Zak Ové: Get Up, Stand Up Now

Posted on June 27, 2019

Armet Francis, ‘Fashion Shoot Brixton Market’, 1973.

Jenn Nkiru, ‘Still from Neneh Cherry, Kong’, 2018.

“I was raised by a village,” says artist Zak Ové of his upbringing in West London. “It was a very outspoken black and West Indian community, [and I was] understanding how assertive one had to be to be seen.”

As the son of an Irish Socialist mum and acclaimed black filmmaker Horace Ové, the artist was raised with strong ideals that have guided him throughout his career: “Politics within the arts has always been very integral from my father’s generation onwards. [It helps us] attain equality, honesty, and perspective towards our own history.”

Now, Ové is honouring those who laid these foundations in Get Up, Stand Up Now, a new landmark exhibition which celebrates 50 years of Black creativity in the UK. The exhibition features historic artworks, new commissions, and never-before-seen work by 100 artists working in art, film, photography, music, literature, design and fashion. This includes the Black Audio Film Collective, Chris Ofili, David Hammons, Ebony G. Patterson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Althea McNish, Steve McQueen, and Yinka Shonibare.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ajamu, from ‘Circus Master Series’, 1997

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

Collier Schorr: Stonewall at 50

Posted on June 26, 2019

Chella Man © Collier Schorr, courtesy of the Alice Austen House

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, gay men, and allies faced down the police during a raid at New York City’s Stonewall Inn – kicking off a rebellion on the streets of Greenwich Village and igniting the global Gay Liberation Movement.

Half a century after this historic uprising, American photographer Collier Schorr pays homage to 15 leading intergenerational LGBTQ activists and artists – including Eileen Myles, Zackary Drucker, and Judy Bowen – in a series of black and white portraits now on view in Stonewall at 50.

Native New Yorker Karla Jay was an early member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). “Stonewall came along in this age of rebellion against societal norms,” she says. “There were so many things happening in 1969: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Women’s Movement. I was a radical feminist and belonged to a group called Redstockings. We didn’t invent rebellion, but we ran with it because we were sex radicals.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Agosto Machado © Collier Schorr, courtesy of the Alice Austen House

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography from 1959 to 2017

Posted on June 26, 2019

Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Flying low, Mexico City, 1989 © Pablo Ortiz Monasterio Courtesy of the artist

“I am not a liberator,” said Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1958, just one year before the Cuban Revolution transformed the landscape of Latin America. “Liberators do not exist. It exists when people liberate themselves.”

This historic movement for independence from western imperialism marks the starting point of the new exhibition Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography from 1959 to 2017. Curated by María Wills Londoño and Alexis Fabry, the show features more than 200 works by over 70 artists; including masters of the medium Alberto Korda, Graciela Iturbide, Sergio Larrain, as well as lesser-known artists such as Enrique Zamudio, Beatriz Jaramillo, and Yolanda Andrade.

“The purpose of the show is to bring a counterpoint to Latin American photography beyond gazes that have an exoticising point of view,” says Londoño. “We want to introduce new perspectives focusing on the chaos and crisis of utopian models of modernity.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Álvaro Hoppe. Calle Alameda, Santiago, 1983

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Exhibitions, Huck, Latin America, Photography

Rick Castro: Glory Hole

Posted on June 26, 2019

Rick Castro. Head bondage, 1992.

In a new online exhibition titled Glory Hole, the ‘King of Fetish’ Rick Castro delves deep into his 30-year archive to unearth a selection of rarely shown photographs. Featuring intimate portrayals of the male body, the Tom of Finland Store exhibition celebrates fetish and BDSM at a time when corporate censorship openly threatens expressions of queer identity. Just this year, Facebook barred Castro from his account for 30 days to prevent him from promoting his exhibition Fetish King: Seminal Photographs 1986-2019 at the Tom of Finland Foundation.

“It’s depressingly becoming really prevalent,” Castro tells Another Man from his home in Los Angeles. “Everything is becoming G-rated. The guise of community standards has nothing to do with the insidiousness of removing a specific voice (of the LGBTQ community). It’s biased and it’s very much overkill.”

But Castro has never allowed anyone to silence his voice. In the early years of his career, he struggled to find a venue to show his work. “Up until the internet, fetish never had a huge forum,” Castro says. “But now, it’s being co-opted and gentrified just like everything else.”

With Glory Hole, Castro fights back, showing why he wears the crown and reigns supreme. Here, alongside an exclusive preview of Glory Hole, he shares memories of his encounters with Kenneth Chang, whose photograph graces the cover of the 1992 cult classic The Bondage Book Vol. 1.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Roger Gastman: Beyond the Streets

Posted on June 20, 2019

Lil’ Crazy Legs during shoot for Wild Style. Riverside Park NY, 1983. Photo Martha Cooper

Graffiti first emerged on the streets of New York and Philadelphia half a century ago as marker tags by young teens with a desire to make their mark. A new art form emerged, and from it styles bloomed, transforming the age-old desire to mark our territory in the most literal way.

Graffiti hit like a bomb, leaving cities covered with the most electric kind of public art: one done for love, not money, at the risk of arrest, fines, and imprisonment. It spread from city to city like a virus through movies like Wild Style and Style Wars, books like Subway Art, and art exhibitions dating back to 1973. It inspired generations of artists from all around the globe to create, innovate, and leave their mark on society in a manner that was nothing short of in your face.

Although New York has largely been scrubbed clean of the art form it unleashed upon the world, “it is still considered the number one graffiti tourism destination,” says Roger Gastman, curator of Beyond the Streets. The exhibition features hundreds of large scale works by over 150 contemporary artists, including Charlie Ahearn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, the Guerilla Girls, Eric HAZE, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, and Dash Snow.

Read he Full Story at Huck Online

Style Wars car by NOC 167 with door open, man reading newspaper. 96th Street Station, New York, NY, 1981. Photo Martha Cooper

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Huck, Photography

Sex, Frocks and Rock & Roll

Posted on June 18, 2019

“Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all,” a deep voice slowly says before the pitch-black screen explodes with a heavy guitar riff and a montage of scenes beautiful and bizarre in the original trailer for the 1966 film Blow-Up — the ultimate art house tale of sex, frocks, and rock & roll.

We enter into a day in the life of Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer modeled on 1960s bad boys David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, Michelangelo Antonini’s first English language film deftly combines aestheticism and existentialism to flawless effect, giving us everything and nothing — much like the troop of mimes that bookend the film.

We first encounter Thomas dipping out of a doss house at the break of dawn and hopping into his Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III Drop Head Coupé, offering the first of many stark contrasts between the artist and his subject. Though set in Swinging London, the city is eerily empty, quiet, and perfectly manicured — an unnerving sense of alienation at every turn.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: 1960s, Art, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music, Photography

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

Motherward, 1985: Photographs by Elbert Howze

Posted on June 14, 2019

A few months after Elbert D. Howze died in 2015, his widow Barbara Howze paid a visit to the Houston Centre for Photography. The photographer had requested that his archive was donated to the centre, and she wanted to honour his final wishes.

Director and curator Ashlyn Davis remembers Mrs. Howze’s distress after learning that the Centre was not a collecting institution. “She said, ‘But I have a whole trunk full!’ So we went and got six portfolio boxes with hundreds of photos,” Davis recalls.

That summer, Davis went through the boxes and discovered a spiral-bound maquette for a photo book Howze had titled Fourth Ward. The book featured a collection of portraits made 1985 of the residents of Freedmen’s Town, a historically black community founded in 1866 by people finally liberated from the shackles of chattel slavery.

Rather than move north, residents built at least 558 settlements that formed the heart and soul of black Houston. Originally built on swamps no one wanted, Freedmen’s Town occupied prime real estate in the centre of the city – and in due time began attracting developers and gentrifiers who wanted a stronghold downtown as the city began to rapidly expand during the 20th century.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Robert Giard: Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s

Posted on June 6, 2019

Robert Giard. Pamela Sneed, NYC 1992.

In 1985, Robert Giard (1939-2002) went to see The Normal Heart – Larry Kramer’s largely autobiographical play about the rise of the AIDS crisis. The set was austere. Newspaper headlines, statistics, and the names of those who had died were painted on the walls of The Public Theater.

“The fact that we knew so many of those people was deeply moving and motivating,” remembers Jonathan Silin, Giard’s life partner, co-president of the Robert Giard Foundation, and executor of the Robert Giard Estate.

Inspired, Giard set forth on a journey to photograph LGBTQ writers, artists and activists across the United States, creating over 600 portraits between 1985 and 2002. Giard’s sitters include Stonewall veterans Stormé DeLarverie and Sylvia Rivera, Samuel R. Delany, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Eileen Myles, Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, Jacqueline Woodson, and Gertrude Stein, among many others.

A new exhibition, Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s, presents a selection of 53 portraits from Giard’s archive, curated to illustrate the photographer’s inclusive spirit, inquisitive mind, and generous heart.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Robert Giard. Sylvia Rivera, Brooklyn, 1999.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Vivien Goldman: Revenge of the She-Punks

Posted on May 29, 2019

Vivien Goldman still remembers what it was like to be the only woman in the room when she began working as a music journalist in London during the early 1970s. “My whole generation was very into music and there was a very vibrant music press known as ‘the inkies,’” Goldman recalls. “It’s a relic now, but it was started by young rebels.”

“There were hardly any women in the field. When you look back it’s insane. I remember big battles at editorial meetings. There was real hostility to my ideas of covering more women and encouraging women. People would say things like, ‘Women don’t make music. Women aren’t into music.’ I was like, ‘Look at me! I’m here in front of you!’ But it was a phalanx of the patriarchy.”

For Goldman, punk was and forever will be a liberating force for women – one which she explores across time and around the globe in the captivating new book Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot (University of Texas Press). Taking a lateral approach, Goldman weaves a fascinating tapestry that threads together themes of identity, money, love, and protest over five decades.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Jerry Hsu: The Beautiful Flower is the World

Posted on May 28, 2019

Back in 2006, skateboarder Jerry Hsu got a Blackberry. He began taking notes, snapping visual one-liners, jotting down locations and references that he’d send by BBM to friends.

“By today’s standards, those photos are really bad but back then it was like, ‘Ohh these are pretty good!’” Hsu remembers. “It was a fun new technology. Many of the photos are personal messages for specific people or a specific group of people. It’s that shorthand language of photos that we use now.”

Three years later, Hsu started his blog, NAZI GOLD, a chronological feed of work curated from the thousands of photographs he was taking on his phone. He has no clue exactly how many there are in all: “On the phone I’m holding right now there are 45,000 photos. Over a 10-year period, it might be double that, or more.”

From this vast archive, a vision emerged, one that became shaped into the new book, The Beautiful Flower Is the World (Anthology Editions). The publication takes its name from a photograph of a t-shirt made in Asia. “The t-shirt is obviously mistranslated,” Hsu says.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online