Posts from the “Painting” Category

The Artists Using Gender as a Tool and a Weapon

Posted on September 25, 2017

Photo: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (0X5A1531), 2017. Archival pigment print, 51 × 34 in (129.5 × 86.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York

Beyond the binary lays a world of infinite possibility, a space of total freedom and fluidity. ‘Male’ and ‘female’ are the space where we begin, and when we liberate ourselves from the paradigm of ‘either/or’ a vast wealth of gender expression begins to reveal itself.

Invariably, not everyone is comfortable within this extraordinary space. Many hold fast to simplistic, reductive thinking that diminishes the complexities and nuances of human experience and may resist enlightenment. Others understand the necessity of expansive and inclusive ideas, conversations and art – and it’s here that Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon takes off.

Curated by Johanna Burton, Trigger is a major exhibition featuring the work of more than 40 artists from all walks of life, which will be on view at the New Museum, New York this month and catalogued in a book of the same name on November 21.

By positioning gender at the intersection of race, class, sexuality and disability, Trigger exposes deep ambiguities, curious contradictions and fundamental questions at the heart of life on earth. The artists featured here offer ways to use gender to construct and dismantle culture, building new spaces and refurbishing the old. We speak with Burton about the importance of the show, and profile the work of six artists using gender as a weapon and a tool to embrace, reject and subvert the status quo.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Artwork: Tschabalala Self, “Loner”, 2016. Fabric, Flashe, and acrylic on canvas, 84 × 80 in (213.3 × 203.2 cm). Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg, New York

Artwork: Justin Vivian Bond, “My Barbie Coloring Book”, 2014. Watercolour on archival paper, 14 ½ × 11 ½ in (36.8 × 29.2 cm). Courtesy the artist

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

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

Kerry James Marshall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Untitled (Curtain Girl), 2016, acrylic on PVC panel, 76 x 61 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Extreme blackness plus grace equals power,” Kerry James Marshall observed, revealing an essential truth of the nature of the world. From a purely aesthetic sense, black is a color and it is something more. It is both the complete absence or absorption of light. It takes in all colors of the visible spectrum becoming the amalgamation all that we know, becoming the alpha and the omega: from where we begin and to where we return.

In this way, Africa as the birthplace of humanity makes perfect sense: from blackness all colors of wo/mankind have been birthed. Black is one of the first colors used by artists painting in the caves of Europe, those prehistoric beings who intuitively understood that essential power of the hue rested in both its immediate impact and its longevity.

With homo sapiens dating back nearly 200,000 years in Africa, in the grand scheme of history it is only in recent times that some have chosen to vilify blackness. Europeans became obsessed with framing it in a negative light, crafting the idea of race as a justification for a campaign of global imperialism that systematically pillaged, enslaved, and decimated peoples of a darker hue across Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

From this we have inherited trauma rooted in profound psychosis that posits us in a position to spread truth to power. Giving voice to that which has been silenced, giving sight to that which has been distorted or erases, giving sanctuary to that which has been targeted for destruction: this is our shared responsibility. Each of us brings talents and gifts, wisdom and understanding, experiences and insights that fill in the blanks, fitting together like a puzzle of billions of pieces that reveal the image of God.

But… such a picture may never appear but that’s no reason to do what we must, for it is in our individual efforts that we light the spark of inspiration and fuel the flames of action. American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama) leads by example, dedicating his life to the creation of a body of work that restores black to its rightful place.

His recent touring exhibition Mastry has claimed the space that it deserves, in the highest echelons of wealth, power, and history: the realm of fine art. In conjunction with the exhibitions, Phaidon has just released Kerry James Marshall, the most comprehensive book published on the artist.

The book is a tour-de-force, providing a comprehensive look at Marshall’s singular career and the ways in which he has used painting as a site for the writing of history. Marshall’s life itself traces the course of America over the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with the artist’s formative years deep in the heart of Dixie under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

In 1963, his family joined the final wave of the Great Migration, moving to South Central Los Angeles, just in time to experience the horrors of the Watts riots in 1965. “By the time the riots got to where we were, it was like a carnival,” Marshall tells Charles Gaines in the book. “The violence that took place was confusing to me.… I started to see that the responsibility for my needs shifted to me as opposed to a collective. I try never to approach a thing as if I’m one hundred percent certain about what it is or what the proper response to it is supposed to be.”

Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20 x 16 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, photo: Matthew Fried, © MCA Chicago

With a perspective rooted in openness and self-reliance, Marshall set forth on a journey rooted in discovery. His purpose began to take shape in 1980, when he painted A Portrait of the Artists as a Shadow of His Former Self, a work that recalls the influence of the great African American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946). But here, Marshall began his exploration of the power of black, of the color that would come to be a signature element in his work.

He told Gaines, “This was when it started to look like there was something that could be done with the black figure, that it could be used to explore ideas that are not only relevant to picture making by itself but also to convey some of those ideas that I’d been developing about where black people fit in. Before then, apart from the self-portraits, which I’d do as an exercise, I was still doing still lifes and paintings of inanimate objects in order to figure out how to paint…. [The issue of race] really came into focus with that one painting.”

With his focus honed and his skills at the ready Marshall set forth to create a body of work depicting the African American experience in all of its complexities, a profound portrait of a people that embraces the heroism of daily life, while also underscoring the culture and its relationship to the individual.

“To recognize the diversity of Blackness (to use Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s militantly colloquial spelling) would be to recognize that there is such a place as the interzone that poet Elizabeth Alexander once termed The Black Interior – primarily a psychic space where flocks of self-actualized black subjectivites freely roam about, walkabout and roust about, “Greg Tate writes in the book.

“If you happen to own the Black Interior that belongs to Kerry James Marshall and you dare to take up the ambitious mission of rendering the interiors of the Black Whole – that loud, proud, obsidian realm saturated with oscillating frequencies, swooping modalities, spiky plateaus, swampy valleys, funky declensions, cosmic ascents, elaborate head rooms, and wickedly salty tall-tales – you have already reckoned with apprehending the liminality of American Blackness: the half hidden/half revealed qualities of that Free Bloack Thang that Duke Ellignotn believed imbued all truly black expression with a lofty and iridescent aura of transluesency, “Tate explained.

And, indeed, that one magnificent sentence is as much as masterpiece as the paintings it describes, so perfectly modulated in its nuances that the complexities of its content simply dissolve before your very eyes. It is what it is, as the classic African-American proverb recognizes.

And what it is restores balance to the earth, the soul and the spirit, the present moment and the history books. The mastry of Kerry James Marshall is a vision to behold, a marvel of necessity, desire, and self determination that leads by example and keeps the promise that possibility, when realized, is God made manifest on earth.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Painting

The 5 Art Shows You Need to See This Fall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Photo; Dawoud Bey. A Boy in Front of the Loew’s 125th Street Movie Theater 1976, Printed by 1979. Gelatin Silver print 230 x 150. Featured in “States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era“

Philippe Halsman, A Paragon of Beauty, Dalí’s Moustache, 1953-54.
Vintage photomontage print. 35.3 x 23.5 cm. Philippe Halsman Archive, New York © Philippe Halsman Archive. From “Dali/Duchamp”

Fall is when everything begins, as the new season kicks into gear and people get in the swing of things. As your calendar fills up, there’s no better time to get away from it all and dip into a museum to catch an exhibition that will inspire the soul and inflame the mind. Crave spotlights five of the best new shows opening this season, each one a phenomenal collection of art and ideas.

States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era

The history of the United States is a multifaceted mosaic of experiences, tiled together around a fragile center that exploded in civil war in the nation’s first hundred years. In its second century, it was rocked over and over again by peoples determined to live into the rights guaranteed under the Constitution against those who would deny them. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the nation faced some of its greatest challenges, from the Civil Rights Movement, which spawned the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements, to the devastation of COINTELPRO and a government that willfully used illegal measures to destroy its people from within.

Looking back at what was and the promises of what might have been, Nottingham Contemporary, UK, presents States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era, a collections of 250 photographs by 16 American masters, now on view through November 26, 2017. Among the artists featured are Crave faves Diane Arbus, Dawoud Bey, Mark Cohen, Bruce Davidson, Louis Draper, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Jim Goldberg, Danny Lyon, Mary Ellen Mark, Stephen Shore, and Garry Winogrand.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

From Martin Wong: Human Instamatic

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Happy Birthday Helen Levitt

Posted on August 31, 2017

Photo: Helen Levitt, Untitled, New York City,1972

It was a coup, in every sense of the word. Helen Levitt was giving an interview. Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker was the lucky cat who received the invitation to Helen’s fifth-floor walk up apartment on 12th Street.

I had not yet met her, but we had spoken on the phone, and I could hear her Bensonhurst accent as she cut things down to size. The story was published in November 2001, and the city as still reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Center.

I, too, lived on 12th Street that year. I knew the horror of being close, but not too close, to it all, just outside the deepest circle of hell. It was visceral, on levels its impossible to articulate, particularly for any True Yorker who had lived through the government warfare under benign neglect, crack, and AIDS.

The interview was done in tandem with the release of “Crosstown,” Helen’s magnum opus that was just released from powerHouse. It was a picture of New York that insiders know: life on the street, perhaps the best thing about this town.

Gopnik sang her praises, calling her New York’s poet photographer laureate. And to be fair, he wasn’t wrong. I just fell down a Tumblr rabbit hole of her work. But, there was another Helen, the one I wish I got to know, the broad from Brooklyn, ya dig.

I can still hear her scratchy voice in my mind’s ear, as Gopnik broached the subject of 9/11. It sounded like he was looking for guidance and wisdom, something to help the readers of the magazine deal with the trauma that had devastated their daily lives. Who better than a lifelong New Yorker who had reached her nonagenarian year to offer a word of solace?

Gopnik asked Helen what she thought New Yorkers should do in the wake of the tragedy.

“I think yous should get the hell out,” Helen said, succinctly.

Happy Birthday Helen Levitt ~*~ thanks for the memories !

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Painting

“Art in Ad Places” Transforms City Sidewalks into a Gallery

Posted on August 23, 2017

Photo: Hope and Promise by Jamel Shabazz. Photo by Luna Park. Courtesy of Art in Ad Places.

“People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are ‘The Advertisers’ and they are laughing at you,” Banksy wrote in his 2004 book, Cut It Out.

People intuitively sense this kind of neg, their egos becoming more increasingly defensive and critical while simultaneously entertaining the lengths advertisers will go to win them over. In the court of public opinion, the attention we are willing to give them serves as costs paid.

Art in Ad Places, a New York City public service campaign, understands this, and has taken the high road by transforming the landscape with public art. Every week throughout 2017, the organization partners with a contemporary artist, installing their works in payphone kiosks across the city in order to reimagine the way we see the world.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Caterpillar by Mab Graves. Photo by Luna Park. Courtesy of Art in Ad Places.

Photo: HOODED by Myles Loftin. Photo by Luna Park. Courtesy of Art in Ad Places.

Categories: Art, Crave, Painting, Photography

Tabloid Art History x Mythomania

Posted on August 21, 2017

Artwork: Rihanna at Crop Over 2017, Barbados // Plate from Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kunstformen der Natur’ (‘Artforms of nature’), 1904. Courtesy of TabloidArtHistory.

“Everything has already been done,” Stanley Kubrick opined “Every story has been told. Every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it one better.”

Perhaps this is true—perhaps it is not. It’s impossible to know that which has never existed until it takes form. But one thing is for sure, and that’s the power of myth, which speaks of human nature’s relentless desire to find a narrative that makes sense out of the chaos and complexities of existence.

We do not need to look all the way back to mythologies of yore, to the heroic, monstrous, and villainous archetypes that have inspired great art, music, and literature in all cultures across time. The classical ideals of god, mortal, and beast have so completely subsumed our conscious (and even unconscious) minds that we simply follow the script.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Prince Harry at a pool in Miami, Florida, 2014// ‘Portrait of Nick Wilder’ (detail), by David Hockney, 1966. Acrylic on Canvas, 183 x 183 cm. Courtesy of TabloidArtHistory.

Artwork: A pregnant Beyoncé amongst flowers, Mother’s Day 2017 // ‘Mary Little, later Lady Carr’ by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 30” x 24”, 2012.Courtesy of TabloidArtHistory.

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Painting, Photography

Omar Victor Diop: Project Diaspora

Posted on August 3, 2017

Photo: Omar Victor Diop, Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Congo (c. 1643-50). From the series: Project Diaspora 2014 . Pigment inkjet print on Harman Hahnemuhle paper 47 1/4 x 31 1/2 in. Edition of 8 + 2 APs. In 1643 or 1644, Don Miguel de Castro and two servants arrived as part of a delegation sent by the ruler of Sonho, a province of Congo, via Brazil to the Netherlands. One objective of the journey was to find a resolution to an internal conflict in Congo. Original painting attributed to Jaspar Beck or Albert Eckout. Photo: © Omar Victor Diop. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris, France.

Photo: Omar Victor Diop, A Moroccan man (1913). From the series: Project Diaspora 2014. Pigment inkjet print on Harman Hahnemuhle paper 47 1/4 x 31 1/2 in. Edition of 8 + 2 APs. Jose Tapiro y Baro was a Catalan painter. One of his closest friends was the painter Maria? Fortuny with whom he shared an interest for Orientalism. He was a master of watercolor painting. Original Painting by Jose? Tapiro y Baro. Photo: © Omar Victor Diop. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris, France.

The great African proverb wisely observes, “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”

The lion has arrived in the form of Omar Victor Diop, a rising star in the photography world. Born 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, Diop has inherited the great traditions of African studio photography and takes them to the next level in his new exhibition, Project Diaspora, currently on view at SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, GA, through August 18, 2017.

In Project Diaspora, Diop tells the story of the lions of African history through the recreation of historic portrait paintings of key figures in art, politics, theology, and trade living between the 15th and the 19th centuries. This particular period reveals the complex relationship between African and the rest of the world, as European imperialist forces ransacked the continent, enslaving its people, occupying its lands, and looting its natural resources.

As a result, the history of the African people extends far beyond the continent as the diaspora takes hold. Millions of people are captured, enslaved, and sold to foreign imperialists who seized North and South Americas. At the same time, the peoples who remained on the continent were forced to deal with what the invaders wrought, their lives and history disrupted and often times destroyed by the inhumanity practiced by those who claimed to live in “The Age of Reason.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Painting, Photography

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

Posted on July 26, 2017

On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael stood before a crowd of 3,000 in a park in Greenwood, Mississippi, who had gathered to march in place of James Meredith, who had been wounded during his solitary “Walk Against Fear” in an effort to integrate the University of Mississippi.

Carmichael, who had been arrested after setting up camp, took to the stage with fire in his gut. “We’ve been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” the newly appointed chairman of the SNCC announced, “What we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power!’”

With those words, Carmichael did more than change the paradigm for Civil Rights, he transformed the language of race itself. Up until that time, Americans had been using the word “Negro,” taken from the Spanish slave trade. It’s linguistic resemblance to the “N” word was all-too evident; the Spanish word for “Black” that was commonly used had been corrupted by English speakers and infested with pathological hatred, fear, and rage.

Carmichael embraced the word “Black” while simultaneously making the case that “Negro” was the oppressor’s term of diminution and disrespect. Malcolm X, who had had been killed a year earlier, was also a proponent for the word “Black.” By the decade’s end, Ebony was using it exclusively, helping to guide the group towards a self-chosen identity that the rest of the nation came to use.

Why does this matter? Because we think in words; the very terms we use to describe the world, and the connotations they hold, inform our beliefs and perceptions, whether we realize it or not. “Black Power” began in the very naming of the act. It was a means of transforming identity from one that was given to that which was claimed.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Betye Saar, Rainbow Mojo, 1972. Paul Michael diMeglio, New York.

Artwork: Emma Amos, Eva the Babysitter, 1973. Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Lee Gallery, NY.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Peter Cain at Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles

Posted on July 5, 2017

Artwork: Peter Cain. Sean Number Two, 1996. Oil on linen, 60 x 84 inches, 152 x 213 cm. © Peter Cain, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

When painter Peter Cain died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 37 at in 1997, he left the art world in a state of shock. His career, which he been on the rise for over a decade, had begun to transform into new realms. What remained was a body of work that comprised 63 paintings that reveal a life interrupted, full of promise and potency, an ability to transform the archetypes of the era into something equally compelling and curious.

Matthew Marks, which represented him during his life, now presents Peter Cain, a new exhibition of works at their Los Angeles galleries, currently on view through September 1, 2017. Featuring paintings, drawings, and collages made between the late 1980s and 1997, this is Cain’s first solo show in LA since 1990.

The breadth of the collection reveals Cain’s development and the directions he had been heading at the time of his death. His earlier works, which brought him to game, are sumptuous paintings of automobiles that combine aspects of Surrealism and Photorealism to stunning effect, luring us into a strange realm where nothing is quite what it seems, yet you’re apt to believe in its truth, just as you would in a dream.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Kehinde Wiley: Trickster

Posted on June 6, 2017

Artwork: “Portrait of Rashid Johnson and Sanford Biggers, The Ambassadors”, 2017 oil on canvas painting: 120 5/16 x 85 5/8 inches (305.6 x 217.5 cm) framed: 131 5/16 x 96 11/16 x 4 ½ inches (333.5 x 245.6 x 11.4 cm). © Kehinde Wiley, courtesy Sean Kelly, New York

The Trickster exists in different cultures around the globe: the wily shapeshifter with the power to transform the way we see the world. As an archetype, The Trickster can be found in any walk of life where people must operate according to more than one set of rules, moving seamlessly between the appearance of things and the underlying truth.

Artists know this realm well for they are consigned to delve deep below the surface and manifest what they find. Yet their discoveries are not necessarily in line with the status quo; more often than not, they will upset polite society and upend respectability politics by speaking truth to power – quite literally.

In the United States, African Americans know this well. Throughout the course of the nation’s history, they have been forced to deal with systemic oppression and abuse in a culture filled with double speak that began with the words “All men are created equal,” penned in the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, a man who kept his own children as slaves until his death.

Throughout his career, artist Kehinde Wiley has moved smoothly between spheres of influence, using the canon of Western art as a tool of subversion, celebration, and recognition for those who have long been excluded from the narrative. “History is written by the victors,” Winston Churchill said, reminding us that now is the time to reclaim that which belongs to us.

In Trickster, a new exhibition of work currently on view at Sean Kelly, Gallery, through June 17, 2017, New York, Wiley honors his contemporaries who walk his same path, creating a series of portraits of extraordinary black artists including Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Nick Cave, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Using Francisco Goya’s infamous Black Paintings as the departure point, Wiley puts blackness front and centre, operating on several levels simultaneously. Below, he speaks to us about this work, revealing the power and courage it takes to go beyond the known.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Artwork: “Portrait of Nick Cave, Nadezhda Polovtseva”, 2017 oil on canvas painting: 120 5/16 x 81 ¾ inches (305.6 x 207.6 cm) framed: 131 5/16 x 92 ¾ x 4 ½ inches (333.5 x 235.6 x 11.4 cm). © Kehinde Wiley, courtesy Sean Kelly, New York

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting