Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Q. Sakamaki: Tompkins Square Park

Posted on August 9, 2018

Keith Thompson, a homeless activist, and his supporters demonstrate for affordable housing on Avenue B, August 1989. Copyright Q. Sakamaki.

On Avenue A in front of the park, protesters hurl bottles at police. May 27, 1991. Copyright Q. Sakamaki.

New York City’s East Village has been home to artists, anarchists, and activists for generations. But by the summer of 1988, ravaged by the twin plagues of crack and AIDS, the neighborhood’s Tompkins Square Park became an ad-hoc camp for homeless people, squatters, punks, drug dealers, and users. In an effort to assert control, the Parks Department enforced a 1 AM curfew in the previously 24-hour park, sparking outrage.

Thirty years ago this week, on August 6, protesters occupied the park wielding signs that read, “Gentrification Is Class War, Fight Back” and chanting, “It’s our fucking park, you don’t live here!” Bottles were thrown. Police Captain Gerald McNamara called in backup, and 400 NYPD officers showed up in riot gear.

Many officers concealed or removed their badges as they clubbed protesters and bystanders. The riot lasted until 6 AM, and more than 100 police brutality complaints were logged afterwards. Fourteen officers faced charges, but none were convicted. Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward went on record to state that the NYPD was responsible for inciting a riot.

Japanese photographer Q. Sakamaki was living in an apartment near the park at the time, and he began documenting the Tompkins Square Park movement, which went on for years. It came to an end following the 1991 Memorial Day riot, when the park was forcibly closed and the homeless encampments, known as Dinkinsville, were razed.

Sakamaki’s photographs, published in Tompkins Square Park (powerHouse Books) crystallize this turning point in New York City history, as gentrification began to replace benign neglect. VICE caught up with Sakamaki to reflect on the 30th anniversary of the riots and how New York has changed in the intervening decades.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

A homeless man in front of his encampment. June 1991. Copyright Q. Sakamaki.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography, Vice

The 35 Anniversary Wild Style Reunion Concert

Posted on August 8, 2018

Kase 2, Busy Bee, Fab 5 Freddy, and friends at the cheeba spot, 1980. Photo © Charlie Ahearn.

Back in 1978, artist Charlie Ahearn saw a couple of vibrant murals in the handball courts of the Smith Projects in New York’s Lower East Side. The word “LEE” appeared across them in big bold letters. Ahearn was intrigued, and quickly realised it was the work of Lee Quinones, one of graffiti’s greatest writers.

A year later, Ahearn met Lee and Fab 5 Freddy during the historic Times Square Show. The trio immediately started collaborating. At the time, the words “wild style” were on everybody’s lips – it was the name for the colorful, hyper-stylised letterforms dominating graffiti that most people could not read.

Simultaneously, hip hop music was sizzling in the clubs and parks, as the first generation of DJs spun breakbeats while MCs tore up the mic and b-boys rocked the floor. As all of this was happening on his doorstep in New York, Ahearn decided to turn it into Wild Style – the first ever hip hop feature film.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Animation drawing by Zephyr, 1982. Courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Bronx, Graffiti, Huck, Manhattan, Music

Marc H. Miller: Downtown Art Ephemera, 1970s-1990s

Posted on July 10, 2018

Public Art Fund, Spectacolor Lightboard, Robin Winters, Card, 1988. Courtesy online Gallery 98

Before the internet made it quick and easy to share information, artists relied on IRL tactics to promote their work. Posters, flyers, paper invitations, postcards, zines, objets d’art, and other ephemera represented a populist impulse: reach the masses and give them a taste of what was to come—something they could keep and collect without having to spend a dime.

Impermanent art, like graffiti and performance, came to the fore in the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s. Art ephemera was often all that remained after a show, and it took on new significance. The materials could be produced cheaply and distributed at will, transforming art in the age of mass reproduction into a marketing tool.

From his studio at 98 Bowery, artist, journalist, curator, and art historian Marc H. Miller amassed an impressive collection of rare ephemera from New York’s storied era of renegade artmaking from the 70s to 90s. His trove contains work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, the Guerilla Girls, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Gordon Matta-Clark, as well as galleries like FUN, Fashion MODA, P.P.O.W., ABC No Rio, Leo Castelli, and Tony Shafrazzi.

Nearly 200 items from Miller’s collection are on display in New York this month, in Downtown Art Ephemera, 1970s-1990s at James Fuentes Gallery. To celebrate, VICE caught up with Miller to chat about why these relics from the recent past have such power today.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

P.P.O.W, David Wojnarowicz, Early and Recent Work, Card, 1990. Courtesy online Gallery 98

Emily Harvey Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Flynt, The Samo Graffiti, Card. Courtesy online Gallery 98

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Manhattan, Painting, Photography, Vice

Flint Gennari: Inside Art & Design

Posted on July 9, 2018

In 1936, four art teachers banded together to create what would become New York’s High School of Art & Design inside a former WPA Federal Theatre Project. Although the walls were ripped apart and there was no school furniture, a little ingenuity transformed orange crates and plywood into student desks and cupboards.

Over the past century, Art & Design has become one of the most pre-eminent public schools in New York, with a list of distinguished alumni that includes fashion designers Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein, photographers Peter Hujar, Steven Meisel, and Sheila Metzner, artist Lorna Simpson, supermodel Pat Cleveland, Andy Warhol Factory denizens Jackie Curtis and Gerard Malanga, downtown icon Fab 5 Freddy, and a host of graffiti legends including Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, and Roberto “FLINT” Gennari.

Gennari began writing graffiti in 1965, after his social studies teacher introduced him to the famed World War II doodle “Kilroy Was Here” in class one day. Inspired in equal parts by advertising slogans, psychedelic artist Peter Max, and the ability to be famous yet anonymous at the same time, Gennari began tagging “FLINT” on walls and trains around his native Brooklyn. He added pithy phrases like “For Those Who Dare” and “For Ladies Only” to let the public know just what was on the menu.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma: Paparazzi Self-Portraits

Posted on July 3, 2018

Angela Davis, c. 1975-79, from ‘Bettie’s FemmeFolio’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

Dictators from ‘Bettie Visits CBGB, 1976-87’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

In the mid-70s, the term “paparazzi” was beginning to seep into the cultural consciousness through a dazzling combination of art and life. While Federico Fellini’s 1961 film La Dolce Vita introduced the word “paparazzi” (Italian for “mosquito”), it was not until American photographer Ron Galella showed the world just what a paparazzo was willing to do to get the shot that it truly become part of everyday parlance; in 1973, Marlon Brando broke his jaw with a single punch; one year later Jackie Onassis sued him, managing to secure an order of protection that did not stop Galella from getting his most famous image.

Intrigued by this new phenomenon coming into its own, American artist Marc H. Miller and Dutch artist Bettie Ringma started making Paparazzi Self-Portraits in 1975. Here, they posed for snapshots alongside personal heroes including Angela Davis, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, and Patti Smith, as well as bands from the emerging punk scene at CBGB including Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

The project reached new heights in 1978 when Curt Hoppe, their downstairs neighbor, offered to create a large format photorealistic painting of Ringma with the Ramones, which was unveiled in Punk Art, the first exhibition to showcase the visual artists of the scene. Miller looks back at the sweet spot where pop culture and conceptual art met, and pays tribute to Ringma, who died on March 8 of this year.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Richard Hell and Voidoids from ‘Bettie Visits CBGB, 1976-87’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

Patti Smith from ‘Bettie Visits CBGB, 1976-87’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

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

Remembrances of Studio 54

Posted on June 13, 2018

Pat Cleveland and Andre Leon Talley. Photo: Copyright Dustin Pittman

Glitz, glam, and glory – Studio 54 had it all. The epicenter of the New York disco scene in the 1970s, the infamous nightclub was a symbol of hedonism – a potent brew of celebrity, sex, drugs, and decadence.

In 1977, co-owners Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, two friends from Brooklyn, converted an old CBS television studio into a magical space where Hollywood stars, fashion designers, performers, socialites, artists, models, and street legends would dance the night away.

For 33 months, Studio 54 made headlines for its outrageous stunts, becoming the stuff of legend until it all came crashing down when Schrager and Rubell were arrested for tax evasion and ended up serving 13 months in prison. In 1989, Rubell died from complications due to AIDS, while Schrager turned his life around, becoming one of the most significant hoteliers of our time. After being pardoned by President Barack Obama in January 2017, Schrager broke his 40-year silence, finally telling the true story of Studio 54.

On Friday (June 15), Studio 54, the first documentary about the famed nightclub will officially release. In celebration of this film, we spoke to its director Matt Tyrnauer and a host of Studio 54 insiders, who share their memories of the endless nights spent partying, rubbing shoulders with everyone from Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Diana Ross to Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Karl Lagerfeld.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Palmoa Picasso. Photo: Copyright Dustin Pittman

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Stanley Kubrick: Through a Different Lens

Posted on June 13, 2018

Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick with Faye Emerson from “Faye Emerson: Young Lady in a Hurry”, 1950. © Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was just 17 years old when he became a staff photographer for Look, one of the biggest large format photo magazines of the ’40s. The Bronx native was a natural behind the camera, capturing scenes of everyday life that perfectly prefigured the intense sensibilities that would come to define his films.

In the era when Weegee ruled the New York photo scene, Kubrick began to carve out a space for himself, shooting the common man and woman as they went about the business of modern life in the years immediately following World War II. Although the scenes could be pedestrian, his photographs were anything but – as Kubrick skillfully crafted a palpable sense of intensity, drama, and tension that made every picture vibrate with life.

Rarely seen photographs from Kubrick’s work for Look at the subject of Through a Different Lens, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York and book published by Taschen. Here, we travel with Kubrick over a period of five years, as he traverses the streets of New York, bringing us onto the movie set, under the big top, into the boxing ring, and backstage on Broadway to get a look at extraordinary lives as they unfolded.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Stanley Kubrick, from “Life and Love on the New York City Subway”, 1947. © Stanley Kubrick

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Joseph Rodriguez: Spanish Harlem – El Barrio in the 80s

Posted on June 11, 2018

Skeely Street Game, Spanish Harlem, New York, 1987. © Joseph Rodriguez Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen.

In the wake of World War I, Puerto Rican and Latin American immigrants first began arriving in New York, settling in a little corner of upper Manhattan around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue, which is now known as Spanish Harlem. With a foothold firmly established in El Barrio, the neighborhood blossomed after World War II, when a new wave of immigration transformed the face of the city.

By 1960, some 63,000 Puerto Ricans called Spanish Harlem home, bringing the culture of the Caribbean to the northern climes. With bodegas and botánicas catering to the culinary and spiritual needs of the people, Spanish Harlem became an enclave unto itself.

But the land of the free was hardly this to the immigrants who faced a system of exclusion that kept them in a state of poverty. By 1970, Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan established a policy of “benign neglect” that deprived Latinx and African-American communities nationwide of basic government systems. Add to this a drug war started by the Nixon White House to flood these neighborhoods with heroin in order to destabilize and criminalize the population, and the results were devastating.

By the late 1980s, after crack made its way through the streets, the people of Spanish Harlem were struggling with rampant crime, addiction, and poverty. At the same time, AIDS was taking innocent lives while the Reagan White House turned a blind eye on a plague that was disproportionately harming the Latinx and African American communities.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Puerto Rican-American photographer Joseph Rodriguez became familiar Spanish Harlem as a child, when he traveled uptown to visit his uncle who had a candy shop in El Barrio. Like many of his generation, he fell victim to the heroin epidemic and ended up incarcerated on Rikers Island for drug possession during the early 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

Ricky Flores: The Puerto Rican Day Parade

Posted on June 10, 2018

After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the official death count was reported as 64 people. But last week, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study with a conservative estimate of 4,645 dead in what was the second most devastating tropical cyclone in U.S. history since 1900.

The new report underscores the government’s failure to help its citizens when they needed it most. The response to Maria dishearteningly echoes a past disaster—how Nixon’s White House policies of “benign neglect” leveled the streets of Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New York City, reducing them to rubble and dirt.

At that time, photographer Ricky Flores lived in the Longwood section of the South Bronx, an area infamously known as “Fort Apache” after the 1981 film of that name. A first generation Puerto Rican-American, Flores came of age as his once-thriving community was being systematically decimated by the government, and as Puerto Ricans began organizing to fight for what was rightfully theirs.

Puerto Rican pride is an integral part of New York’s diverse populace. Every year on the second Sunday in June, the community comes together on Fifth Avenue to celebrate with the Puerto Rican Day Parade. In advance of the 60th annual parade on June 10, Flores spoke with VICE about how Puerto Ricans have the power to change the course of history.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Bronx, Latin America, Manhattan, Photography, Vice

Remembering Interview Magazine

Posted on May 29, 2018

Diana Ross on the cover of Interview magazine. Artwork Richard F. Bernstein

Debbie Harry on the cover of Interview magazine. Artwork Richard F. Bernstein

Last week, nearly 50 years after it first launched, Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine announced that it was ceasing publication. The large format periodical, which began as a ‘Monthly Film Journal’ in an effort to entice Hollywood to bankroll and distribute Warhol’s films, evolved over a period of five decades to become ‘The Crystal Ball of Pop’, chronicling the downtown scene.

Interview was the ultimate Warholian project, giving readers insider access to the pop cultural elite through a compelling blend of glamour photography and celebrity-on-celebrity conversations that sprawled decadently across the oversize pages of the magazine. From 1972 to the late 80s, Richard F. Bernstein gave it a stamp of distinction with his exquisitely rendered portraits of everyone from Grace Jones, David Bowie, and Diana Ross to Debbie Harry, Michael Jackson, and Bob Marley, among many others.

Under the auspices of editors like Bob Colacello, Ingrid Sischy, and Glenn O’Brien, Interview constantly reinvented itself, striking the perfect balance between art and celebrity, just like Warhol himself. Here, a handful of editors and contributors share their memories of working alongside Andy, Glenn, and Ingrid over the years.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Grace Jones on the cover of Interview magazine. Artwork Richard F. Bernstein

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Manhattan

Danny Lyon: The Destruction of Lower Manhattan

Posted on May 26, 2018

In 1966 at the age of 25, American photographer Danny Lyon returned to his native New York at the top of his game. Having completed his work on The Bikeriders and in the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, settled into an apartment in Lower Manhattan just as the neighbourhood was undergoing radical change.

Under the auspices of David Rockefeller, the Downtown Manhattan Association had been formed as part of a new program of urban renewal. Industries were decamping from Manhattan in search of greener shores, leaving the city abandoned and in an abject state of decay. The financial district was heading to midtown where they could erect shiny new skyscrapers; the Washington Street Market closed after the fruit and vegetable suppliers set up shop in New Jersey. All that remained were 19-century residential and industrial buildings.

Governor Nelson Rockefeller, David’s brother, already had plans for the construction of the World Trade Center in the works, and together they focused on a new vision for downtown New York. A plan was enacted that would wholesale erase the buildings and streets of lower Manhattan and in its place, a new neighbourhood would be built, one designed to attract middle and higher income people in the name of “urban renewal.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1960s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography