Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

Keith Haring: Posters

Posted on July 20, 2017

Artwork: Keith Haring (1958-1990). Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death, Fight Aids Act Up, New York, USA, 1989. Offset lithograph, 61,1 x 109,5 cm. © Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring (1958-1990) was more than a Pop artist—he was a populist. He made his name in 1980 when he went underground, descending to the subterranean level that New Yorkers know all too well: the subway platform. It was here that Haring set to work, creating a series of white chalk drawings on black paper that had been placed over unrented advertising spaces.

These works, known collectively as Subway Drawings, were an instant hit among people from all walks of life. Because they were made in chalk, rather than marker and spray paint, and depicted recognizable figures rather than hard-to-read graffiti tags, they instantly caught on with people who found the Wild Style of the times simply too taxing to their nervous system.

He softened the punch that graffiti aimed at one and all, and in doing so he was well-received by the art world and the mainstream. But Haring was no punk; he had a message and a style all his one, one that he quickly honed into an industry. In 1982, he began producing posters, one of the most democratic forms of visual culture at the time with its ability to use the systems of mechanical reproduction to distribute reproductions at an affordable price.

Haring seized these opportunities to spread the word, to use the highly popular mode of poster art to reach the broadest audience possible. Of the approximately 100 posters he made during his life, less than 20% were for his shows; instead he focused his efforts on collaborating with like-minded organizations and companies to bring their message to life in a way that was emblematic of the 1980s: bold graphics, bright colors, and good vibes.

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Artwork: Keith Haring (1958-1990). Montreux 1983, 17ème Festival du Jazz, Juillet 8-24, 1983. Silk-screen print, 100 x 70 cm © Keith Haring Foundation.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Posted on July 19, 2017

Photo: Dennis Hopper, Selma, Alabama (Full Employment), 1965, Gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard, 6 2/5 x 9 4/5 inches. Courtesy of The Hopper Art Trust and Kohn Gallery.

Dennis Hopper (1949-2010) is best known to the world as an actor and director whose films sharpened the cutting edge, whether appearing in Rebel Without a Cause (1954), Easy Rider (1969), or Blue Velvet (1986). Hopper didn’t play by the rules that Hollywood wrote, and quickly earned the reputation of being “difficult.” Finding himself ostracized by a studio system that loved to sell rebellion but couldn’t tolerate it within its own ranks, Hopper turned to photography.

His first wife Brooke Howard gave him a Nikon, and he began documenting the world in which he lived—and he lived hard. He attended the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery March in 1955, hanging out with outlaw biker gangs, art stars, musicians, and actors. He created the cover art for the Ike & Tina Turner classic “River Deep – Mountain High,” released in 1966, and was described as an up-and-coming photographer by Terry Sothern in Better Homes and Gardens (of all places).

“But I tell you the truth,” Luke wrote (4:24). “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.” And so it was for Hopper, who showed his work around the globe, that his first major photography retrospective in Los Angeles only occurred after his death. Yet this is where our story begins, for it was at the exhibition preview at the Museum of Contemporary Art that Julian Schnabel introduced Petra Gilroy Hertz, author of his book of Polaroids, to Hopper’s daughter, Marin.

In an interview with The Telegraph in 2012, Marin indicated she did not feel the museum had done Hopper justice. She decided to partner with the Hopper family to create another exhibition and was invited to the family home in Venice Beach. It was here, in the garage, when luck struck and an additional five boxes containing 429 prints that Hopper had exhibited at the Fort Worth Museum in 1970, were rediscovered.

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Photo: Dennis Hopper, Ike and Tina Turner, 1965, Gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard, 6 2/5 x 9 4/5 inches. Courtesy of The Hopper Art Trust and Kohn Gallery.

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Sanne De Wilde: The Island of the Colorblind

Posted on July 18, 2017

Photo: Jaynard (achromatope) climbs a tree in the garden, to pick fruits and play. I took the picture while he was climbing back down. The sun comes peeking through the branches; bright light makes him keep his eyes closed. Sadly local people are often not growing their own food. But the trees around them naturally grow coconuts, breadfruit, bananas and leaves used to chew the betelnuts. © Sanne De Wilde.

Photo: On the way back from a picknick to one of the uninhabited small islands around Pingelap with the colorblind Pingelapese and all the children of the one school of the island. The bay is now protected, islanders are no longer allowed to fish for turtles. Because of the infrared colors the scene looks very romantic, at the same time there’s the visual connotation of the boats full of refugees setting off for a better future. © Sanne De Wilde.

More than a thousand years ago, peoples of an unknown origin arrived in Pingelap, one of the 80 atolls scattered through the Pacific Ocean around Pohnpei, in Micronesia. Over a period of eight centuries, the flourished under an elaborate system of hereditary kings, oral culture, and mythology that kept the population of nearly 1,000 thriving.

Then, in 1775, everything changed. Typhoon Lengkiekie swept across Pingelap decimating the island nation. Of the estimated 20 survivors was the king. Of great fortune to the tribe was their extreme fertility. Within a few decades, the population was approaching 100, but with this came the continuation of a genetic condition of the king. He carried the achromatospia-gen; he was colorblind—and soon, so were many people on the tiny atoll.

In Pingelap, an estimated 5% of the population of 700 are colorblind, whereas the figures are closer to an estimated 1 in 30,000 anywhere else on earth. The phenomenon was first documented by neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who set up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where islanders described their colorless world in terms of light and shadow, pattern and tone, transforming their history into the book The Island of the Colorblind (A.A. Knopf, 1997).

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Photo: Jaynard (achromatope) plays with a disco-light-torch I brought from Belgium. I asked him what he saw. He answered ‘colors’ and kept staring into the light. © Sanne De Wilde

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Godlis: Miami Beach, 1974

Posted on July 15, 2017

Photo: © Godlis

Best known for his photographs of the burgeoning punk scene down on the Bowery made in between 1976-1979, Godlis created his historic images of downtown New York in the same spirit of Brassaï’s Paris at Night. It was just two years earlier that Godlis created the photographs in Miami Beach that he describes as “the first time I took really good pictures that didn’t look like anyone else.”

Godlis took up photography in 1972. A year later he began studying at Imageworks Photography in East Cambridge, where he discovered the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Frank. But it wasn’t until he went down to Miami Beach that he found his eye, perhaps due to the fact that he was returning to a pivotal place from his formative years.

In the 1950s, his grandfather retired and moved to Miami Beach, purchased a multi-apartment complex and began renting out units. He kept a few apartments for the family so they would have somewhere to stay for free. Godlis remembers his mother would take him for a visit during the winter and they wouldn’t return to New York until the weather changed. He went every winter as a child until he was in high school. When Godlis returned to Miami Beach in 1974 at the age of 22, it felt like a homecoming. For the first time since he took up photography, he was able to relax and let the pictures happen.

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

Edward S. Curtis: The North American Indian

Posted on July 11, 2017

Photo: Edward Sherriff Curtis. The North American Indian. Portfolio 8, Plate 256. Chief Joseph – Nez Perce, 1909, Photogravure.

American photographer Edward S. Curtis embodies the essence of heroism in a single word: sacrifice. He staked everything he had to create one of the most significant bodies of work, The North American Indian, ever made and died in obscurity for all that he gave. Now the Muskegon Museum of Art, Michigan, presents Curtis’s full oeuvre—723 portfolio prints—for what may be the first time ever.

Recognized at the largest artistic collaboration and photographic achievement in the history of the medium, The North American Indian presents a body of work made between 1906 and 1930 documenting the indigenous peoples of the land at a time when they were being systematically wiped off the face of the earth by the United States government.

The project, financed by J.P. Morgan, then the richest man in the world, was celebrated by The New York Herald as “The most gigantic undertaking since the making of the King James edition of the Bible.” In total, Curtis produced 20 volumes featuring a whopping 2,200 photogravures, that were sent to subscribers as they were published. Each portfolio contained 75 hand-pressed photogravures and 300 pages of text, which was accompanied by a corresponding portfolio containing at least 35 photogravures.

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Photo: Edward Sherriff Curtis. The North American Indian. Portfolio 9, Plate 320. Lummi Type, 1899, Photogravure.

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles

Posted on July 5, 2017

Artwork: Peter Cain. Sean Number Two, 1996. Oil on linen, 60 x 84 inches, 152 x 213 cm. © Peter Cain, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

When painter Peter Cain died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 37 at in 1997, he left the art world in a state of shock. His career, which he been on the rise for over a decade, had begun to transform into new realms. What remained was a body of work that comprised 63 paintings that reveal a life interrupted, full of promise and potency, an ability to transform the archetypes of the era into something equally compelling and curious.

Matthew Marks, which represented him during his life, now presents Peter Cain, a new exhibition of works at their Los Angeles galleries, currently on view through September 1, 2017. Featuring paintings, drawings, and collages made between the late 1980s and 1997, this is Cain’s first solo show in LA since 1990.

The breadth of the collection reveals Cain’s development and the directions he had been heading at the time of his death. His earlier works, which brought him to game, are sumptuous paintings of automobiles that combine aspects of Surrealism and Photorealism to stunning effect, luring us into a strange realm where nothing is quite what it seems, yet you’re apt to believe in its truth, just as you would in a dream.

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Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Danny Lyon at Galerie Edwynn Houk

Posted on July 4, 2017

Photo: Danny Lyon. From Lindsey’s room, Louisville, 1966. ©Danny Lyon/Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

Brooklyn native Danny Lyon came of age in the 1960s as the nation underwent radical upheavals that have defined the era in which we live. As the Civil Rights Movement came to the fore, Lyon headed south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1962 at the age of 20. His time with SNCC put him on the frontlines of the movement, where he was able to document the horrific reality the fight against government-sanctioned apartheid.

“It was my good fortune to stumble into the story early,” Lyon told The Guardian in 2012. “Being in SNCC politicized me. Having said that, I wasn’t black and I was free. My agenda was photography and books, and what is now called media.”

Lyon is one of the first photographers to practice New Journalism, to embed himself within the cultures he was documenting in order to tell the story from the inside. At the same time, the camera defined his role: he was a journalist using photography to question the practices of the government, the media, and society as a whole.

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Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Gregory Bojorquez: Frame Life

Posted on June 28, 2017

Photo: Beto and Bob’s Dog. © Gregory Bojorquez.

Hailing from East Los Angeles, Gregory Bojorquez (b. 1972) began photographing the cycles of life and death as it unfolded before his very eyes, documenting the glorious and the grim realities as only an insider can. His sensitivity to beauty and strength infuses his photographs with an intense sense of the moment itself, the fleeting nature of existence—here today, gone tomorrow.

With his images, Bojorquez freezes time yet somehow you forget the picture isn’t moving. The impact is so immediate, so urgent, so intense that it becomes cinematic. You perceive a sense of before and after, of three dimensions collapsed into two. You smell the air and feel the sun on your face as a breeze sweeps you away. To put it bluntly, you caught the vapors, as Biz Markie would say.

“I don’t ever want to be called a street artist,” Bojorquez told LA Weekly in 2012. “I’m not a street person. I’m not bad. I take pictures. I feel more like the Ferris Bueller of the Eastside.”

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

David Gwinnutt: Before We Were Men

Posted on June 21, 2017

When Swinging London collapsed, the Pop-optics faded away. The bright cheerful colors of promise became muted, grubby, and grey as the city fell into created desperate times. The rising tide of unemployment, set against an on-going recession, brought the conservatives to fore, and through them a new leader was.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became the first woman to assume the mantle and she went hard: deregulating the financial sector, privatizing state-owned companies, and reducing the power of trade unions. She spoke for the elite and was largely unpopular until victory in the 1982 Falklands War.

During those intervening years, a new generation was coming of age, embracing the D.I.Y. ethos of punk and taking it far beyond the reaches of the known. The scene, which came to be known as the New Romantics, was centered at the Blitz, a nightclub in the Covent Garden section of London.

If ever there was a fitting name, it was this. At the Blitz, a fantastical coterie of artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, and performers came dressed to kill, wearing handmade pieces that could best be described as Ziggy Stardust on acid. The Blitz Kids, as they were known, took that art of the poseur to the next level. The donned costumes and makeup that blurred gender lines, sometimes going so far as to erase the human element in the search for an identity that spoke to the moment.

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

Ai Weiwei: Hansel & Gretel

Posted on June 20, 2017

Photo: Ai Weiwei, courtesy of Studio

In our brave new world, we live in a state of constant surveillance, where our every moment can be shadowed. Our phones can track our footsteps while cameras can use facial recognition software to identify who, where, and when. People presume because “they have done nothing wrong,” such invasions are in their best interest. As author Aldous Huxley predicted, “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity it think.”

It falls to the provenance of artists to question the status quo, to remind us not to take things at face value. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has dedicated his life to this: to calling out injustice, hypocrisy, and violations of the state, corporations, and anyone who would be so inclined to use technology to dig into someone else’s affairs.

Yet it seems no matter how much we speak of the “other,” people are by and large unmoved. Many simply refuse to perceive the impact of abject violations until it happens to them. Understanding the self-centeredness that is innate to so many people these days, Ai taps into the inherent need many people have to use personal experience as the primary path to learn.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Rashid Johnson: Stranger

Posted on June 7, 2017

Artwork: Rashid Johnson. Untitled Beach Collage, 2017, Vinyl, spray enamel, oil stick, black soap, and wax. 183 x 244 x 5 cm / 72 x 96 1/8 x 2 in.

In 1953, James Baldwin published the essay “Stranger in the Village” in Harper’s magazine in which he recounted the culture shock of life as a young African-American man in a small village in Switzerland. The people he encountered were distinctly provincial to the point that manners and etiquette were the least of their concerns. They did not welcome Baldwin so much as the openly gawked, so caught up as they were in the physicality of race.

“…it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there were certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder,” Baldwin writes, perfectly summarizing the power that cognitive dissonance has over the mind that has lost self-control.

Grace is more than a virtue, it is an act of dignity; to be able to perceive the experience of the other is to understand the role one has to play. To disregard this, whether out of lack of care or awareness, creates a visceral sense of alienation, codifying the outsider as strange: a stranger.

Most people are conscientious of their otherness when they step outside their comfort zones; it is only those who are extremely extroverted or self-involved who escape the feeling of not belonging to that which is not theirs by birthright.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions