Posts from the “Huck” Category

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

Richard Davis: Tales From The Second Cities Birmingham 1985–1988

Posted on November 12, 2020

In 1984, at the age of 18, Richard Davis left home and moved into a shared house in the Moseley District of Birmingham. “It felt a good fit for me – alternative, full of young people and open-minded,” he says.

“I remember someone in the house telling me about a centre for the unemployed run by the Birmingham Trades Council, which was located within walking distance of our house in Sparkhill – an inner-city neighbourhood with a large Asian and Irish population.”

At the centre, Davis discovered a darkroom and making photographs, an expensive practice made possible by the generous supply of free film, paper, and chemicals. “Its staff offered nothing but encouragement and support. They would often send me out onto the streets of Birmingham armed with a camera and tell me not to come back until I had a decent set of photos,” he says.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, 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

Diana Markosian: Santa Barbara

Posted on November 5, 2020

On January 2, 1993, Santa Barbara became the first American television show to air in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The beloved 1980s soap opera chronicling the lives of the wealthy Capwell clan of Southern California became a sparkling image of the American Dream, captivating a nation just liberated from the yoke of a communist regime.

Born in Moscow in 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern Bloc began to crumble to dust – photographer Diana Markosian grew up idolising Santa Barbara. “It was a window to another life that didn’t belong to us,” she says.

“We had nothing as a family. My brother and I were picking bottles to buy bread for my mom. Both my parents had PhDs, but couldn’t get work. My father was painting nesting dolls for tourists on the Red Square. They were reduced to nothing and they weren’t the only ones.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, 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

Judah Passow: Divis Flats Belfast 1982

Posted on October 25, 2020

The Troubles reached a fever pitch in 1982, as the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) struck hard, killing more British security forces than ever before. The grievous harm to the innocent was made plain on Thursday, September 16, when the INLA exploded a bomb hidden inside a drain pipe along a balcony in Cullingtree Walk, Divis Tower, Belfast.

Though aimed against a British Army foot patrol, the blast had the unintended effect of killing two local children, Stephen Bennet, 14, and Kevin Valliday, 12, along with soldier Kevin Waller, 20. Three other civilians and one soldier were also injured in the explosion.

It just so happened that earlier that year, Israeli photojournalist Judah Passow spent a couple of weeks documenting Divis Flats for the Observer magazine to create a portrait of a people and a place. These photographs have been published in Divis Flats Belfast 1982 (Café Royal Books).

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today

Posted on October 22, 2020

*©Bob Adelman Estate. Mourner with sign at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial service, Memphis, Tennessee, 1968.*

Protest is the very foundation upon which the United States was built. In demanding the government answers to the people and not the other way around, it is vital to a functioning democracy and at the core of the First Amendment.

In 2020, protests feel particularly ubiquitous; spurred on by the Black Lives Matter Movement, which has since become one of the biggest global civil rights actions in the history of the world. The protest movement as we know it today began with the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till — his killers declared not guilty the very same day Breonna Taylor’s would some 65 years later.

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” activist Fannie Lou Hamer famously said in a 1971 speech. It is a principle at the heart of Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1960s to Today (Ten Speed Press), a new book by Melanie Light and Ken Light.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*©1976 Matt Herron. A white policeman rips an American flag away from a young Black child, having already confiscated his “No More Police Brutality” sign, Jackson, Mississippi, 1965.*

*©Michael Abramson. The Young Lords, New York City, 1970.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Books, Huck, Photography

Meryl Meisler: 1970s New York Go-Go Bars

Posted on October 2, 2020

In spring 1978, photographer Meryl Meisler accompanied her friend Judi Jupiter to an interview to work the bar at the Playmate, a new go-go bar opening on 49th Street and Broadway in New York.

“It was a topless-bottomless bar,” Meisler remembers. “There was disco music playing and girls were dancing on stage. It was fascinating. I asked if I could get a job there as a hostess, and was hired.”

During the late 1970s, Meisler led a double life. By day she worked as a CETA photographer documenting Jewish New York for the American Jewish Congress, exploring her ethnic roots. By night, she was partying at nightclubs like Studio 54 and working at the Playmate, where she soon began making photographs, a selection of which have been published inPurgatory & Paradise SASSY ‘70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre).

Meisler was required to wear a bathing suit or leotard, stockings, high heels, and makeup, and as hostess, she’d greet customers at the door, seating them by the stage, and serving them $4 “near-beers,” as the bar didn’t have a liquor license. She received a dollar tip for every drink, plus a $10 tip whenever she brought customers to the back rooms for private dances and a $40 bottle of “champagne” (Martinelli’s sparkling cider).

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Mimi Plumb: The White Sky

Posted on October 1, 2020

Growing up beneath the shadow of Mount Diablo in the 1960s, photographer Mimi Plumb witnessed the explosion of strip malls and tract homes with raw dirt yards lining treeless streets of Walnut Creek, a suburb of Berkeley, California.

“To me and my teenage friends, they were the blandest, saddest homes in the world,” Plumb recalls of the predominantly white middle-class hamlet set amid the rolling hills and valleys of Northern California. “The town had a mixture of conservative to liberal adults. My parents were progressive, but I often felt like we were outsiders – tolerated but not embraced by the community. I never understood why we lived there.”

With the Haight Ashbury counterculture scene flourishing less than 20 miles away, Plumb decamped for San Francisco in 1971 at the age of 17. “By then, the idealism of the early to mid-60s was eroding, particularly with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. There was no longer the belief within the youth movement that we could change the world.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, 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

Adger Cowans on the Spiritual Power of Photography

Posted on September 21, 2020

*Adger Cowans. Biggie Smalls, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1990s*

Photographer Adger Cowans, who turned 84-years-old earlier this month (September 19), was one of the few African American artists to work commercially during the mid-twentieth century. Before garnering widespread recognition for his experimental style of image-making, Cowans got his start assisting Gordon Parks – a groundbreaking figure in 20th-century photography – at Life magazine in the 1950s.

Cowans first reached out to Parks while he was pursuing a BFA in photography at Ohio State University. “I wrote Gordon a letter, and he wrote me back and told me to look him up when I got to New York,” explains Cowans. “That summer, I went to New York if Miles Davis was at the Vanguard or Thelonious Monk was at the Five Spot. One of those weekends, I called Gordon.”

“Gordon said (to me), ‘Get on the train and come and see me in White Plains.’ I got there and waited and I saw this powder blue Corvette; the top was down, all-white leather seats. I saw a guy smoking a pipe and he said, ‘Adger Cowans? Gordon Parks.’ I said, “I’m going to be a photographer! Oh boy, this is the deal!’”

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*Adger Cowans. Gloria Lynne, Newport Jazz, 1961.*

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