Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful

Posted on January 22, 2018

Untitled (Naturally ’68 photo shoot in the Apollo Theater featuring Grandassa models and founding AJASS members Kwame Brathwaite, Frank Adu, Elombe Brath, and Ernest Baxter 1968, printed 2016. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) 1968, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

On the evening of January 28, 1962, a massive crowd gathered outside Harlem’s Purple Manor, eager to gain entrance to Naturally 62 – the landmark event that introduced the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement to the world.

The brainchild of photographer Kwame Brathwaite (born in 1938) and his older brother Elombe Brath (now deceased), Naturally 62 presented Blackness in its natural state through a powerful combination of fashion, music, and politics. The brothers, who were born in Brooklyn to a politically active family, had embraced Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement and co-founded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and fashion designers. “Our mission was to reach the folks so that they could see their own work,” Brathwaite reveals. “It was a time when people were trying to organize and improve the community, to get themselves in order so that they would not be the low man on the totem pole.”

The brothers worked on two fronts, supporting the African independence movement while embracing Black business at home, producing jazz concerts at legendary locales including Club 845 in the Bronx and Small’s Paradise in Harlem. But it was a local beauty contest that gave the brothers the inspiration for Naturally 62. A year earlier, while attending the annual Marcus Garvey Day Celebration, they watched ‘The Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest’, wherein models came to the stage without make-up, their hair free from heat press.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Untitled (Self Portrait) 1964, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Categories: 1960s, Africa, AnOther, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

Posted on January 16, 2018

Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, 1973. Collection of Ronay and Richard Menschel. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Peter Hujar (1934–1987) is your favourite photographer’s photographer – a man who lived independently, crafting a life in downtown Manhattan that flourished between the Stonewall uprising of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Inside his East Village loft, Hujar mastered his craft, pursuing the art without the burdens of commerce. Liberated from the strictures of the market, Hujar created a body of work that is as broad in subject matter as it is refined in technique and as original in perspective.

A new exhibition, Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, looks at the work the legend left behind, three decades after his death. The show presents 140 photographs drawn from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, the most comprehensive public collection of the artist’s work. Curated by Joel Smith, the exhibition adopts the traditional retrospective format while staying true to Hujar’s vision.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ethyl Eichelberger as Minnie the Maid, 1981. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Christopher Street Pier, 1976. © Peter Hujar Archive, LLC, courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

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

Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Dianne Brill

Posted on January 12, 2018

Photo: Space Bride on The Mugler runway, 1990. Photography Marc Baptiste.

Photographed by everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Klein, and Mario Testino to Annie Leibovitz, Michel Comte, and Bill King, to name just a few, Dianne Brill was at the very heart and soul of the New York scene in the 1980s and 90s as a creative coterie of artists, musicians, and writers forever changed the world of pop culture. As Andy Warhol wisely observed, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party!”

Brill’s star rose in the club world but it didn’t end there. Whether serving as a muse for Warhol and Keith Haring, working with fashion designers Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Vivienne Westwood, designing clothes for rock stars and actors, or penning a bestselling self-help book, Brill was at the top of the game.

Now the art world pays tribute to the Queen of the Night in the new exhibition, To the Future Through the Past, which will be on view at PHOTO 18 in Zurich, through January 12-16, 2018. Featuring hundreds of images of Brill at her best, the exhibition celebrates her roles as It Girl, model, designer, and the bon vivant of your dreams.

Here Brill shares the secrets of her success, revealing how you can spin your social life into stellar opportunities.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Pony girl, The Roxy, NYC, 1988. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat at an Outlaw party in NYC 1986 – was set up in an abandoned subway station, which was totally illegal and so fun. The party lasted 20 minutes before it was closed down. Photo from the estate of Dianne Brill.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Allan Tannenbaum: New York in the 1970s

Posted on January 11, 2018

Photo: Girls will be girls – and boys will be boys – at a pre-opening Construction Party at John Addison’s Bond’s mega-disco in Times Square. Penthouse Pet Anneka and friend, 1980. © Allan Tannenbaum from ‘New York in the 1970s’

Photo: Coming on strong on the dance floor at the 82 Club, 1974. © Allan Tannenbaum from ‘New York in the 1970s’

The 1970s were the height of personal liberation. Prior to the advent of Aids, sex was a space for experimentation by a new generation coming of age, reaping the freedoms of the sexual revolution and the women’s and gay liberation movements. Powered by a profound desire for pleasure, self-expression, and the need to connect, sexuality became an open space for men and women free from the heavy-handed social control of the 1950s – and the results were amazing.

Nightclubs became the go-to place to live out fantasies, find a partner to hook up with, and for a brief, shining moment there was no ‘walk of shame’ in the morning. Everyone was encouraged to let it all hang out. Performers and patrons alike led decadent lives of pure, unadulterated fun. There were sex clubs as well as sex-themed parties, and sometimes people just felt the vibe. Sometimes it seems like everyone was naked just because – something virtually unimaginable now.

As a former chief photographer of the SoHo Weekly News, Allan Tannenbaum covered New York in the 1970s like no one else. Whether visiting sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat and the Hellfire Club on assignment or covering sex-themed parties and art happenings, Tannenbaum captured the most hedonistic period in the city’s history in glorious black and white photographs.

The author of four books, including New York in the 1970s (Overlook Press) and Grit and Glamour (Insight Editions), Tannenbaum gives us a taste of the libertines living the life, as comfortable with their bodies as they were with their lust. Here, at the intersection of gender and sexuality, it was a time when anything goes. Tannenbaum looks back at an era unlike any other, reflecting on the power of youth culture to change the way we relate to each other – and to ourselves.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Two models wear designs based on bicycle parts by Karl Lagerfeld at the “Fashion as Fantasy” exhibition at the Rizzoli Bookstore, 1975© Allan Tannenbaum from ‘New York in the 1970s’

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

Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983

Posted on December 6, 2017

Artwork: Kenny Scharf (American, born 1958). Having Fun. 1979. Acrylic on canvas. Collection Bruno Testore Schmidt, courtesy the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles

By 1978, the East Village art scene was coming into its own, and a new movement began to take hold in the basement of New York’s Holy Cross Polish National Church at 57 St. Marks Place. Club 57, as it was known, was home to a group of young artists including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy, Klaus Nomi, Tseng Kwong Chi, Joey Arias, John Sex, and Marcus Leatherdale – all of whom were redefining art and photography, fashion and design, film and video, performance and theatre.

The no-budget venue and social club broke all the rules, transforming the ways in which we experience art to the present day. In celebration, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983, a major exhibition and catalogue organised by Ron Magliozzi, Curator and Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, with guest curator Ann Magnuson.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Artwork: John Sex (American, 1956–1990). Amazon Temptation, 1980. Silkscreen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Department of Film Special Collections

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Painting, Photography

Gregory Kramer: Drags

Posted on November 14, 2017

Photo: Fllyod. Copyright Gregory Kramer.

After paging through Small Trades, Irving Penn’s portrait series depicting skilled trades people in their work clothes, New York-based fashion photographer Gregory Kramer had an epiphany. “I woke up one morning and was like – that’s it! Let’s document the New York drag scene,” he recalls.

Kramer was inspired by the classic studio photography that Penn had mastered in the early 1950s: a full-length figure set before neutral background and softly lit with gentle lighting. Each subject was portrayed with elegance and dignity so that viewers could see the person who lay beneath the uniforms they wear. This approach resonated with Kramer who understood: underneath the wigs, the make-up, and the costumes are innovative and creative performers greater than the sum of their parts: they are groundbreaking figures whose commitment to the craft of drag has redefined the art.

Kramer called the person he knew best: Linda Simpson, a fixture on New York’s drag scene since the 1980s. Simpson was Kramer’s first subject and his entrée to the scene. Over the next year, Kramer went to work, creating a series of portraits of legends including Charles Busch, Lady Bunny, Duelling Bankheads, Sherry Vine, Flotilla DeBarge, and Tobell Von Cartier. He also made a foray into the Brooklyn scene, photographing the drags who continue to push the envelope, including cover girl Sasha Velour, winner of the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The result is Drags (KMW Studio), a sumptuous monograph with 80s black and white portraits that will leave you breathless as you take in the full glamour and glory of New York’s finest. As a way to give back to the city that he loves, Kramer is donating his author royalties to the Ali Forney Center, which assists and protects homeless LGBTQ youth. Kramer speaks with us about his experiences making a book with the city’s groundbreaking drags.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Peppermint. Copyright Gregory Kramer.

Photo: Wang Newton. Copyright Gregory Kramer.

Categories: Art, Books, Brooklyn, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco

Posted on October 12, 2017

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Pat Cleveland, Paris (Blue Water Series), 1975. Copyright, 2012, The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Photo: Antonio Lopez, Corey Tippin and Donna Jordan, Saint-Tropez, 1970. Photograph by Juan Ramos. © Copyright The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, 2012. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Deep in the mountains of Puerto Rico lies Utuado, built by Spanish imperialists nearly 300 years ago. It is here that Antonio Lopez (1943–1987) was born. The son of a father who crafted mannequins and a mother who made dresses, Lopez was a child prodigy who began to sketch at the age of two, revealing a gift that would revolutionise the fashion industry and prefigure the times in which we currently live.

At the age of seven, Lopez and his family moved to New York City, where he grew up living a double life, making mannequins with his father but playing with dolls out of sight. His burgeoning bisexuality would soon drive a wedge between Lopez and his family, inspiring him to create his own centered in his artist studio at Carnegie Hall.

As the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements made space for those who had been previously marginalized by the mainstream, Lopez and his creative partner Juan Ramos (1942–1995) introduced goddess-like visions of his muses to the world in the pages of Vogue, WWD, and The New York Times. His discoveries, known as “Antonio’s Girls” included Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Cathee Dahmen, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall and Warhol Superstars Donna Jordan, Jane Forth and Patti D’Arbanville – women who not merely beautiful but were extraordinary characters and artists in their own right.

In celebration of his glorious career, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump, will make its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on October 12. The documentary charts Lopez’s rise from the streets of the Bronx to the pinnacle of the Parisian demimonde. As the dominant fashion illustrator of the late 1960s and 70s, Lopez arrived on the scene just as ready-to-wear came into existence, bringing his distinctive Afro-Latinx sensibilities into the mix.

Antonio Lopez 1970 brings us back to a pivotal period in fashion history when the aristocratic hierarchy of the couture houses was falling away. In its place, Lopez emerged with a vision so modern that he was boldly ahead of his time – James Crump reflects on the ways in which Lopez’s Afro-Latinx roots transformed the fashion industry.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Eija Vehka Ajo, Juan Ramos, Jacques de Bascher, Karl Lagerfeld and Antonio Lopez, Paris, 1973. From Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, a film by James Crump.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Jonas Mekas: A Dance with Fred Astaire

Posted on October 4, 2017

Jonas MekasPhotography John Lennon. Photo courtesy of Anthology Editions

At 94-years-old, Jonas Mekas is undergoing a literary renaissance. The esteemed filmmaker, poet, and artist is publishing five books of work, most notably A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions), a visual autobiography comprised of anecdotes and drawn from Mekas’ life after his arrival in New York in 1949.

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas was a teen when the Russian Army invaded his homeland. As he and his brother, Adolfas, attempted to flee in 1944, they were captured and forced to spend eight months in Elmshorn, a Nazi labour camp. When the war ended, they became Displaced Persons living in refugee camps, until finally able to emigrate to America, settling in Brooklyn.

Once in town, Mekas planted new roots, from which the tree of life has grown firm, with many branches bearing countless fruits. At his deepest core, is a love for cinema, its revolutionary forms, and a profound respect for the avant-garde. Together with his brother, Mekas launched Film Culture magazine, which ran from 1954 to 1996. His commitment to community went far and wide, enabling him to serve a need and fill a void.

Mekas became the first film critic for the Village Voice, founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which has since evolved into Anthology Film Archives, located in the heart of the East Village. Along the way, he met and collaborated with some of the greatest figures of the times, from Andy Warhol to Salvador Dalí, John Lennon to Jacqueline Onassis.

As you weave your way through his work, the words of Plato reveal themselves time and again: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” His is a singular life unlike any other, one filled with passion, determination, and innovation. His stories inspire, enlighten, and entertain with equal parts charm, courage, and originality. Mekas takes us on a stroll down memory lane, sharing the knowledge and wisdom garnered from a lifetime dedicated to art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan

Jane Friedman: How to Find Artists That Can Change the World

Posted on October 3, 2017

Photo: Mark Sink, Grace Jones, ca 1988

Artwork: Arturo Vega, “Supermarket Sign(Steak Sale)”, 1973. Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches

Located in the heart of New York’s East Village, Howl! Happening was established in memory of artist Arturo Vega, who designed the iconic Ramones logo. Vega, a Mexican national, fled his native land in 1968 when the government rounded up 148 of the country’s most notable artists and intellectuals, putting their lives at risk. Vega fled to New York where he had prominent connections, like Jane Friedman – the woman made rock’n’roll journalism a legitimate business.

New York native Jane Friedman grew up on Broadway, as her father handled public relations for legendary shows along the Great White Way. Friedman followed in her father’s footsteps, and along the way, she realised her talents would be best served by supporting the greatest artists of the time. She went on to craft a new lane in the media, representing artists like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, as well as doing PR for the famed musical Hair. She was also Patti Smith’s manager throughout her career.

Friedman has been a behind-the-scenes fixture in downtown New York, working with artists and musicians to ensure their success and legacy. When Vega, one of her dearest friends died in 2013, Friedman set up Howl! Arts, a non-profit organisation that preserves the culture of the East Village and the Lower East Side in a rapidly gentrifying city that has effectively erased so much of the New York’s fabled past.

Taking its name from Allen Ginsberg’s famed 1955 poem, Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project is the cornerstone of the organisation. A gallery, performance space, and archive located around the corner from where CBGBs once stood, Howl! Happening has been home to a series of phenomenal shows including exhibitions by Patricia Field, Lydia Lunch, Taboo!, PUNK Magazine’s 40th Anniversary, and The East Village Eye – as well as on-going events and performances that showcase the very best of the community, which continues to thrive despite the exponential explosion in the cost of living.

This month, Howl! presents Love Among the Ruins: 56 Bleecker Gallery Street and the late 80s New York, a group exhibition that looks back at the famed East Village gallery and performance space that served as a vital intersection of music, fashion, art, and nightlife during one of the most vital and devastating period of New York history. Featuring works by nearly 100 artists including David LaChapelle, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dondi White, Stephen Sprouse, and George Condo, to name just a few, the exhibition is on view through October 7, 2017.

Friedman speaks with us about what it takes to cultivate a community of artists that can change the world, while staying true to your roots, and shares images from the ongoing show.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Straight to Hell flyer

Photo: Mark Sink, Keith Haring, ca 1988

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Painting, Photography, Women

Remembering Jean-Michel Basquiat

Posted on September 21, 2017

Photo:Jean-Michel Basquiat on set of Downtown 81, written by Glenn O’Brien, Directed by Edo Bertoglio, Produced by Maripol Photo By Edo Bertoglio© New York Beat Films LLC, by permission of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat all rights reserved

Jean-Michel Basquiat joined the 27 Club on August 12, 1988. He died young, at the height of his success, breaking through boundaries that had marginalised countless African-American artists from establishing their rightful place in museums, galleries, and history books. With the $110.5 million sale of his painting at auction earlier this year, Basquiat once again was established at the pinnacle of American art, with his work setting records and putting him in the company of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

But who was the man behind the work, the Brooklyn native of Puerto Rican and Haitian lineage whose singular style set him apart and has influenced generations of artists worldwide since his death? As the Barbican opens Boom for Real – the first large-scale exhibition in the UK about the American artist – we speak with those who knew and worked with him over a period of ten years, to paint a portrait of the artist as a young man.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982. A frame from the ART/new york video “Young Expressionists.”Credit Paul Tschinkel.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, Dazed, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Manhattan, Painting, Photography

Richard Boch: The Mudd Club

Posted on September 15, 2017

Photo: Mudd Club Fashion Show, 1980. Photography Nick Taylor.

Photo: Jackie Curtis and Bowie. Photography Bobby Grossman.

The Mudd Club: the name alone embodies the mystical, mythical essence of Old York – a city where you could reinvent yourself from the ground up. All it took was ingenuity, desire, and nerve to do-it-yourself, take it to the streets and show out on the world stage.

In the fall of 1978, the Mudd Club opened its doors at 77 White Street, long before anyone referred to the triangle below Canal as “Tribeca.” Back then it was an outpost on the frontier of downtown. As manufacturing shops packed up and left town, huge industrial buildings stood bare, attracting artists who transformed these commercial spaces into studios and homes. When they needed a break, they hit the Mudd, a tiny spot that became the ultimate nightclub, bringing together people from all walks of life.

Here the No Wave rubbed shoulders with Hip Hop, while graffiti writers and post punk musicians filled the joint. Everyone from Halston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Bowie to Nan Goldin, Lydia Lunch, and Dee Dee Ramone could be found in the mix. This is the place where Fab 5 Freddy taught Debbie Harry to rap and no one thought twice about a white woman dropping rhymes on the mic.

From 1979 to 1983, the Mudd Club was the place to be, the ultimate scene for insiders and outsiders alike, a place where art, music, fashion, and culture completely reinvented itself with luminaries like trans model Teri Toye, drag legend Joey Arias, and performance artist Klaus Nomi sharpening the cutting edge. On any given night, something wild and wonderful was going down, whether it was a theme party like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Funeral Ball,” a reading by William S. Burroughs, or a live performance by Nico.

For two years, at the Mudd Club’s height, Richard Boch manned the door, deciding who would make it past the legendary ropes and enter the delirious den of iniquity that embodied the downtown scene at its height. As a doorman, Boch played a critical role in casting the characters you would see inside, a glorious mélange of celebrities, local legends, and underground superstars. He has just released his memoir The Mudd Club (Feral House) and speaks with us about how to throw the hottest party in New York.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Ivy crash out at Mudd Club on the second floor, 1979. Photography Alan Kleinberg

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography