Posts from the “Exhibitions” Category

Tony Vaccaro at 98

Posted on December 1, 2020

*Leslie Uggams, Gold Metal, 1963 © Tony Vaccaro / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of* Photography

After a lifetime behind the camera, Tony Vaccaro is still going strong. After recovering from COVID-19 earlier this year, the Italian-American photographer, who turns 98 on December 20, has resumed his workout routine. On an unseasonably warm late November morning, he ran a 12:54 mile; not bad for the high school athlete who shaved 42 seconds off the record in 1943. “I plan at 100 to establish a new record for running a mile,” Vaccaro says from his home in Long Island City, Queens.

It’s more than a notion; Vaccaro is a survivor par excellence. Born Michelantonio Celestino Onofrio Vaccaro in Greensburg Pennsylvania, in 1922, Vaccaro was just four years old when both his parents died while the family was relocating to Italy. The horrors of his childhood linger to this day, as the photographer recounts the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father’s brother while growing up in Italy.

“My uncle and his wife never had children and they didn’t know how handle them,” Vaccaro says. “Because of this, I was punished every day. I was black and blue for 15 years of my life, until I got in the Army. They looked and asked, ‘What happened to you, son?’ I couldn’t tell the truth, that people were beating me for everything I did wrong.”

Though the bruises have healed, the memories remain tempered by a love his discovered as a teen. After World War II broke out in Europe, Vaccaro fled to the United States, and enrolled in Isaac E. Young High School in New Rochelle, New York. The young artist dreamed of being a sculptor but fate had other plans.

“Mr. Louis, a teacher, told me, ‘Tony, these sculptures are pretty good but you are born to be a photographer.’ I had never heard the word photography before,” Vaccaro says. “He told me, ‘You will make a great life with it,’ and by God he was right. I was then 14, 15. I’ve been a photographer for 85 years and I still feel very good.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Gwen Verdon for LOOK, New York, City, 1953 © Tony Vaccaro / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

*After Degas, Woman and Flowers, New York City, 1960 © Tony Vaccaro / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of Photography*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Fashion, Photography

Paul Smith: The Human Curve

Posted on November 13, 2020

An integral part of the downtown New York art scene in the 1980s, American artist Paul Smith got involved with the legendary Lower East Side gallery ABC No Rio in 1983 exhibiting work from the civil war in Guatemala. Primarily a painter making panoramic works, Smith began using a homemade pinhole camera to experiment with perspectives, creating a series of black and white landscapes and sensuous scenes of sexual self-discovery made during the height of the AIDS crisis.

In the new exhibition, The Human Curve opening Saturday, November 14 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in New York, Smith brings together a selection of these works, some of which were first exhibited in Bodily Fluids at Greathouse Gallery in the East Village in the 1980s.

“It was an exciting time for me,” Smith recalls. “Through Tim Greathouse I met David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Zoe Leonard, and Marcus Leatherdale. I had three solo shows at Greathouse Gallery, but Bodily Fluids was the least commented on show at the time. It wasn’t so common then for people to exhibit sexually intimate and frank work then.”

Here, Smith takes us back to the streets and rooftops of New York for a tender look at beauty, desire, and love.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1980s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Lyle Ashton Harris: Ecktachrome Archive

Posted on November 13, 2020

*Lyle Ashton Harris. ké, L.A. Eyeworks, 1985.*

In 1985, Lyle Ashton Harris travelled to Amsterdam to visit his brother, where he had an epiphany. Harris – then an economics major in his junior year at Wesleyan College – was truly an artist.

“I went over a wannabe Izod prep, came back with orange hair, and dropped out of [econ] school,” he says. “My South African stepfather encouraged my family to let me do what I needed to do.”

Harris had switched majors, studied photography, and received his MFA before pursuing his masters at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. “Cal Arts was on the cutting edge, contemporary thinking around art theory, AIDS activism, feminism, and the like,” Harris says.

“It was a ripe period where not only were these ideas being discussed in the classroom, but the activism spilled out into the street around communities like ACT Up and Gran Fury.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Lyle Ashton Harris. Marlon Riggs, Black Popular Culture conference, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, December 8-10, 1991.*

*Lyle Ashton Harris. Vaginal Davis, Spew 2, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, February 2- March 3, 1992.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test

Posted on November 12, 2020

Dancehall emerged in Jamaica in the late 1970s, as a new generation forged an indigenous national identity coming of age in the years following independence from the UK. Embracing the already well-established tradition of sound system culture, the movement made itself known at local gatherings around Kingston, quickly radiating across the Caribbean diaspora.

Growing up between Kingston and Brooklyn, Section 8 fashion designer, stylist, and artist Akeem Smith, 29, became heavily involved in the dancehall scene. His aunt Paula and grandmother co-founded the Ouch Collective – a niche fashion house that created iconic outfits for the dancers.

Over the past 12 years, Smith began creating an extensive archive of artifacts chronicling the 1990s dancehall scene that forms the basis for the new exhibition, No Gyal Can Test. Smith weaves together scenes from the era in a multi-disciplinary show that combines photography, video, ephemera, sculpture, fashion, and audio components to evoke the extraordinary creative spirit of dancehall.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Photography, Women

Martine Barrat: Harlem in the 1970s and 1980s

Posted on November 10, 2020

*Martyine Barrat. Mabel Albert (Harlem), 1982.*

Hailing from France, Martine Barrat got her start as a dancer working with Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. After travelling to Edinburgh for the International Dance Festival, she met Ellen Stewarr – director of La MaMa Experimental Theater on New York’s Lower East Side.

“She offered me a ticket to come to the city, with my son, to dance with her company,” Barrat recalls. In June 1968, she arrived and made the city her home, settling into Harlem before moving to the South Bronx during the height of white flight.

With a group of jazz musicians, Barrat co-created the Human Arts Ensemble – a collective working with children staging street performances and running video and music workshops.

“I wasn’t trying to be a photographer,” Barrat says. “Two incredible philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari gave me a video camera saying we should document the events we were creating at La Mama every day with the kids from all over the city. This, I loved.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Martine Barrat. Love on her way to the Rhythm Club (Harlem), 1993.*

*Martine Barrat. Eric Williams, the dominoes champion (Harlem), 1983.*

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

Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981 – Photographs by Henry Horenstein

Posted on October 30, 2020

*Lovers, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville, TN, 1975 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

*Ponderosa, Near Pikesville, KY, 1974 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

In the 1970s, country music reached stratospheric heights by seamlessly weaving itself into the fabric of American culture by blending elements of folk and rock music into its Southern honky-tonk roots. Songs of love and loss, booze and gambling, family and country — the triumphs and struggles of everyday folks trying to make it through life — fueled a new generation of artists who reveled in a compelling mix of nostalgia, heartbreak, and pride.

The ‘70s brought talents like Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Reba McEntire, and Emmylou Harris into the ranks, their raw talent and star power shining alongside luminaries like Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, John Denver, and Charley Pride. Throughout the decade, country music could be heard on popular television shows like Hee Haw as well as on local radio from coast to coast, the stars of the Grand Ole Opry were seen as national icons — with breakout performers like Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Marie Osmond going Hollywood.

Photographer Henry Horenstein, a dyed in the wool Yankee, began photographing the country music scene as part of a final assignment for his history professor, the famed British writer and socialist E.P. Thompson, who helped Horenstein understand the importance of recording, studying, and documenting the people who were going to disappear from history unless someone preserved their role in it. He did just that, amassing an extraordinary archive of the images now on view in the new exhibition,Honky Tonk: Portraits of Country Music 1972-1981 – Photographs by Henry Horenstein.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Dolly Parton, Symphony Hall, Boston, MA, 1972 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

*Drunk Dancers, Merchant’s Cafe, Nashville, TN, 1974 © Courtesy of Henry Horenstein*

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

Earlie Hudnall Jr.: Past and Present

Posted on October 29, 2020

*Earlie Hudnall, Jr., Hot Summer Days, 2011, Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX*

Growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during Jim Crow, Earlie Hudnall Jr. discovered the importance of photography, keeping records, and documenting family and community through his grandmother Bonnie Jean.

“My grandmother was like the community historian in her own way,” Hudnall says. “In the summertime, we would sit on the porch. She would be telling stories so vivid your imagination almost came to life.”

Bonnie Jean kept albums that Hudnall would peruse, filled with photographs of community residents, primary school kids who grew up in the neighborhood, alongside family photos and works by her son Earlie Hudnall Sr. – an amateur photographer who made pictures while serving in the military.

Bonnie Jean impressed upon her grandson the importance of being aware of what was happening in the community. Hudnall recalls his family telling him about the lynching of Emmett Till, and stumbling upon newspaper clippings reporting an African American pilot shot down in the Korean War. Hudnall has kept them to this very day.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Earlie Hudnall, Jr., June 19, 1987, Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, TX*

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

Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio

Posted on September 30, 2020

*Richard Bernstein, Grace Jones photographs for On Your Knees, 1979. Eric Boman courtesy of The Estate of Richard Bernstein*

Hailing from Jamaica, Grace Jones is a true iconoclast: a rebellious pioneer who set the worlds of music, fashion, and film ablaze with aesthetics that defied categorisation, appropriation, or co-option by industries that have long cannibalised marginalised communities.

In the new exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio, curators Cédric Fauq and Olivia Aherne offer a multifaceted portrait of the renegade who turned the mainstream upside down with her refusal to be pigeonholed by any singular quality.

Featuring 100 works by some 50 artists including Anthony Barboza, Antonio Lopez, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jean-Paul Goode,Grace Before Jones is organized into 13 sections that explore her approaches to gender, sexuality, performance, race, and cybernetics throughout her career.

“The incredibly poignant thing about this exhibition is that everything she was doing in the 1970s, ‘80, and early ‘90s is still relevant today,” says Aherne. “It stills feel so fresh and experimental, even though Grace was thinking about things like Afrofuturism back in the ‘80s, at a time when these ideas were first being developed and hashed out.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Antonio Lopez, Personal Study, Angelo Colon, 1983 © The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos*

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

Remembering Keith Haring

Posted on September 24, 2020

*Unknown photographer, 1989 Courtesy of The LGBT Community Center National History Archive*

Just 31 years old at the time of his death, Keith Haring (1958–1990) was a small-town boy who took the big city by storm when he moved to New York in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). He began frequenting Club 57, an experimental art space and nightclub in the East Village, and quickly became close friends with a new generation of groundbreaking young artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Futura 2000.

In the early 80s, Haring made his name with some 40 “subway drawings”, introducing his soon-to-be iconic symbolic language to the world in a series of white chalk drawings on black matte paper that occupied unused advertising panels in New York City train stations. The public immediately fell in love with this early iteration of street art, which was often thematic in nature, offering holiday cheer as a treat. In 1982, Haring made his Soho gallery debut at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, and soon became the toast of the international art world – but at his heart Haring was a man of the people.

In 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, the ultimate retail space that offered affordable art in the form of T-shirts, toys, posters, and buttons. He was also devoted to art in the service of activism, collaborating with organisations and charities around the globe to raise money and awareness on issues as diverse as Aids, apartheid, and the crack epidemic. In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with Aids and less than two years later he was gone – yet the love of his work lives on, generation after generation.

On September 24, Sotheby’s will open Dear Keith: Works From the Personal Collection of Keith Haring, a dedicated online auction presenting over 140 works of art and objects gifted to, purchased by, and traded with Haring among his circle, by artists including Andy Warhol, George Condo, Rammellzee, Roy Lichtenstein, Scharf, and Basquiat. Full proceeds from the auction will benefit The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of New York, an organization Haring proudly partnered with during his life. In advance of the auction, we speak with fellow artists and friends who share their encounters with Haring over the years.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled. Courtesy of Sotheby’s

Categories: 1980s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Manhattan

Adriana Parrilla: No Me Llamas ‘Trigueña’; Soy Negra (Don’t call me ‘Trigueña’; I Am Black)

Posted on September 14, 2020

A young man holds a newborn baby in Loíza, Puerto Rico. July 26, 2018. I was taught in school that the only place that there was a “real” black community was in the town of Loíza and that their only contribution to Puerto Rican society was only tied to our folklore, to the heritage of our traditional Afro-Caribbean music, Bomba and Plena. Subsequently, the image of the Afro-Puerto Rican community in Loiza was distant and distorted. From ‘No Me Llames Trigueña; Soy Negra’ (‘Don’t Call Me Trigueña; I’m Black’). © Adriana Parrilla

The Bronx Documentary Centre’s Third Annual Latin American Foto Festival (LAFF) brings together artists from across the Western Hemisphere, among them Adriana Parrilla, Luján Agusti, Adriana Loureiro Fernández, and Luisa Dörr.

For as long as Afro-Puerto Rican photographer Adriana Parrilla can remember, she was called “trigueña” – a word to describe someone who is light-skin Black or mixed-race to distinguish them from someone who was “Negro”, or explicitly Black.

“It was so common to hear this word that it was almost as if they were calling me by name. ‘Trigueña’ was always used by people as a euphemism, to make me feel better by not calling me ‘Black’ because that had a negative connotation. They only called me ‘Black’ when they intended to hurt me.”

For Parrilla, growing up, her relationship to her African heritage had been a mystery. “I had thousands of questions about my racial identity, but I never dared to seek some answers,” she says. “My identity was in limbo, a mixture of many elements that I preferred not to examine. Like many Puerto Ricans, I accepted my identity as ‘in-between’ but never as Black.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Three young men, c. 1950 © 2019 Leo Goldstein Photography Collection LLC*

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

Christopher Makos: Dirty

Posted on September 11, 2020

*Christopher Makos. Hawaiian Shirt, 1976.*

At the outset of his artistic career in 1976, May Ray imparted upon American photographerChristopher Makos a simple ethos to make great work: “obey your instinct” – a directive that has served him well over the years.

Infused with a delectable mix of confidence, charisma, and striking beauty, Makos returned to New York ready to take the city by storm. The following year he published his first monograph, White Trash, a bold and beguiling collection of photos documenting the punk scene that effortlessly mixed high and low society with all the verve of a bright young thing.

Andy Warhol took notice and soon the two became friends and collaborators. When editor Bob Colacello departed Interview magazine in 1983, leaving his ‘Out’ column behind, Warhol suggested Makos start a column called ‘In’. Soon New York’s finest found their way to Makos’ studio, ready to bare it all.

“I remember at the time, if I had a model in front of me and if I didn’t ask him or her to undress they were so disappointed like, ‘Did I not make the grade?’” Makos tells AnOther. “When I look at some of these pictures now, I think about TikTok and Instagram, I was way ahead of the curve there because so many of these pictures of these sexy boys and girls; they’re of the moment now.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Christopher Makos. Keven Kendall Red Bikini Polaroid, 1986.*

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