Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

BOOM FOR REAL: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Posted on May 18, 2018

(L.) Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1979. Featured in the Zeitgeist art exhibition. (R.) Jean-Michel Basquiat in BOOM FOR REAL: THE LATE TEENAGE YEARS OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo Credit: © Alexis Adler. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In the 1970s, the streets of New York were crumbling under the weight of the systemic denial of basic government services under a policy of “benign neglect.” As white flight took effect, landlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings, knowing they could collect more for insurance than from rent checks, while Nixon’s White House criminalized and disrupted the city under the guise of the “War on Drugs.” Then, when all hope seemed lost, President Ford dropped the death knell, refusing to bail the city out of financial crisis.

Yet within the waves of destruction, a new world began to take shape, one created by the youth who understood that necessity is the mother of invention. With nothing left to lose, they began to create grassroots cultures that would take the world by storm in the form of hip-hop, graffiti, punk, and No Wave. During the late 70s and early 80s, these scenes came together, mixing and remixing into original new forms, spawning a new breed of artist best exemplified by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Although he died in 1987 at the age of 27, his legacy looms large, inspiring new generations who recognize that the issues he addressed 30 years ago—like police brutality, erasure of African-American history, and the commodification of art—remain unresolved. Driven by a desire to unearth the roots of Basquiat’s creativity, filmmaker Sara Driver created the documentary BOOM FOR REAL: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which explores the artist’s life and legacy through those who knew him best.

Driver also teamed up with culture critic Carlo McCormick and Mary-Ann Monforton, the associate publisher of BOMB magazine, to curate Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat, a group art exhibition featuring Basquiat’s friends and contemporaries, including Nan Goldin, Kenny Scharf, Al Diaz, and Lee Quiñones at Howl! Happening gallery in New York.

Driver spoke with VICE about Basquiat’s New York, a playground for visionaries from all walks of life that continues to speak truth to power today.

Read the Full Story at VICE

L: Jean-Michel Basquiat R: Jean and friends. Photo Credit: © Alexis Adler. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Manhattan, Vice

LES YES!: Meryl Meisler 1970s & 80s Lower East Side Photos

Posted on May 17, 2018

Mom at Sammy’s Roumanian NY, NY July 1978. © Meryl Meisler / courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

100 years ago, New York’s Lower East Side (LES) was the pre-eminent melting pot – a mixture of old and new immigrants leaving Europe en masse, creating a singular blend of Ashkenazi Jews, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Poles, and Romanians. With some 400,000 Jews living in the hood, the Ashkenazi made up one of the largest groups in the LES, bringing their unique spin on old-world culture to the city that never sleeps.

A neighbourhood with a leaning towards radical politics, the LES helped foster a new culture rooted in housing reform following the publication of Jacob A. Riis’ 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, which documented the horrors of people forced to live in slums. The New Law Tenements passed in 1901 resulted in the construction of settlement houses – such as the Henry Street Settlement on Grand Street – which transformed living conditions for the working class, and has continued to serve the community for generations.

In 1976, a young Jewish-American photographer named Meryl Meisler began frequenting art events at the Henry Street Settlement, where her cousin and roommate taught art. Here, she met Mr Morris Katz, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Grand Street. A retired widower who once worked at Coney Island guessing weights, Mr Katz cut a striking figure that could best be described as Yiddish chic. Donning a sports jacket over a zebra-patterned shirt, patterned bow tie and plaid pants, Mr Katz warmly greeted Meisler at the street corner and offered her a lollipop. She was instantly charmed.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Women with gift boxes NY, NY April 1978. © Meryl Meisler / courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

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

Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls

Posted on May 11, 2018

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Angelina “Pepper” Davis / Eric Emerson. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

During the summer of 1966, while hanging out in the famed backroom of Max’s Kansas City, Andy Warhol took a napkin and began to draw a line down the middle. On one side, he wrote “B,” and on the other “W.” From this simple sketch, the concept of a split screen film, which would become Chelsea Girls, was born.

“I want to make a movie that is a long movie, that is all black one side and white the other,” scriptwriter Ronald Tavel recounts Warhol explaining, in Ric Burns’ documentary film Andy Warhol.

A true radical in the avant-garde cinema community, Warhol’s first major film was Sleep (1963): a five-hour, 20-minute silent film of John Giorno, his boyfriend at the time. It could be described as an endurance test, for nothing much happened. Warhol took this idea of the still camera and the unedited reel of film, combined it with the faux-documentary sensibility of cinéma vérité, added his Superstars into the mix, set them in a simple scenario, and let them do their thing.

The result was Chelsea Girls was born: a split-screen film featuring 22 different 33-minute reels featuring appearances by Nico, International Velvet, Eric Emerson, Brigid Berlin, Mario Montez, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Susan Bottomly, and Ingrid Superstar that became Warhol’s first commercially successful film – due in no small part to the classic cocktail of sex, drugs, and drama.

“Before, people fell asleep during my films. When they didn’t walk out,” Warhol observes in the new book, Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (D.A.P./The Andy Warhol Museum, May 24). “But Chelsea Girls is packing them in. Why? Because it’s dirty.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Nico / Ondine. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol, “3 Min. Mary Might”, 1966. Pictured: George Millaway, Ronnie Cutrone, Angelina “Pepper” Davis, unidentified man. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan

Ryan Weideman: In My Taxi – New York After Hours

Posted on May 8, 2018

Back in 1978, while living in Oakland, photographer Ryan Weideman saw Midnight Express, a nerve-wracking film that tells the true story of Billy Hayes – a young American who, after being caught smuggling hashish, escapes from a Turkish jail and lives to tell the tale.

“I thought, ‘If this guy can go through that, I am ready for New York!” Weideman says with a laugh.

1970s Manhattan was an outlaw town riddled with violence and crime. It became a magnet for fearless spirits who lived life on their own terms. Although Weideman had taken visual cues from film noir throughout his life, it was the work of photographers William Klein, Diane Arbus, Joel Meyerowitz and Robert Frank that made him aware that something spectacular was happening in New York.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Rammellzee: Racing for Thunder

Posted on May 2, 2018

RAMMΣLLZΣΣ. Photography Keetja Allard

Hailing from the outer limits of New York City and maybe even the earth itself, Rammellzee (1960-2010) arrived on the downtown scene aged 19, fully realised, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, clad in armour, ready to take on all comers.

A singular figure in the early years of graffiti and hip hop who stood apart in a world filled with charismatic talents and revolutionary pioneers, Rammellzee introduced his philosophies of Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism in his artwork and performances. He donned characters and costumes as extensions of himself, comfortably shrouding himself in mysticism, mythology, and legends.

Did he go to jail in the 70s for robbing a bank? The world may never know – but now a new exhibition titled RAMMΣLLZΣΣ: Racing for Thunder tells the story of the elusive artist through those who knew him best. Organised by Red Bull Arts New York Chief Curator Max Wolf and cultural critic Carlo McCormick, the artist’s largest survey to date presents an inclusive selection of work from the icon throughout his three-decade career along with oral histories told by those who knew him best. Here, friends and colleagues share memories of Rammellzee, the man behind the mask.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

RAMMΣLLZΣΣ. Photography Brian Williams

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Manhattan, Music, Painting

Marcia Resnick: Wild Women

Posted on April 3, 2018

Left: Joan Jett at the pool hall. Right: Laurie Anderson with her violin. © Marcia Resnick

Brooklyn-born photographer Marcia Resnick has documented New York City’s art communities for more than half a century. When she was in high school in the 1960s, she mingled with aging hippies at Greenwich Village clubs like Café Au Go Go and Café Wha? And in the 1970s, she shared a loft building in Tribeca with neighbors like Laurie Anderson.

During the 70s and the city’s wildest years, Resnick spent most nights at CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, and the Mudd Club. Around this time, she also started photographing the “bad boys” of the art scene. Resnick wanted to see how powerful men like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Iggy Pop, and William S. Burroughs reacted when the tables were turned and a woman was behind the camera, subjecting them to the female gaze.

Resnick was also enchanted by the gregarious women she lived, worked, and partied with who were simultaneously shaking up the scene. Though it’s less well-known than her Bad Boys series—which was later published as the book Punks, Poets and Provocateurs, NYC Bad Boys 1977-1982 (Insight Editions, 2015)—Resnick’s Wild Women series captures the revolutionary spirit and creative power of artists like Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, and Susan Sontag.

Wild Women is a rarely-seen body of work that embodies the DIY ethos of the era, and VICE recently sat down with Resnick to talk about what it was like documenting her peers and how Women’s Liberation shook up the 70s and 80s.

Read the Full Story at VICE

Pat Place with toy dragon. © Marcia Resnick

Lydia Lunch on all fours. © Marcia Resnick

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Manhattan, Photography, Vice, Women

Steven Edson: Vintage New York City Street Scenes

Posted on March 25, 2018

Wedding couple NYC, 1973. © Steven Edson

Big car white shoes, 1973. © Steven Edson

Steven Edson was just eight years old when he was blinded in one eye by a pebble thrown by another child. While recovering, his neighbour, who was also an eye doctor, gave him a camera and he began to shoot. He quickly fell in love with photography – a passion he shared with his father, who always took pictures at various family occasions.

At home, he would page through picture magazines like LIFE and National Geographic, and came to admire the work of street photographers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus.

Growing up in New York City during the ’50s and ’60s, Edson got to know the streets of his native town, which soon became the backdrop for a series of black and white street photographs and portraits. “New York was rough and unpolished,” Edson recalls. “It was filled with buses, taxis, and trucks all honking their horns, while the fumes of exhaust spilt out into the street, choking your breath. The subway was also extremely loud but offered the thrill of sending you barreling down the tracks through the darkened tunnels.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

NYC street scene. © Steven Edson

Man hugging woman, 1974. © Steven Edson

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

Duncan Hannah: Twentieth Century Boy

Posted on March 15, 2018

Duncan Hannah with his painting My Funny Valentine, 1981

When Duncan Hannah arrived in New York in 1971, he could have walked out of the pages of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. With big eyes and high cheekbones, Hannah’s androgynous beauty attracted the attention of the city’s prominent women and gay men, who didn’t let his resolute heterosexuality get in the way of their relentless pursuit.

As an aspiring artist coming of age during a mythical time when glam rock, punk, and new wave transformed the underground, Hannah found himself at the center of it all, feeding an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life: sex, drugs, alcohol, parties, and art. Whether partying with Television at CBGB, starring in Amos Poe’s underground film Unmade Beds, or serving as a muse to Patti Smith, Hannah was always in the mix.

Throughout it all, he kept a series of handwritten journals filled with cameos by everyone from David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Debbie Harry to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Nico, and Lou Reed. Their pages, filled with gritty, evocative memories from the 70s, were collected and edited into Hannah’s new book, Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the 1970s (Knopf, March 13).

VICE asked Hannah to take us on a tour of New York through its most debauched decade—an era when punk became a catalyst for cultural revolution.

Read the Full Story at Vice

The Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and Duncan Hannah (second from right) at The Factory. Photographed by Lance Loud, 1976

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Vice

Philip Trager: New York in the 1970s

Posted on February 16, 2018

In 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan convinced the Nixon White House to support a policy of “benign neglect,” wherein basic government services were systemically denied to cities across the United States with large African-American and Latinx populations.

New York City quickly became the nation’s most famous victim of “urban blight” at the hands of the state. The city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy as manufacturers fled en masse, while landlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings knowing they could get more money from insurance than they could from resale. The city fell into desolate and desperate straits. Yet within this horrific landscape, New York maintained its dignity and strength, becoming the site for the most explosive cultural movements of the late 20th century.

The city’s landmark buildings and dramatic vistas were a symbol of the potent energy that lay within, a vision that spoke to American photographer Philip Trager. He and his wife Ina packed a view camera and two tripods into their Jeep Commando and drove into Manhattan from Connecticut, where they lived at the time.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Mr Chow: 50 Years

Posted on February 15, 2018

“Michael Chow, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat’s mother and friends” (1984). Silver gelatine print; 77/8 x 97/8 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Portrait of Michael Chow” (1984). Polymer silkscreened on canvas; 80 x 80 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Restauranteur. Designer. Architect. Art Collector. World Traveler. Icon of style and substance Michael Chow – or M, as he is known – has transformed fine dining into an art at Mr Chow, providing a magical bridge between the East and the West for the past fifty years.

M was born Zhou Yinghua in 1939 in Shanghai to Zhou Xingfang (1895-9175), a leading figure in the Peking Opera who wrote and acted in more than 650 titles during his illustrious career, and Lilian Qui (1905-1968), who hailed from a wealthy family whose fortune was made in tea.

At the age of 13, everything changed when M was sent to boarding school in London. What he didn’t know at the time was that he would never see or communicate with his father again. “Suddenly there was a void within me,” M reveals.

Into that chasm, M plunged – first in despair, then finding himself in art. He studied at St. Martins and went on to paint for a decade before the market forces made it apparent that it was not receptive to a Chinese artist. Once again, M turned to art to guide the way, launching the very first Mr Chow in Knightsbridge in February 1968.

From the very outset, Mr Chow was not just a restaurant – it was theatre: a stage for pleasure, passion, and intrigue, where Italian waiters served fine Chinese cuisine to sophisticated clientele and artworks by Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, and Jim Dine became an integral part of the experience. He established three restaurants in London before setting a course to conquer America.

Over the past half-century, M has opened restaurants in Beverly Hills, New York, Miami, and Las Vegas, always bringing glamour and theatre to the dining experience. Now, on the occasion of Mr Chow’s golden anniversary, M has released, Mr Chow: 50 Years (Prestel/Delmonico), a beautifully illustrated volume that explores a singular life in art, architecture, design, and cuisine, combining the very best of the east and the west.

Featuring works by Helmut Newton, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, Francesco Clemente, and Ed Ruscha, just to name a few, the book reveals the significant role Mr Chow has played in the art world over five decades. Here, M speaks with us about a life in art: the past, present, and future vision of a man whose magic has touched countless hearts.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

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

Khalik Allah: Souls on Concrete

Posted on January 29, 2018

In the summer of 1998, Khalik Allah had come to a major crossroad after failing eighth grade. Dancing with a B-boy crew had been keeping him out late at night, and school had failed to interest him. Yet he understood the importance of educating himself. Concerned about his future, he headed up to Harlem and began to study with the Five-Percent Nation at the Allah School.

The Five-Percent teachings provided Allah with the self-knowledge and street smarts needed to turn his life around. When he graduated high school, he received a $1,000 scholarship that he used to buy his first camera. He took up filmmaking, then photography, with a mission to create an original style that he could use to create what he describes as “psychic x-rays” – portraits of the soul that lies within.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Manhattan, Photography