Posts from the “Huck” Category

Rhys Frampton: The Compton Cowboys

Posted on September 21, 2020

On August 8, 1988, N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton, putting their beloved hometown on the map when they introduced the world to gangsta rap. Although they received virtually no radio airplay outside of Los Angeles, “Fuck Tha Police,” their rallying cry against police brutality, became a nationwide anthem.

That same year, resident Mayisha Akbar founded The Compton Jr. Posse to provide local youth with a positive alternative to street life. “Coming up in the ‘90s was a really crazy era,” says Randy Hook, Akbar’s nephew who remade his uncle’s riding club in 2017 as the Compton Cowboys, a group of ten local riders that he now leads. “We grew up in a chaotic time and the horses really shielded us from all of that.”

“Compton has always been community oriented, even though there’s been an image painted of us in the media that’s just a corrupt, ungodly place,” continues Hook. “Things have improved over the decades with drugs, gangs, crime and police brutality. Today Compton is beautiful.”

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Categories: Art, Huck, Photography

A Golden Age of NYC Nightlife: Nightclub Ephemera from the 1980s

Posted on September 17, 2020

*Xenon, Everybody Hates Punk Tad Shaffer, Poster, 1978*

*Club 57 at Irving Plaza, Lee Scratch Perry, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Card, 1981*

In the mid-1960s, Max’s Kansas City became the mecca of New York’s avant-garde, attracting a mix of artists, writers, musicians, and underground stars who made the famed backroom into the ultimate nightlife destination.

By the 1970s, Max’s began hosting performances for glam rock and punk icons, setting the tone for a new breed of nightclub culture that brought together the worlds of art, music, fashion, literature, and film into a carnivalesque environment.

Before the advent of the internet, promoters spread the word by creating innovative flyers to advertise their one-night-only affairs. These eye-catching pieces of ephemera became an integral part of the event, with denizens eager to get on the mailing lists and have an instant “in” to that night’s coolest scene.

Artists like Antonio Lopez, Keith Haring, David LaChapelle, and Jenny Holzer would collaborate on these flyer designs. Produced and distributed en masse, they have become a record of New York’s downtown scene. Once given away free of charge, they are now valued as works of art.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*AREA, Grace Jones & Christian Jones, Folded Card, 1986*

*AREA, Antonio Lopez, A Celebration for Kevin, Folded Card, 1984*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Fashion, Huck, Manhattan, Music

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.”

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

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

Guzman: 90s Music Icons

Posted on September 10, 2020

*Guzman. Salt N Pepa, for US Magazine, early 1990s.*

By the 1990s, the music industry had changed irrevocably. Vinyl was becoming a thing of the past as CDs came to the fore, and music videos skyrocketed in popularity, requiring artists to develop an aesthetic to embody their sound.

Guzman – the husband and wife photography duo of Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock – helped to define the look of the times with a series of iconic album and magazine covers for everyone from Fishbone to En Vogue.

The couple got their start in music photography with the cover of Debbie Harry’s 1986 album, Rockbird, collaborating with the likes of Stephen Sprouse and Andy Warhol. Three years later, they hit the big time, when they photographed the cover of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 – a groundbreaking album that transformed the course of Hansen and Peacock’s careers.

Throughout the ’90s, Guzman would go on to photograph some of the era’s biggest acts, among them Lenny Kravitz, Luther Vandross, SWV, and Salt-N-Pepa. Long before industry personnel began crowding photo shoots, photographers and artists collaborated in intimate settings.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Guzman. Lenny Kravitz for Vibe Magazine, 1998.*

*Guzman. Hole for “Celebrity Skin” album cover shoot, 1998*

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

Joseph Rodriguez: LAPD 1994

Posted on September 3, 2020

*Joseph Rodriguez. A young man received a ticket for jaywalking.*

Rife with systemic abuses of power, the Los Angeles Police Department’s brutalization of Black and Latinx communities came to a head when four cops charged with assaulting Rodney King were found not guilty in April 1992, sparking off the LA Riots.

That June, Willie Williams became the first Black Chief of the LAPD after Daryl Gates was forced to resign. Recognizing the power of publicity, Williams gave the New York Times Magazine unprecedented access to the LAPD in an effort to sell the public “A Kinder Gentler Cop.”

In September 1994, the Times commissioned photographer Joseph Rodriguez to ride along with members of the LAPD across the city and around the clock over a period of two weeks. A native New Yorker, Rodriguez had been in Los Angeles for two years working on a project that would become East Side Stories: Gang Life in East LA (powerHouse Books, 1998).

“It was an eye-opener,” Rodriguez says of his time with law enforcement, which has been compiled in the forthcoming book, LAPD 1994 (The Artist Edition), a photographic expose of his time with members of the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit, the subject of the 1988 film Colors, the Rampart Division, and the 77th Street Division in South Central and Watts.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Joseph Rodriguez, Rampart officers search an abandoned motel for a murder suspect. The building is just a few blocks from Charlie Chaplin’s old mansion.*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Huck, Photography

Black Journal Returns

Posted on August 28, 2020

*Actress-singer Diahann Carroll Co-hosts Black Journal …This Evening, with Executive Producer Tony Brown.*

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power marked a collective shift in the Black Freedom Movement. As a new wave of youth activists came to the fore frustration and anger with the systems of oppression so long used to deny Black people their inalienable human rights was fomenting.

“This shift towards a more direct action agenda made it more difficult for the US government to ignore the demands of Black people in the US,” says Christine Acham, Ph.D, who co-curated the exhibit, Televising Black Politics in the Black Power Era: Black Journal and Soul!.

Recognizing Fredrick Douglass’s dictum, “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” a new generation understood it was time for Black people to tell their stories on their own terms.

In the wake of uprisings in more than 100 cities across the United States following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., National Educational Television (NET), the precursor to PBS, launched Black Journal, the groundbreaking national public affairs show produced for, about, and by Black Americans. Largely unseen since it first aired between 1968-1977, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting has brought all 59 episodes back to stream online.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Black Journal, WNET/Thirteen 1970, Lena Horne ©1970 Bob Fletcher*

*Sixth Period WNET (see CPB Report, May 31, 1976)*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Huck

Nicole R. Fleetwood: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Posted on August 13, 2020

*Courtesy of Russell Craig. Photo by Kisha Bari, provided by the Soze Agency.Russell Craig, Self Portrait, 2016. Pastel and paper on canvas, 10 X 8 feet.*

While more than two million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, Black and Latinx communities are affected disproportionately by the prison industrial complex. For generations, families have been torn apart leaving few untouched by a system that amounts to legalised slavery under the 13th amendment.

Coming of age during the 1980s and early 90s, the subject hit close to home for curator and author Nicole R. Fleetwood. “So many forces coalesced to restructure Black life—our homes, families, institutions, neighbourhoods. I felt like my community was under siege,” she says, “As a teenager, I worried all the time about people I knew—that they would end up jobless, on crack, in prison.”

“I remember the horror of younger people going to prison for longer periods of time. It was collectively traumatising. There are now tens of thousands of middle-aged people in prison who have been there for decades, sentenced as teenagers.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Courtesy of Tameca Cole and Die Jim Crow Tameca Cole, Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016. Collage and graphite.*

Categories: Art, Huck

Sergio Purtell: Love’s Labour

Posted on August 10, 2020

In 1973, at the tender age of 18, Sergio Purtell fled his hometown of Santiago, Chile, for the United States. The decision came after General Augusto Pinochet and Admiral José Merino lead a coup d’état, killing the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Once situated in his new home, Purtell began studying photography, going on to receive a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA from Yale. “Photography had the ability to sustain time itself – it was to be discovered not constructed,” Purtell says. “One could use one’s intuition to drive one’s motivation. Suddenly the world started to make sense to me.”

In the summer of 1979, Purtell decided to make a pilgrimage to Europe to discover the birthplace of Western art, an annual practice he would continue well into the mid-’80s. He purchased a Eurail pass to travel the continent at length, staying in seedy motels, visiting local cafes, beaches and bars, and amassing a glorious archive of his adventures, just published in the new book Love’s Labour (Stanley/Barker).

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

Beyond Heaven: Chicago House Party Flyers – Volume II, From 1981-1992

Posted on July 24, 2020

On July 12, 1979, 50,000 people descended upon Comiskey Park inChicago to attend “Disco Demolition Night”. The promotional stunt, organised by Major League Baseball, saw a crate of disco records get blown up, and the field destroyed. The “Disco Sucks” sentiment was fueled by the global success of disco music; a predominantly Black and gay art form that triggered the worst impulses of white cultural hegemony.

Once the mainstream turned its back on the culture, disco went back to its roots, and a new style began to emerge in Chicago’s nightclubs. This was the beginning of house music, which got its name from the Warehouse, a members-only gay club for Black men helmed by legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles.

“Knuckles and native Chicagoan Ron Hardy began adding their own twists and turns, mixing in Italo disco, synth, soul, R&B, and even rock occasionally, until their sounds began to find their way outside of these walls,” says Mario ‘Live It Up’ Luna, author, and Brandon Johnson, publisher of the new book Beyond Heaven: Chicago House Party Flyers – Volume II, From 1981-1992 (Almighty & Insane).

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*Get Your Ass On The Dance Floor Centrum ’85*

Categories: 1980s, Huck, Music

The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture

Posted on November 14, 2019

J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Untitled (Suku Banana Onididi), from the series Hairstyles, 1974 (printed 2009). Courtesy of The Walther Collection and Galerie Magnin-A, Paris

S. J. Moodley, [Two women wearing Western attire], 1981. Courtesy of The Walther Collection

As European imperialists set forth to colonise the globe, they took everything they could – including images of indigenous peoples forced to pose for photographs against their will. They made, sold, and distributed images, often objectifying and fetishising the subjects. This is where our story begins.

A new exhibition, The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture, features more than 100 works drawn from The Walther Collection to trace the history of female agency in photographic form. Guest curated by Sandrine Collard, the show features works by Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, David Goldblatt, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Yto Barrada,Zanele Muholi, and Lebohang Kganye, exploring the role of women as both subject and photographer.

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Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, Nonkululeko, from the series Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

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

KK Ottesen: Activist – Portraits of Courage

Posted on October 28, 2019

Never let it be said that one person can’t change the world. That is the central tenet of KK Ottesen’s new book, Activist: Portraits of Courage(Chronicle Books). From Angela Davis, Tarana Burke and Gabrielle Giffords to Bernie Sanders, Edward Snowden, and Avram Finkelstein, Ottesen profiles 40 American activists who have dedicated their lives to the fight for human rights.

“They say leaders are born; I think they are made,” Dolores Huerta, labour leader and civil rights activist tells Ottesen in the book. “People choose to be activists, choose to be leaders. Anybody can do it, but you have to make the decision. And you have to sacrifice the most precious resource that you have, which is your time.”

Activism is not a one-time action, but a mindset – a commitment to the ongoing struggle against oppression, exploitation and injustice that has fired up mass global movements today from Hong Kong to Chile. “I think it’s important to realise that ‘there are no final victories,’ as Dr. Harry Edwards put it,” Ottesen says.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography