Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

The Armory Show 2017

Posted on March 5, 2017

Martin Wong, Golden State MKT (storefront)_ 1974_16.25×20.25×1.25 (small). Courtesy of P.P.O.W.

The 2017 edition of The Armory Show was a tremendous success, a testament to the vision of returning director Benjamin Genocchio for his second year. Taking a fresh approach to a traditional, somewhat stale format, Genocchio too the proverbial bull by the horns this year, doing away with the contemporary/modern division that has come to define previous editions of the fair. With the addition of new windows to allow in more light, wider aisles, and more spacious booths, the new layout has an open, luxurious feeling that gives it a more leisurely feel.

With a number of galleries showing single-artist booths, the result was a cohesive presentation of the crème de la crème in the art world. The VIP preview was packed with collectors and celebrities, including Sofia Coppola, Anderson Cooper, John McEnroe, Larry Warsh, Don Rubell, and Marty Margulies, among many others.

Art fairs have become a global industry and they are watched assiduously as thermostats for both creativity and sales. Above all, art fairs are evidence of our times; what happens here helps to set the bar for trends in the market.

Read more the Full Story at Crave Online

“Head Chief and Young Mule Affair-Lame Deer, MT, September 13th 1890 (killing of Hugh Boyle)”, Cheyenne, ca. 1890-95, tanned elk hide, pigment, width: 59”, height: 47 ½”. Courtesy of Donald Ellis Gallery

Categories: 1970s, Crave, Exhibitions

Muhammad Ali, LeRoy Neiman and The Art of Boxing

Posted on March 2, 2017

Artwork: LeRoy Neiman. Round 2, February 25, 1964. Mixed media and collage on paper.. Courtesy LeRoy Neiman Foundation

Muhammad Ali and LeRoy Neiman were a match made in heaven. When the two met here on earth, they changed the art of boxing forever. A new exhibition, Muhammad Ali, LeRoy Neiman, and the Art of Boxing, currently on view at the New-York Historical Society now through March 26, 2017, celebrates their winning combination.

LeRoy Neiman (1921–2012) began working as an illustrator for Playboy in 1954, just a year after the magazine launched, becoming a seminal contributor that gave the publication its look and feel outside of the seductive photographs. Neiman’s style, which could best be described as American Impressionism, was bold, rugged, and captivating, keeping painting and drawing fresh at a time when photography was replacing illustration in the print media.

Neiman regularly covered athletic events, and in 1964, he found himself at the World Heavyweight Championship between Sonny Liston, the title-holder, and Cassius Claw, the No. 1 Contender. In his seminal volume, LeRoy Neiman Sketchbook (powerHouse Books), Neiman writes, “The two black American prizefighters were about to play out their parts as only the times could have scripted them, a good guy and a bad fut. Only who was who?”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: LeRoy Neiman. Round 2, February 25, 1964. Mixed media and collage on paper.. Courtesy LeRoy Neiman Foundation

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting

75 Years After the Japanese Internment, “Only the Oaks Remain”

Posted on February 20, 2017

Photo: Tuna Canyon Detention Center, aerial view. Courtesy of the Merrill H. Scott family.

Sunday, February 19, marked the 75^th anniversary of the Japanese internment, whereby the United States government set up ten camps during World War II to inter some 120,000 innocent Japanese American citizens and legal residents in the wake of the attack on Pearly Harbor. Each and every one of these men, women, and children were held prisoner against their will, without being charged with a crime, given a fair trial, or convicted of breaking any law.

The government, acting under the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, claimed such a blatant violation of the Constitution was a measure to protect “against espionage and sabotage.” The government determined the criterion included any person with who was 1/16 Japanese or more, or any orphaned infant with so much as “one drop of Japanese blood” could be imprisoned.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Tuna Canyon Detention Center, bunk room. Courtesy of the Merrill H. Scott family.

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Photography

By Any Memes Necessary

Posted on February 19, 2017

Artwork: Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q, 1919

Yesterday, while writing a story for Crave Online covering By Any Memes Necessary, a gallery exhibition of meme art at Junior High, Los Angeles, I was hit by a lightning bolt of recognition.

The line from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol continues to this vital, viral new form of readymades, subversive delights that find their provenance in Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which they teach in Art History 101 with a straight face. Duchamp literally took the piss out of the white cube with his “Fountain,” all good taste swept aside for the radicalization of the form and the creative process—which is what memes do, so brilliantly.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next, what bold mastermind will pick up the mantle of Warhol and push culture beyond the boundaries of the known, knowing, as he knew, “Art is anything you can get away with.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions

The David Hockney Takeover!

Posted on February 16, 2017

Artwork: David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971 Private Collection© David Hockney. Courtesy of Tate Britain.

Has there ever been a painter of modern life as celebrated as David Hockney? The British artist, who celebrates his 80th birthday this July, is being fêted with the largest retrospective of his career at the Tate Britain and a flurry of fabulous new art books celebrating his incredible body of work.

While a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney was included in the 1963 exhibition Young Contemporaries, which signaled the arrival of British Pop art. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for four years, creating his seminal painting, A Bigger Splash (1967), which has been knocked off with reckless abandon.

Over a period of six decades, Hockney has transformed the nature of picture making through his relentless questioning of conventions, always seeking to go deeper to connect with art’s very essence. The exhibition at the Tate, simply titled David Hockney, starts with the Love paintings, early work made in 1960 and ’61, in which he subverted the macho language of abstract expressionism and subverted it into a vehicle to express homoerotic ideas and experiences.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: David Hockney. English 1937–. The group XI, 7-11 July 2014. acrylic on canvas. 122.0 x 183.0 cm. Collection of the artist. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt. rom David Hockney: Current (Thames & Hudson, May 2017).

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors

Posted on February 13, 2017

Artwork: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, and water, 113 ¼ x 163 ½ x 163 ½ in. Courtesy of David Zwirner, N.Y. © Yayoi Kusama

“Art is like an endless ocean. I can feel a sense of infinity, the heaven and sky—all a sense of infinity that I can feel through the ocean,” Yayoi Kusama tells Melissa Chiu in a conversation in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the exhibition catalogue published by DelMonico Books/Prestel that accompanies an exhibition by the same name at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. this February. The Hirschhorn is the first stop on a two-year, five-city tour; a full list of venues and dates appears at the end of this story.

Infinity Mirrors is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2017, as it includes six of Kusama’s mindblowing Infinity Mirror Rooms. By now you’ve seen them in countless selfies taken by museum attendees around the world. Kusama has constructed magical spaces that capture the captivating expanse of vast, unknowable universe in rooms filled with multi-colored LED lights. All the surfaces are mirrors so that the result is a gloriously expansive sense of being launched into outer space.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks

Posted on February 9, 2017

Artwork: Untitled Notebook (front cover), 1980–81. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Mixed media on board; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 x ¼ in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Like a prophet, Jean-Michel Basquiat was ahead of his time, alternately embraced and exploited by the art world. The artist, who first became known in the late 1970s, produced more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works before his death in 1988. He also kept an unknown number of notebooks, where he recorded his private thoughts and ideas, some of which would later be realized in his finished works.

It is into these notebooks that we can glimpse the artist’s mind at work, the process of working through ideas in images and words, of things that pass through the mind like “Higher Monkeys” “Spring Onions” and “The History Of The World” at the end of a list that began as “Rubber Monkey At A Buffet.” The pages of Basquiat’s notebooks string together like memories of a dream. Reading through these notebooks is like reading a diary of sorts. It’s a deeply private space that exists between the brain and the eyes. It is being inside and outside of your self at the exact same time.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Al Jolson, 1981. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Oilstick on paper; 24 x 18 in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Estelle Schwartz, 87.47. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum

Artwork: Jean Michel Basquiat in his Great Jones Street studio, New York, 1987. Tseng Kwong Chi (Chinese-Canadian-American, born Hong Kong, 1950–1990). Chromogenic print; 50 x 50 in. Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York & Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, New York. © 1987 Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. New York. www.tsengkwongchi.com

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

Long Live Frederick Douglass, Man of the New Millennium

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: Frederick Douglass, circa 1960,s courtesy of Picture History/Wikimedia Commons.

On February 1, Donald Trump kicked off Black History Month with a breakfast meeting where he quixotically announced, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

The public quickly took note, wondering if the President was aware that Douglass had died in 1895 at the age of 77. Not to be missed amid the head scratching and jokes is the fact that Douglass continues to be one of the most prolific, influential Americans of our time. In recent months, his work has inspired the publication of two new books, a magazine, and an exhibition of photography and art.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Posted on February 4, 2017

Photo: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, The Daughter of the Dancers (La hija de los danzantes). 1933. Gelatin-silver print. 9 1/4 x 6 11/16″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase.

I can still remember the first art show I ever reviewed. It was the Manuel Alvarez Bravo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was 20 years ago this month. I was on assignment for The Village Voice, writing for this brand new thing folks were calling “The World Wide Web.”

I stepped into my first press preview and had a croissant, picked up a folder I still have (and I keep nothing) with an image a woman looking through a porthole in the wall. I was mystified, intrigued, and absolutely enthralled. I can still remember the first line of the review: “A man lies dead in the dirt, his hair slicked with blood like it was gel.” I knew then this was all I ever wanted—needed—to do. Be still and listen for the words that weave the spell.

It’s been a rather round about road, such is life, and on this, the 115th birthday of Alvarez Bravo, I give thanks. It all began with a photograph and the urge to give voice to the thousands of words that speak every language at the same time deep within the silent realm of a picture hanging on the wall.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography

Yuri Dojc: Last Folio

Posted on January 26, 2017

It was written. And then it was lost. But prophecies must reveal themselves. This is the story of serendipity, of miracles, of discovery that can only happen by the right person at the right time in life.

Yuri Dojc was born into one of the few surviving Jewish families in Slovakia in 1946. During the war, the nation had eagerly aligned itself with Germany, seizing Jewish businesses, closing schools, and carting the peoples off en masse to concentration camps where few lived to return. His parents escaped such a fate by fleeing to the mountains and hiding in a bunker outside a village that kept their presence a secret.

After the war, the Jews who returned or remained were careful to hide their identities. Dojc remembers, “You have to understand the history. Being a Jew was unpopular. You don’t tell anyone. You hide that because if you tell them, you might not have any friends. No one in their right mind would come out and do this.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Posted on January 20, 2017

Photo: Squatters attempt to defend their building by blocking the street with overturned cars and trash before an expected attack by the police on East 13th Street. 1995 © Andrew Lichtenstein

As we enter a brave new world filled with threats unfolding against the citizens of this nation by the very hand of the government it purports to serve, we can look to the recent past to find inspiration in the power of the people and their will to speak truth to power by any means necessary.

From race relations, policy brutality, and war to gay rights, abortion, and housing, ever issue facing the common man and woman was addressed by organizers who understood the power of mass protests. Civil disobedience, a term coined by no less that Henry David Thoreau in an essay of the same name penned in 1849, takes the high road of political activism. Grounded in the moral welfare of the people, it is a practice that is American at its core, for this country was founded upon the refusal to accept state-sanctioned abuse that openly violated human rights.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography