Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Posted on August 4, 2021

*Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire celebrates with her friends, 1980–83/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

At the age of 45, Lorraine O’Grady emerged as an artist fully formed when she made her first public appearance as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in 1980 at Just Above Midtown, the center of New York’s Black avant-garde run by revolutionary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Dressed in a handmade gown comprised of 180 pairs of white gloves, a sparkling tiara, and beauty queen sash, O’Grady entered the gallery bearing flowers and a cat-o’-nine-tails whip.

The flowers were for the audience, the whip she saved for herself in a performance that decried the respectability politics that consumed the Black American middle class desperately striving to find some semblance of protection from the horrors of systemic racism. But O’Grady, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, knew such ideas were illusions at best. As she whipped herself, she spoke verse, her poem ending in a firm declaration: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!”

O’Grady wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t afraid – even if it meant her work would go without proper recognition for more than 40 years. Now 86, the artist is finally being given her proper due with her first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled Both/And and which just ended, and the publication of two collections of her work from Duke University and Dancing Foxes Press.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

*Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two), 1983/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

The Fourth Annual Latin American Foto Festival

Posted on August 1, 2021

*Alfred Flores, 5, holds a bunch of quenettes in Patanemo, Venezuela, on July 17, 2020 © Andrea Hernández Briceño*

Strength, resistance, endurance, and adaptability are vital necessities for survival in a brutal world, one that continues to perpetrate the horrors of colonialism upon indigenous communities who have been rooted in the land for thousands of years. When looking at contemporary Latin America, we bear witness to an extraordinary blend of cultures in 33 nations on two continents fighting for survival in the wake of cataclysmic waves of warfare, ethnic cleansing, and environmental destruction.

With the Bronx Documentary Center’s (BDC) Fourth Annual Latin American Foto Festival(LAFF), which opened July 15, we see the stories of the people told by those who have lived it. Featuring a series of exhibitions, virtual and in-person workshops, tours, and panel discussions online and within the Bronx, the LAFF presents a series of powerful and poignant stories offering new paradigms that speak truth to power.

Curated by BDC Directors Michael Kamber and Cynthia Rivera, the LAFF features work by artists Andrea Hernández Briceño, Carlos Saavedra, Cristóbal Olivares, Florence Goupi, Luis Antonio Rojas, Pablo E. Piovano, Rodrigo Abd, Victor Peña, and Victoria Razo. On view until Sunday in installations at the BDC galleries, as well as on sidewalks, school exteriors, and in community gardens, the LAFF brings the story of Latin America to the Bronx, home to more than half a million Latinos.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*A working horse bites its tail during a break from carrying cocoa beans in a farm in Patanemo, Venezuela, on July 16, 2020 © Andrea Hernández Briceño*

Categories: Art, Bronx, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography

Stanley Stellar: Artifacts at the End of a Decade

Posted on July 26, 2021

*Stanley Stellar. “Brian Michaels in a cowboy hat with a friend, West Side Highway NYC” (1981).*

On May 18 1981, the New York Native, the only gay newspaper in the city, published the first story on a new disease later identified as AIDS. After hearing rumours of a “gay cancer,” the paper’s medical writer Lawrence D. Mass contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC claimed that word of a deadly threat descending upon the gay community largely unfounded – a pernicious start to what would become a longstanding pattern of malignant neglect by the federal government.

The advent of AIDS marked the end of a brief but shining chapter of LGBTQ+ history that began with the Stonewall uprising in 1969. As a new generation came of age during the Gay Liberation Movement, they transformed the street of New York into a garden of earthly delights, reveling in the bountiful pleasures of existence itself. No longer driven into the shadows, forced to deny their true selves, the community could openly partake in sex, love, friendship, and camaraderie.

Although the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) would not extend Constitutional rights to the LGBTQ+ community until 2003, change was in the air. After 20 years of pathologising homosexuality as a form of mental illness, the American Psychiatry Association removed it from the DSM-II in 1973 – the very same year that SCOTUS modified its definition of “obscenity” to finally legalise the depiction of male frontal nudity.

While established artists like Andy Warhol began experimenting with homoerotic photography in his series Sex Parts and Torsos, he struggled to call a spade a space, writing in The Andy Warhol Diaries: “I shouldn’t call them nudes. It should be something more artistic. Like ‘Landscapes’.” But a new crop of emerging artists including Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), Peter Hujar (1934-1987), Alvin Baltrop (1947-2004), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), and Peter Berlin were more inclined to embrace the spirit of the times, centring LGBTQ+ life in their work.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Stanley Stellar. “Grand Torino, Hudson River Waterfront, NYC” (1979).*

*Stanley Stellar. “Gay Pride Day on Christopher Street, NYC” (1983).*

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

Erwin Olaf: Strange Beaurt

Posted on July 23, 2021

*“Palm Springs”, American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex I, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

eality — like nature — is a wild, savage, and beautiful force, a truth so grand as to be sublime that we can never truly fathom it, though we most certainly may try. Art, in its most exalted form, transports us into an ineffable realm, a space where understanding lays beyond the word itself. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso famously said. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

These sentiments speak to the work of Dutch photographer and multimedia artist Erwin Olaf, whose carefully staged images occupy the liminal space between fact and fiction. In the new exhibitions “New Series: April Fool and In the Forest” and “Strange Beauty“, on view in Munich, Germany along with a catalogue, Olaf revisits his archive, looking back over his 40-year career that explores meditative aspects of human emotion, motivation, and thought as well as pressing social and political issues facing women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.

“I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks.

“For me, the camera is an instrument to register my imagination and to translate the things in my mind into an image. When we see a painting, we accept that it is from the mind and the spirit of the painter. It’s the same with music, literature, and film. You can go to the cinema in the afternoon, watch a movie, and cry your heart out when you know it’s totally artificial. But when it’s photography, it should be part of the ‘real world.’ I don’t think so.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*“Palm Springs”, The Kite, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

A Visual Conversation Between Carrie Mae Weems and Diane Arbus

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Diane Arbus, Black boy, Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965 © The Estate of Diane Arbus*

“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way,” Diane Arbus said — a truth that challenges us to acknowledge we are not fully in control of our lives or our destinies, but rather charged to navigate the world with the understanding there is always something that will escape our perception or comprehension. Such wisdom requires that we act with faith, yet remain receptive to what we may uncover along the way, for it is only in the unknown that possibility can be found.

Photography, being both incredibly precise and prone to all sorts of “accidents,” makes this abundantly clear; for all our intentions, there’s still space for new understandings to emerge. With the portrait, artists explore the landscapes of the physical and psychological worlds simultaneously.

For Diane Arbus and Carrie Mae Weems, the photograph is a space to consider communities largely misrepresented, marginalized, or erased from the history of Western art. Whether using documentary or staged photographs, Arbus and Weems create tender, thoughtful, and honest portraits that engage with complex issues of identity, gender, and race in contemporary American life.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup), from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems*

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

In the Gallery with Bene Taschen

Posted on July 5, 2021

*Arlene Gottfried. Striped Woman at Studio 54, NY, 1979.*

“Art was always a part of my life,” says gallerist Bene Taschen, the son of world-renowned German book publisher Benedikt Taschen. “Growing up [in Cologne], I was surrounded by photographers and met great artists working with my father, like Helmut Newton. It was a blessing to have this as a part of my daily life. It was inspiring to be surrounded by art in any form.”

In 2011, an unexpected twist of fate provided Taschen with the opportunity to strike out on his own. He learned that a German exhibition planned for his friend, American photographer Gregory Bojorquez, had been cancelled. “That made me frustrated, so I decided to organise the exhibition myself,” says Taschen. “I didn’t have much gallery experience, but I had a passion for photography and a desire to create a good show that would excite and inspire people who saw it.”

Titled Streets of LA, the exhibition, which was first exhibited in Berlin in September 2011, then Cologne in November 2011, celebrated the people of Bojorquez’s hometown through the lens of an insider: a vantage point that Taschen finds profoundly compelling as a gallerist. “Curating is a very personal experience, and I’m always trying to create something that expresses how I feel and makes me happy,” he says. “The selection of images can tell a story of the artist and their work, but it has to look good together on the wall. I may choose works for different reasons but it has to be visually convincing when it is hung. You can’t just throw 35 photographs in the room and call it an exhibition.”

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, Photography

Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara Opens at SFMoMA

Posted on July 2, 2021

*Diana Markosian, First Day at Work, from “Santa Barbara”, 2019*

Seven decades after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union was teetering on the brink of collapse as internal unrest threatened to dissolve the once stalwart nation that had risen to global dominance. With Moscow losing control, the country dissolved as 10 republics seceded during the last quarter of 1991, that Christmas. President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, no longer having a country to run.

In an instant, Diana Markosian’s world was turned upside down. Born in Moscow in 1989, her parents’ dream for their family was wrested away and their PhDs couldn’t save them in an economy with no jobs. As a child, Markosian and her brother took the streets to pick bottles to make enough money to buy bread. Her father made painted matryoshka dolls to sell to tourists visiting the Red Square, while the stress of destitution eventually broke the marriage apart. “I saw in my mother the sadness of ‘this can’t be my life,’” Markosian recalls.

On January 2, 1993, the radiant light of escapism came from the most unlikely of places. The daytime soap opera, Santa Barbara, was ending its ten-year run that month, and would become the very first American television show broadcast in Russia. As a young girl, Markosian idolized the show, which chronicled the dramatic intrigues of the Capwell clan, who embodied the glitz and glamour of 1980s Southern California.

But these images of wealth and prestige led Markosian to believe that America wasn’t a place she and her family belonged — which made her move to the actual Santa Barbara all the more a shock to the system after her mother decided to marry an American man and immigrate to the United States in 1996 in order to provide the best possible life for her children.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Diana Markosian, Eli’s House, from “Santa Barbara”, 2019*

*Diana Markosian, Mom by the Pool, from “Santa Barbara”, 2019*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Janette Beckman: New York, New Music 1980-1986

Posted on June 24, 2021

By 1980, New York City was a shell of its former self, reduced to miles of rubble in Black and Latino communities across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Landlords laid their properties to waste, sometimes hiring arsonists to torch their buildings to collect insurance payouts. With the government support systemically denied under the Nixon White House policy of “benign neglect“, infrastructure crumbled, and crime rose. Yet within this bleak and barren landscape, a new generation came of age embodying the dictum, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

While white flight drove a mass exodus of the middle class to the hermetic safety of suburbia, rents plummeted, making it possible for anyone to afford to work, live and play in New York. Without the threat of over-policing or the stultification of gentrification, kids ran the streets, the clubs and the bars, creating their own styles of art and music — hip-hop, punk, disco, salsa, jazz, and No Wave — that would set the blueprint for decades to come. It was a golden era, the likes of which are being celebrated in the new exhibition New York, New Music: 1980-1986 at the Museum of the City of New York, which brings together art, fashion, music videos, vinyl records and photography for a kaleidoscopic look at the city’s highly innovative music scene.

“Everything was authentic — it came from the streets and people’s hearts,” says British photographer Janette Beckman, who came to visit New York during Christmas 1982 and never left. “Hip-hop was the boiling point. The economy was bad, and people just decided they were going to do things their way. Kids would steal out of their parents’ house at midnight, go to a train yard to paint, then come home again before going to school. Other kids wrote poetry in their bedrooms, practiced on the streets, and got tapped to rap on stage, getting props from their community. The creativity was coming from the artists, rather than someone telling them what to do.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

*CHARLIE AHEARN, DEBBIE HARRY, FAB 5 FREDDY, GRANDMASTER FLASH, TRACY WORMWORTH, AND CHRIS STEIN, 1981*

Categories: 1980s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, i-D, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Chester Higgins: The Indelible Spirit

Posted on June 17, 2021

*Chester Higgins. Early morning coffee, Harlem, 1974.*

While working at The Campus Digest, the Tuskegee Institute student newspaper, in the late 1960s, Chester Higgins visited the studio of photographer P.H. Polk and was struck by his powerful portraits of Black Americans made in the 1930s.

“The countenance of the people in Polk’s pictures made me pause,” says Huggins, who hails from the small farming community of New Brockton, Alabama and recognized the archetypes immortalized in these works. “These pictures existed because Polk understood and appreciated the dignity and character of people.”

Knowing he couldn’t afford to commission Polk to do the same for the people of New Brockton, Higgins seized upon an idea and asked if he might borrow Polk’s camera to learn how to make photographs. “He studied me, then finally said, ‘If you’re fool enough to ask me that request, I’m going to be fool enough to help you.’”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Chester Higgins. Looking for Justice, Civil Rights Rally, Montgomery, Alabama, 1968.*

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

Ming Smith: Evidence

Posted on June 9, 2021

*Ming Smith. Grace Jones, Studio 54 (New York), 1970s.*

Throughout her five-decade career, Ming Smith has broken through boundaries she has faced as a Black American artist coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement. Born in Detroit, raised in Columbus, Ohio, and educated at Howard University in Washington D.C., Smith moved to New York in the 1970s to work as a model alongside pioneers including Grace Jones, Toukie Smith, and Bethann Hardison.

“I didn’t call myself a photographer, but I was constantly shooting,” the artist said in Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph. “I was just a young person in New York trying to find my way, and I had to support myself, so I took a job as a model.”

While on a go-see, Smith heard Kamoinge members Louis Draper and Anthony Barboza discussing photography. She showed Draper her work and he invited Smith to become the first woman to join the legendary photography collective. “That was a major awakening,” Smith said.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Ming Smith. Self-Portrait as Josephine (New York), 1986.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

In the Gallery with: Brian Clamp

Posted on June 4, 2021

*© Peter Berlin, “Self Portrait as Urban Cowboy, “ c. 1970s, Hand-painted vintage gelatin silver print.*

The year 2000 marked a turning point for New York-based gallerist Brian Clamp. After turning 30 and receiving his MA in Critical Studies in Modern Art from Columbia University, he had reached a crossroads. “I had been working as director of Owen Gallery on the Upper East Side, and wanted to get more involved with contemporary art, photography, and working with living artists,” says Clamp. “I decided to take the plunge and start my own gallery, not fully realising what I was getting into.”

That fall, he opened ClampArt, and worked as a private dealer from his West 27th Street loft. An avid practitioner of photography, Clamp also spent time at The Camera Club of New York (now known as Baxter St), getting to know a number of photographers whose work he admired. Through these relationships, Clamp developed the foundations for the gallery program.

In early 2003, Clamp signed a lease for a commercial space on West 25th Street, just as Chelsea was becoming the center of the downtown art world. “I was able to get a ground floor space in Chelsea for my first gallery without any backing,” he says.

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

*© The Estate of Peter Hujar, “Scrumbly Koldewyn and Tom Nieze, The Cockettes,” 1971, Vintage gelatin silver print, Courtesy Peter Hujar Archive.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography