Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes: The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Posted on June 18, 2019

“We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” Langston Hughes said of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his landmark art book collaboration with Roy DeCarava recently republished by David Zwirner Books.

In 1952, DeCarava became the first African-American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He used the one-year grant of $3,200 to make the photographs that would appear in the book, a tribute to Harlem glowing in the final years of its legendary Renaissance.

DeCarava gave Hughes a selection of prints from which the poet wrote the story of Mecca through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley, a fictional grandmother who knows everybody’s business and will put you on if you listen.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Barry Blinderman: The Downtown Art Scene

Posted on June 11, 2019

Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Futura 2000. Courtesy of Barry Blinderman

The Director of Semaphore Gallery in Soho, Barry Blinderman was also a freelance writer for Arts Magazine, where he wrote very early articles on Keith Haring and Robert Longo, among others. In the fall of 1981, he curated a very popular exhibition called The Anxious Figure, reflecting the new figuration by artists like John Ahearn, Jedd Garet, Ed Paschke, Longo, Haring, and others. He speaks with NYC, 1981 about the art scene as it was happening on the streets and in the galleries, in the studios and the clubs.

Miss Rosen: Please talk about the art scene, as it was downtown in 1981. I am very interested in the relationship between the street and the gallery, and the way in which outsider artists migrated into the mix of curators, collectors, and critics. Could you speak about how the door was opened to this new generation of artists?

Barry Blinderman: In 1980-81, some of the most vanguard art being created in New York wasn’t on view within the white-walled sanctuaries of SoHo. At lower Manhattan nightspots such as Mudd Club or Club 57, young artists, musicians, filmmakers, poets and other performers congregated to collaborate on one- or two-evening events. I first met Keith Haring at Club 57, which occupied a church basement on St. Mark’s Place, and a few years later I met Martin Wong at Danceteria on the West Side. It was a time when you could keep up with what was going on by scanning the layers of posters that decorated walls and construction sites downtown. New Wave rock bands, many featuring art school dropouts, were exhibiting some of the most innovative artwork in the form of concert announcements. Cryptic messages by SAMO and other graffiti poets began to appear at regular intervals between the East Village and Tribeca.

In addition to the clubs, guerrilla art spaces and organizations flourished: ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, Group Material, Colab (Collaborative Projects), and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, organized theme exhibitions and performances that were open to virtually any artist. It was at Fashion Moda that I first saw the work of the charismatic trickster Rammellzee, the progenitor of “Iconoclast Panzerism,” and his young disciple A-1.

The Times Square Show, organized by Colab in a former Midtown massage parlor, brought together over 100 artists. Some were art-school trained, like Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, John Ahearn, Tom Otterness, and Jane Dickson, and others got their training on the streets and subways, such as Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quinones, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museums like the New Museum (Events: Fashion Moda, December 1980-January 1981) and P.S.1 (New York/ New Wave, February-April, 1981) soon followed suit with large, well-publicized exhibitions mixing the talents of “studio” artists and street artists. Graffiti artists first shown at Fashion Moda and the Times Square Show were within a year or so offered exhibitions at Fun Gallery, named by Kenny Scharf and run by Bill Stelling and underground film star Patti Astor. Fun showed Dondi, Futura 2000, Fab 5 Freddy, and many other graffiti artists, along with Haring, Basquiat, and Jane Dickson. European collectors showed up to Fun’s openings in limousines and snapped up plenty of work, and seasoned American collector Hubert Neumann, who later held a symposium on graffiti art, visited and bought there as well.

The more established galleries soon followed suit, most notably Tony Shafrazi Gallery and Barbara Gladstone in SoHo, and Sidney Janis on 57^th Street. A little later, in 1985, we showed Lady Pink at Semaphore EAST on Tompkins Square, and then Futura 2000 at Semaphore Gallery, Soho, in 1986.

Keith Haring’s championing of graffiti artists, both through exhibitions he curated at clubs and his public acknowledgment of their influence upon his own art, was also a factor in their greater acceptance by the art world. For example, in his first exhibition at Shafrazi in 1982, he showed work he had co-created with LAll, a teenager at the time. When I watched Keith paint a frieze a few hundred feet long at P.S. 22 on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1981, I felt it was one of the most important exhibitions of the year. I still have a video of him drawing some of this monumental project with a refillable marker. On the walls below this frieze were spray-paintings by Lady Pink, Futura, Lee, Dondi, and several others.

nstallation shot of Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi at Semaphore EAST, October, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.

Miss Rosen: Keith Haring is an excellent example of this confluence between public to private space. Can you speak about why you think Haring best exemplified the spirit of the times, and why his work resonated so deeply with people from all walks of life?

Barry Blinderman: Keith Haring was, quite simply, a phenomenon, the kind of artist that comes around just once in a great while. From the very start, he was driven to share his art with as many people as possible. While a student at School of the Visual Arts in 1978-79, he opened his first-floor studio on 23^rd Street to passersby as he painted huge drawings on photo backdrop paper on the floor. Performance was of the essence to him, and not long after, in December 1980, he carried this impulse into the greatest uncommissioned public art project New York had ever seen—the chalk drawings on covered-over ad spaces in subway stations.

When I saw the very first of these: space ships looking like sombreros zapping babies, dogs, and pyramids, I was living on the Upper East Side, taking the #6 train downtown every day to my gallery in SoHo. There would be new ones every day, as others got covered up by new ads. I had no idea who was doing them, and at first thought it was some secret campaign—and in essence it was. I got hooked, traveling the subway sometimes for no other reason than to see his latest drawings.

Here, for perhaps the first time, was sophisticated contemporary art that could be understood by anyone—much more accessible even than Warhol, whose appeal did not extend to children, minorities, and everyman straphangers. And, unlike standard graffiti, it was meant to be impermanent, ever-changing, and done right out in the open, not covertly in deserted train yards after dark. And unlike just about any other artist, he never had to show his slides to a dealer. They all came to him. It was nothing short of brilliant, and there has never been anything like it since.

Haring’s interest in promotion began with the “crawling baby” buttons he carried with him at all times, handing them to anyone expressing interest while he was drawing in the stations. This eventually grew into the idea for the Pop Shop, which granted him access to audiences barely reached by a fine artist. You could wear a Haring tee shirt or hat, put colored magnets on your refrigerator, grab a poster. Some said he’d sold out, but these days so many artists have followed in his footsteps in the area of marketing.

Martin Wong in front of the billboard for his first show at Semaphore, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.

Miss Rosen: As a writer for Arts Magazine, you had the opportunity to speak directly with some of the most dynamic figures of the era. At the same time, as Director of Semaphore Gallery, you had the opportunity to show their work, and engage directly with the public. How did being a director and a critic inform and shape your understanding of the artists you engaged with

Barry Blinderman: I really have to thank Richard Martin, the late editor of Arts magazine for taking a chance and opening the door for me and other young critics at the time like Dan Cameron and Peter Halley. He imposed little or no control over what I wanted to submit, and offered nothing but encouragement. One of the first reviews I published, on Warhol’s Ten Jews series at the Jewish Museum (February 1981), led to my interview with Warhol published in October 1981. Between those two articles, I got to write an essay on Robert Longo, which became his first cover story, Keith Haring’s first art magazine interview, and an interview with Roger Brown. Meeting Warhol, and being able to get responses from him about his influences and working process, was one of the most exciting encounters I’ve ever known. And that interview has made its way into an anthology of selected Warhol interviews edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

In the same year, 1981, I’d published the pieces on Longo and Haring, I curated my first theme exhibition at Semaphore Gallery in SoHo, called The Anxious Figure. It was one of the first exhibitions to address the new figuration appearing in the work of Jedd Garet, John Ahearn, Longo, Haring, Mike Glier, and others, mixed in with paintings by artists of the preceding generation like Alice Neel, Robert Colescott, and Peter Dean. So basically I was showing for a brief time some of the work I was writing about, getting to work with artists from different angles, and getting to know them pretty intimately. The Anxious Figure got a lot of publicity, including a feature article in the Village Voice by Peter Schjeldahl entitled “Anxiety as a Rallying Cry,” a nod to my exhibition title. As my gallery became more prominent, and we began advertising our own exhibitions in Arts, I was faced with a potential conflict of interest as someone who was both a critic and a dealer. So by the end of 1982, it was time to stop publishing in the magazine.

At Semaphore, and later at Semaphore EAST, I began exhibiting several emerging artists on a regular basis, including Martin Wong, Tseng Kwong Chi, Duncan Hannah, Walter Robinson, Robert Colescott, Nancy Dwyer, and Mark Kostabi. I also included Donald Baechler, Joseph Nechvatal, Mimi Gross, Cara Perlman, and Jane Dickson in two- or three-person exhibitions. Annie Herron, later a pioneer in Williamsburg, became director of Semaphore EAST and organized early one-person shows for Lady Pink, Ellen Berkenblit, Felix, Lori Taschler, and Bobby G. The opening show at Semaphore EAST, by the way, in October 1984, was a two-person show with Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi. Kwong Chi exhibited light boxes with color transparencies of Keith’s subway drawings in situ, and Keith had us paint the entire gallery black so he could fill every inch of the gallery with chalk drawings interacting directly with the installation of light boxes. For some reason, the show received very little critical attention, but for me it was an amazing moment. I wish we could have preserved it somehow.

In 1987, I closed Semaphore and took the position of Director of University Galleries of Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve had the privilege of organizing large traveling exhibitions for many of the artists I worked with in New York, including Jane Dickson, Duncan Hannah, Martin Wong, Keith Haring, and just last fall, Walter Robinson, the first show in our brand new space off campus. My writing these days consists mostly of catalogue essays for either our publications or those by other museums and galleries.

First published at NYC, 1981 in 2015

Barry Blinderman in front of billboard for our summer 1984 exhibition. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Manhattan, Painting

James Van Der Zee: Studio

Posted on May 17, 2019

James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey with George O. Marke and Prince Kojo Tovalou-Houénou, 1924. Gelatin silver print; printed c.1924, 5 x 7 inches ©Donna Mussenden Van Der Zee, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Picture it: Harlem. 1918. James Van Der Zee, 32, opens Guarantee Photo Studio on 135 Street just as the Harlem Renaissance was coming into bloom during the first wave of the Great Migration.

As northern Manhattan became the Mecca for Black America, Van Der Zee was there to record it all inside his studio and on the streets. James Van Der Zee: Studio, recently on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery, is a portal into the past, into a time when Black society thrived and set the pace for music, art, poetry, literature, dance — well, you name it.

Van Der Zee was no exception. He set himself apart by using painted backdrops and luxurious props in the studio to create elaborate tableaux for his subjects, and bathed them in sumptuous lighting to evoke a painterly touch, imbuing each photograph with the hand of the artist.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

James Van Der Zee, Eve’s Daughter, c.1920. Gelatin silver print; printed c.1920, 6 ¼ x 4 ¼ inches ©Donna Mussenden Van Der Zee, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Categories: Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Tom Bianchi: 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983

Posted on May 15, 2019

untitled, nyc099 by Tom Bianchi

After discovering the Pines on Fire Island in 1972, Tom Bianchi found himself drawn into New York’s flourishing gay scene which emerged in the years following Stonewall.

“I was having an affair with the playwright Edward Albee, which brought me in and out of New York,” Bianchi says from his home in Los Angeles. “I thought New York was too difficult a place to live – too expensive and too crazy – but my contacts lead me to imagine I could live there and be a New Yorker. What was thrilling was the sexual availability of the gay community at that time: we were just bursting at the seams.”

In 1975, Bianchi moved to the heart of Greenwich Village and took a job as in-house counsel at Columbia Pictures. That year, Bianchi received a Polaroid SX-70 camera during a corporate conference and began documenting the lives of his friends and lovers in the early years of Gay Liberation – images which are now compiled in the new book, 63 E. 9th Street. NYC Polaroids 1975–1983.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

untitled, nyc079 by Tom Bianchi

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography

Miron Zownir: NYC RIP

Posted on May 15, 2019

NYC 1983 © Miron Zownir

Hailed by Terry Southern as the “Poet of Radical Photography,” Miron Zownir took up photography in the late 1970s when he arrived in West Berlin. Moved by the spirit of punk, Zownir embraced the utopian vision of anarchy and nihilistic self-destruction that flourished openly on the streets and in the sex clubs, drug dens, and nightlife of West Berlin and London.

It was a spirit that continued to guide his photography when he moved to New York in 1980, just as the city reached new heights of decadence just before the advent of AIDS. Using his camera as his guide, Zownir made his way from his digs in the East Village to explore the streets of New York at its most outlaw.

Before gentrification erased all that had come before, Zownir captured New York’s seedy years when prostitutes walked the streets, movie theaters screened porn around the clock, live sex and peep shows took loose change, and the West Side piers were the ultimate destination for anonymous sex—but also art interventions by Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Peter Hujar in the years following Stonewall.

Zownir’s photographs show New York after a decade of “benign neglect” and landlord-sponsored arson that reduced large swaths of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Lower East Side to rubble. Real estate was affordable—if not outright cheap—after white flight had sent the middle class out to the suburbs. In their absence, artists like Zownir arrived, mixing and mingling with locals with roots going back generations to create a powerful document of an era that has otherwise disappeared.

In Zownir’s pictures, we see the people who often fall through the cracks from the eye of one who understands the struggle and pays respect in the tradition of Bruce Davidson, Nan Goldin, and Larry Clark. In advance of a presentation of his work by Galerie Bene Taschen during Photo London (May 16-19), Zownir takes us on an incredible journey though the New York underground.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

NYC 1981 © Miron Zownir

NYC 1982 © Miron Zownir

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

Bruce Davidson – Subject: Contact

Posted on May 10, 2019

Bruce Davidson, East 100th Street, 1966–68 © Bruce Davidson, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery/Magnum Photos

At the tender age of ten Bruce Davidson embarked on a quiet, solitary hunt in search of the perfect photograph. It was a journey that began when his mother built a darkroom in the basement of their home in Oak Park, Illinois so that he could meticulously print and edit his work, scanning contact sheets in search of gems preserved in slips of silver gelatin first captured on his forays out into the world.

“I always felt like an explorer on some faraway planet,” Davidson tells AnOther from his home in New York City. “I work best if I’m left alone. I like to explore, uncover, observe and reflect without anyone looking over my shoulder.”

His independence has been an integral part of his career, a trait that announced itself while serving in the US Army during the 1950s. Posted to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe outside Paris, Davidson was given enough freedom to follow his own path – one that lead to his meeting the widow of the impressionist painter Leon Fauché in Montmartre, who he photographed alongside her late husband’s paintings.

His photographs of their encounter, first published in Esquire in 1958 in an essay titled Widow of Montmartre, caught the eye of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who arranged to have Davidson inducted into Magnum Photos that year. As a member of the fabled photo agency, Davidson has become one of the most influential photographers of our time, writing history with his camera in a series of landmark images.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, 1959 © Bruce Davidson, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery/Magnum Photos

Categories: 1960s, AnOther, Art, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Dawoud Bey X David Hammons

Posted on May 8, 2019

David Hammons in his Harlem Studio, 1984. Gelatin silver photograph (24”x20”) Photography Dawoud Bey / courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

The New York art world has long operated on heavily stratified lines, placing white men at the centre of commercial representation and institutional investment. For the better part of the 20th century, it marginalised or erased the work of anyone else, forcing artists outside those narrow demographic to fend for themselves – or infiltrate from within.

Linda Goode Bryant decided to do just that when she opened Just Above Midtown (JAM) in the sweet centre of the city’s gallery district in 1974. Located at 50 West 57 Street, JAM was unlike anything that had come before – or since.

JAM was dedicated to black artists exclusively when no one else was. Goode Bryant elevated black arts at the pinnacle of power and prestige by presenting the most innovative and unconventional conceptual work of the time. By showcasing the work of artists such as Dawoud Bey, David Hammons, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Ming Smith, Goode Bryant created a space where a new generation of black artists could connect, commune, and collaborate.

JAM exhibitions sharpened the cutting edge, pushing possibilities of art. For Greasy Bags and Barbecue Bones, his first solo show in 1975, David Hammons glued black hair to fat-drenched brown paper bags from a fried chicken spot, embracing the materials of black culture while simultaneously subverting the soulless commodification of art.

It was everything for which JAM stood for. Liberated from the restraints of content and form, black artists could soar into the stratosphere, creating work that now, 45 years later, is being recognised in a special tribute Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery at Frieze New York, curated by Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale I, 1983. Archival pigment photograph (44”x33”) Photography Dawoud Bey / courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

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

Richard Corman: Basquiat – A Portrait

Posted on May 3, 2019

In June 1984, Jean-Michel Basquiat was flying high in his downtown studio at 57 Great Jones Street. He had just come off his first solo exhibition at Marry Boone and featured in the MoMA’s inaugural re-opening show, an international survey of the most important painters and sculptors of the moment.

Enter the then 30-year-old photographer Richard Corman, who had completed a two-year apprenticeship with Richard Avedon. On assignment for L’Uomo Vogue, Corman would spend an hour with Basquiat creating a series of incisive portraits of the artist as a young icon, just published in a new, limited edition book titled BASQUIAT: A PORTRAIT,

This was Corman’s first encounter with Basquiat, who started leasing the studio from Andy Warhol in 1983. “I hope it works out,” Warhol says in his diaries on August 26. “Jean Michel is trying to get on a regular painting schedule. If he doesn’t and he can‘t pay his rent it’ll be so hard to evict him. It’s always hard to get people out.”

Spoken like a true Factory owner.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Builder Levy: Humanity in the Streets

Posted on April 30, 2019

Builder Levy enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1959 with the dream of becoming an Abstract Expressionist, but the work didn’t resonate the way he hoped it would. Photography, however, made perfect sense. “It allowed me to get more involved with life,” Levy says.

Growing up in Bath Beach, a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, Levy lived in a housing development built by Donald Trump’s father, Fred. Living through the Jim Crow 1950s, fraught with the spectres of McCarthy and the Cold War, Levy was sensitive to the struggle of people of colour and the working class, becoming politically aware and engaged at a young age.

“I started taking the camera with me to street demonstrations,’ Levy remembers, recognising the importance of amplifying the fight against oppression and injustice.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Dave Heath: Dialogues With Solitude

Posted on April 24, 2019

Dave Heath. Elevated in Brooklyn, New York City, 1963 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Dave Heath. Washington Square, New York, 1960 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

At the age of 16, Dave Heath was paging through a 1947 issue of LIFE magazine when he came upon “Bad Boy’s Story: An Unhappy Child Learns to Live at Peace with the World,” a photo essay by Ralph Crane that explored the life of an orphaned by growing up in Seattle.

Heath, who had been abandoned at the age of 4, immediately felt seen. Living in foster homes and an orphanage, Heath saw himself in both the protagonist and the journalist at the same time. Heath had already been participating in a camera club and recognized that photography could become a lifeline between himself and the world.

It was a commitment to which he would give his life, using the camera to document the political, social, and cultural events of the time, while simultaneously creating an investigation of the photograph itself. Largely self-taught, Heath made it his business to learn the craft, theory, and history of his chosen medium in order to create for himself.

Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitude, on view at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through June 2, 2019, and the accompanying monograph from Steidl, provide a deep dive into Heath’s singular oeuvre that is a poignant and powerful look at the human animal.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Dave Heath. Washington Square, New York City, 1960 © Dave Heath, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Suzanne Donaldson: Inside the Final Years of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Studio

Posted on March 29, 2019

Back in 1986, at the very beginning of her career, Suzanne Donaldson was working in the art department at Vanity Fair. Just 24 years old, her dream was to be a photo editor, and she was thrilled to learn of an opening in the photo department under Elisabeth Biondi.

“My boss didn’t want me to go,” Donaldson recalls. “She very snarkily said, ‘With your interest in photography, I don’t know why you don’t go work for Mapplethorpe, Horst, or Avedon?’”

The forces of fate must have heard the crack, for not long thereafter Donaldson learned that Robert Mapplethorpe was looking for someone to manage his Manhattan studio.

“I was lucky enough to have an interview with him,” she says. “It was an epic time in New York. It was the beginning of the AIDS crisis. He was diagnosed at that point. Everybody was wary of toilet seats, shaking somebody’s hand, kissing them — it wasn’t known how it was contracted.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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