NEW YORK, NY – MAY 02: DJ Juliana performs onstage at the Gucci Bloom Fragrance Launch at MoMA PS.1 on May 2, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Gucci)
Throughout history, great works of art have been ascribed to the hand of “Anonymous,” their names erased and authorship denied. Virginia Woolf famously said, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Fortunately, we are now at a time to write and publish our histories, firmly inscribed. With Art Basel in Miami Beach heating up this weekend, here are seven black artists on our radar out here changing the game.
Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions
American photographer Art Kane was introduced to the idea of the “Big Picture” while serving as a member of the Ghost Army – a 1,100-man unit tasked with creating 20 battlefield deceptions, complete with dummy tanks and fake radio transmission to mislead the German Army during the 1944 invasion of Normandy. “The experience of creating something larger than life really stuck with him,” Jonathan Kane, his son, tells me.
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By 1958, Kane was restless. At 27, he was the hot young art director for Seventeen magazine but he yearned to be a photographer. He got word Esquire was planning a special issue dedicated to jazz and decided to pitch his very first photography story: “A Great Day in Harlem,” which they accepted and published as the issue’s centerfold.
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To celebrate the 60th anniversary of this legendary group portrait, one of the most celebrated images in American history, Jonathan Kane has put together the phenomenal book, Art Kane: Harlem 1958 (out this month via Wall of Sound Editions), featuring texts by Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, and Art Kane, as well as dozens of never-before-seen photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, and Gene Krupa, among others.
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“It’s exciting to see the outtakes, and also rare,” Kane reveals. “My father did not believe in outtakes. He was about his one vision. I’m normally very protective but become bigger than even his original intention. The book is a journey through that day, and a revelation of the intimacy and connections between the musicians, and what is in the mind of a young photographer doing his first major professional assignment, and how it all crystallised in the ‘Big Picture.’”
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Here, in an excerpt from the book, Art Kane looks back on this moment in time, as history was being made on the streets of Harlem.
Top: Janette Beckman | LADY PINK. Queen Latifah, New York City, 1990/2016
In the years leading up to the birth of hip hop, graffiti was sweeping the streets of New York and Philadelphia, reinventing itself on the cusp of a new millennium. No longer was it mere inscriptions from anonymous hands, but an emerging world filled with charismatic characters who took style to a level never before seen.
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As tags hit the street and masterpieces appeared on the trains, graffiti’s vibrant style, innovative aesthetics, and transgressive nature made it the natural visual expression of a new DIY culture coming into its own. In the 45 years since Kool Herc began spinning breaks, graffiti and hip hop have linked up to collaborate in countless ways; perhaps most famously in the culture first feature film, Wild Style. The film starred some of the scene’s most influential writers at the time, including Lee Quinoñes, LADY PINK, ZEPHYR, and CRASH – each of whom were recently invited by artist and graphic designer Cey Adams to bring their talents to The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists(Hat and Beard Press).
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The Mash-Up is the brainchild of Adams, the former Creative Director of Def Jam, and British photographer Janette Beckman, whose portraits of hip hop’s greatest stars have graced countless album covers, magazines, and newspapers since she first encountered the artists in 1982. Here, some of the finest to ever wield spray can and marker remake Beckman’s classic images of everyone from Run DMC, Slick Rick, and Salt-N-Pepa to Grandmaster Flash, Queen Latifah, and Big Daddy Kane.
The image of Florida is a curious mélange of palm trees and sandy beaches, gators and golfers on the green, and something darker lying in wait, ready to take the bait — best known to in the headlines as “Florida Man.” Peel back the cheerful veneer of “the happiest place on earth,” and what you find is something far more unusual.
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Perhaps it is the draw of living in the Sunshine State that has cast Florida as the dream destination for people living across the Americas. “Whether they were snowbirds moving from the north into retirement or whether they were refugees, economic or political, from the Caribbean, Florida has always had this allure as a place of opportunity,” says Florida native Nathan Benn, who is showing photographs from his new book A Peculiar Paradise (powerHouse) at HistoryMiami Museum this winter.
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“This is not like any other celebration of the state: other Florida picture books have sunsets, palm trees and beaches, and pink stucco,” Benn adds. Here, we have everything from Dundee’s 5th Street Gym, where Muhammad Ali famously trained, to Benn’s work with Frank White (a.k.a. “Dirty Harry”) at the Drug Enforcement Agency during the early days of the Drug War.
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Drawing from an archive of more than 27,000 photographs taken of his home state while photographing for National Geographic Magazine over a period of 20 years, A Peculiar Paradise is a love letter to a most unusual land.
Postcard, The Concord Hotel, Kiamesha Lake, NY, Undated.
The Borscht Belt, otherwise known as the Jewish Alps, was America’s premier getaway during the 20th century. Established in response to abject displays of anti-Semitism nationwide, the Borscht Belt consisted of resort hotels bungalow colonies, summer camps, and boarding houses nestled into the Catskill Mountains of New York state.
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At its height, the Borscht Belt was the height of a glamour all it’s own — an all-inclusive vacation replete with indoor and outdoor pools, golf, tennis, skiing, ice-skating, dance, and live entertainment from no less than Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Billy Crystal, and Rodney Dangerfield. While many Jewish-Americans born before the ’80s know the area well, the 1987 film Dirty Dancing became the cultural touchstone for all who had never lived it for themselves.
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But like the Rust Belt, the Borscht Belt has disappeared, lost to the massive socioeconomic shifts that have taken place in recent years. For photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, the shift quite literally hit home.
By the age of 12, Aaliyah Dana Houghton hit the big time. Her uncle Barry Hankerson, an entertainment lawyer formerly married to Gladys Knight, secured a distribution deal at Jive Records for his Blackground Records label – and signed his niece to a record deal.
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Hankerson introduced Aaliyah to R. Kelly, the hottest new R&B star on the scene, who was taken with her voice after hearing her sing a cappella. Thirteen years her senior, Kelly positioned himself as a mentor, guiding his protégée to success, becoming the sole songwriter and producer of her 1994 debut album, Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number.
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As soon as the album dropped rumours began to swirl. Talk of a secret marriage between Aaliyah and R. Kelly was everywhere. Both artists denied the allegations and it would be some time before Vibe magazine unearthed their Illinois marriage license issued in 1994, in which the 15-year-old singer gave the age of 18 for the certificate. The pair denied the allegations, while her parents arranged to have the marriage annulled in 1995. Aaliyah then severed all communication with Kelly and had all records of the marriage expunged.
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The scandal of a secret marriage did not dampen Aaliyah’s debut. Her first single, “Back and Forth” went to number one on the R&B/hip hop chart and number 5 on the pop chart, with Madonna taking notice and sampling it for a track on Bedtime Stories, released just a few months later.
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In the years since Aaliyah’s death, she continues to be the subject of intense fascination. We look back for clues of who this enigmatic artist truly was in the music, the videos, the films, the photographs, and the stories she left behind.
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British photographer Eddie OTCHERE first crossed paths with Aaliyah in London in 1994, while in his second year of studying photography at the London College of Communication. Like Aaliyah, OTCHERE was at the start of his career – and now his time with Aaliyah can be seen in the new book Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop by Vikki Tobak (Clarkson Potter), which presents four decades of iconic photo shoots. Here, OTCHERE shares what it was like to photograph Aaliyah at her very start.
Smoke Holes #2, 1969, 2018. Courtesy Nina Johnson and the artist
Fifty years ago, Judy Chicago set the world aflame, unleashing Atmospheres into the air we breathe and igniting a passion for pyrotechnics that continues to this very day. Yesterday, Miami gallery Nina Johnson opened an exhibition of never-before-seen photo prints documenting this prescient series of landscape installations and performances made staged between 1968–1974, concurrent to Chicago’s major survey, A Reckoning at The Institute of Contemporary Art.
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“It is not unusual for it to take decades for people to understand my work,” Chicago explains. It is not at all surprising, considering the ways in which Atmospheres bridges the divides between the timeless and the temporal by making art an action, rather than an object, to behold – as the ultimate expression of the sacred feminine principles of Mother Earth.
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Atmospheres first found expression on the streets of Pasadena, California, where Chicago lived and worked, several years after graduating with an MFA from UCLA. “Using a colour system I had developed for emotive purposes, I did a series of dimensional domes, in which the colour was trapped inside the transparent shapes,” Chicago recalls.
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Then, working with other artists, she built a large colour wheel to cover klieg lights and lined the street with billowing fog machines. “When the fog began to fill the street, the colour wheels turned, and I saw the entrapped colour inside my domes liberated in the air. I thought to myself, ‘’I am going to use coloured smokes’, not realising that I was getting ready to liberate myself from the constraints of minimalism – and patriarchy.”
“In the end, what is history? And what is historical truth? These are questions that do not have ready answers,” Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura asks in “egó sympósion”, the preface he pens in the catalogue for Ego Obscura, a 30-year retrospective of photographic work in which he transforms iconic works of art and pop culture into self-portraits.
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Whether presenting himself as Marilyn Monroe in the famous Playboy centerfold, appearing as Frida Kahlo standing bare-breasted in her brace, or portraying Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy, Morimura surgically deconstructs the concept of “the self” to explore the perils of binary thinking that accompany our assumptions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity, and the ways in which we ensconce them in the pantheon of cultural memory and art history.
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“Various truths are concealed in many paintings,” Morimura continues. “On the other hand, a painting can be seen as a fake, something caked with falsehoods and misunderstandings. A painter’s testimony is at once a confession of a hidden truth and an attempt to overwrite their life with a false statement.”
“I didn’t start life as a photographer,” Adrian Boot says with a laugh. “I stayed at university as long as I could – as everyone else did in those days – and then I went to Jamaica to teach physics for about three years. I took up photography as a hobby, and ran into people like Bob Marley and Burning Spear.”
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Boot got his first paying gig when the Rolling Stones were in town to record Goats Head Soup at Dynamic Sounds Studios, through his friend Michael Thomas. When Boot returned to the UK, he collaborated with Thomas once again on the 1977 book Jamaica: Babylon on a Thin Wire, now in its fourth printing.
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The book was a powerful document of Jamaica in the early ’70s, showing the emergence of reggae music within the larger landscape of politics, violence, and poverty. Suddenly the media took notice, and editors from NME, The Melody Maker, Sounds, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice were on the phone, giving Boot assignments to shoot the emerging reggae scene in the UK.
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“I decided to delay going back into teaching and have a sabbatical just taking photographs — and I am still having that sabbatical,” Boot says. “Now I am 72. I have been doing it for a lifetime, and I always expected it to fade out but it didn’t. Then I started to work for Island Records, and then Bob Marley came along and started to have success. The rest is history.”
Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is a bigger star in death than he was in life. His paintings sell for sums he could have only dreamt of, and his images are licensed and reproduced all over the globe. His ascension to the pantheon of genius reveals that Warhol knew America better than we know ourselves.
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Warhol transformed pop culture into high art, subverting both in the process. He took Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to its logical conclusion, making art out of the very act of repetition itself. In doing so, he planted the seeds for everything from celebrity worship, reality TV, personal branding, and meme culture.
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Warhol set himself apart with his trademark silver wig and classic uniform—a white Brooks Brothers oxford cloth button-down, unwashed navy Levis, and a black leather Perfecto jacket—and assumed the position of an oracle. In public, he was a man of few words, saving it all for the spectacle he would unleash in his art, photography, films, books, magazines, record covers, and happenings.
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“Andy is connected with quintessentially American things—he didn’t look towards Europe, and that’s why it feels contemporary,” Christopher Makos, a Warhol friend and collaborator, told VICE. “Whether it’s Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola or Campbell’s Soup, Andy always has a built-in PR machine going for him. He doesn’t even have to be around.”
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More than three decades after his death at the age of 58, Warhol’s legacy is being celebrated in a major museum exhibition, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, the first American retrospective since 1989. Senior Curator Donna De Salvo organized more than 350 of the most influential works that illustrate Warhol’s ability to bridge the paradoxes of American life, like fame and privacy, democracy and elitism, innovation and conformity, and truth and propaganda.
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The traveling show, with an accompanying catalogue from Yale University Press, just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where it’s on view through the end of March, before heading to San Francisco and Chicago in 2019. In anticipation, VICE tracked down a handful of Warhol’s friends and collaborators to find out what Andy Warhol was really like.
Untitled, New York, 1950. The Gordon Parks Foundation. Photography by Gordon Parks, Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a singular figure in every sense of the word, transcending every boundary foisted upon him as a black man coming of age in Jim Crow America. Now, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950, a new exhibition in Washington, looks back at the groundbreaking first decade of his career, during which he rose to become the first African-American photographer at LIFE magazine.
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Hailing from Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks decided to become a photographer while working as a waiter in a railroad dining car and looking through discarded copies of magazines like Vogue and Look. At the age of 25, Parks purchased a Voigtländer Brilliant, which he later called his “choice of weapon”, and taught himself to become a professional portrait photographer and photojournalist.
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“Having a camera gave him access to tell different stories,” says Dr Deborah Willis, who wrote an essay titled ‘Gordon Parks: Haute Couture and the Everyday’ for the exhibition catalogue published by Steidl.
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“We have to keep in mind that at the time, black people didn’t have that sense of freedom to walk into spaces and expect the respect that he received. That’s what I find fascinating about Gordon: the boundaries weren’t there for him. He understood that he had an eye. He believed in his sense of understanding of the depths and complexities of life that he wanted to pursue work and develop the work.”
