped colour inside my domes liberated in the air. I thought to myself, ‘’I am going to use coloured smokes’, not realising that I was getting ready to liberate myself from the constraints of minimalism – and patriarchy.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Immolation, 1972; from Women and Smoke, 2018. Courtesy Nina Johnson and the artist

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura

Posted on November 15, 2018

Yasumasa Morimura, “Doublonnage (Marcel)” (1988)Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Yasumasa Morimura

“In the end, what is history? And what is historical truth? These are questions that do not have ready answers,” Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura asks in “egó sympósion”, the preface he pens in the catalogue for Ego Obscura, a 30-year retrospective of photographic work in which he transforms iconic works of art and pop culture into self-portraits.

Whether presenting himself as Marilyn Monroe in the famous Playboy centerfold, appearing as Frida Kahlo standing bare-breasted in her brace, or portraying Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy, Morimura surgically deconstructs the concept of “the self” to explore the perils of binary thinking that accompany our assumptions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity, and the ways in which we ensconce them in the pantheon of cultural memory and art history.

“Various truths are concealed in many paintings,” Morimura continues. “On the other hand, a painting can be seen as a fake, something caked with falsehoods and misunderstandings. A painter’s testimony is at once a confession of a hidden truth and an attempt to overwrite their life with a false statement.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Yasumasa Morimura, “Une moderne Olympia” (2018)Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. © Yasumasa Morimura

Yasumasa Morimura, Still from Ego Obscura

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Japan, Painting, Photography

Adrian Boot: Bass Culture 70/50

Posted on November 14, 2018

Sound System – DJ’s at Notting Hill Carnival – 1979

“I didn’t start life as a photographer,” Adrian Boot says with a laugh. “I stayed at university as long as I could – as everyone else did in those days – and then I went to Jamaica to teach physics for about three years. I took up photography as a hobby, and ran into people like Bob Marley and Burning Spear.”

Boot got his first paying gig when the Rolling Stones were in town to record Goats Head Soup at Dynamic Sounds Studios, through his friend Michael Thomas. When Boot returned to the UK, he collaborated with Thomas once again on the 1977 book Jamaica: Babylon on a Thin Wire, now in its fourth printing.

The book was a powerful document of Jamaica in the early ’70s, showing the emergence of reggae music within the larger landscape of politics, violence, and poverty. Suddenly the media took notice, and editors from NME, The Melody Maker, Sounds, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice were on the phone, giving Boot assignments to shoot the emerging reggae scene in the UK.

“I decided to delay going back into teaching and have a sabbatical just taking photographs — and I am still having that sabbatical,” Boot says. “Now I am 72. I have been doing it for a lifetime, and I always expected it to fade out but it didn’t. Then I started to work for Island Records, and then Bob Marley came along and started to have success. The rest is history.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

Posted on November 14, 2018

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is a bigger star in death than he was in life. His paintings sell for sums he could have only dreamt of, and his images are licensed and reproduced all over the globe. His ascension to the pantheon of genius reveals that Warhol knew America better than we know ourselves.

Warhol transformed pop culture into high art, subverting both in the process. He took Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to its logical conclusion, making art out of the very act of repetition itself. In doing so, he planted the seeds for everything from celebrity worship, reality TV, personal branding, and meme culture.

Warhol set himself apart with his trademark silver wig and classic uniform—a white Brooks Brothers oxford cloth button-down, unwashed navy Levis, and a black leather Perfecto jacket—and assumed the position of an oracle. In public, he was a man of few words, saving it all for the spectacle he would unleash in his art, photography, films, books, magazines, record covers, and happenings.

“Andy is connected with quintessentially American things—he didn’t look towards Europe, and that’s why it feels contemporary,” Christopher Makos, a Warhol friend and collaborator, told VICE. “Whether it’s Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola or Campbell’s Soup, Andy always has a built-in PR machine going for him. He doesn’t even have to be around.”

More than three decades after his death at the age of 58, Warhol’s legacy is being celebrated in a major museum exhibition, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again , the first American retrospective since 1989. Senior Curator Donna De Salvo organized more than 350 of the most influential works that illustrate Warhol’s ability to bridge the paradoxes of American life, like fame and privacy, democracy and elitism, innovation and conformity, and truth and propaganda.

The traveling show, with an accompanying catalogue from Yale University Press, just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where it’s on view through the end of March, before heading to San Francisco and Chicago in 2019. In anticipation, VICE tracked down a handful of Warhol’s friends and collaborators to find out what Andy Warhol was really like.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography, Vice