The self-proclaimed love child of Missy Elliott and Romare Bearden, Philadelphia native Jonathan Lyndon Chase creates powerful pictures of queer black life, rendering intimate moments with extraordinary tenderness and nuance. In his hands, the canvas becomes the space to craft a new visual language to explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, in vivid, visceral, and raw works that combine painting, sculpture, drawing, and collage.
“combing my hair” (2017). Acrylic, oil stick, rhinestone, glitter, canon printer collage, marker, graphite on cotton sheet 30h x 30w in Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery
Heal-a-zation, Swathe a la Blob Ba, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1981. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives
In 1974, American artist Steven F. Arnold traveled to Spain at the behest of Salvador Dalí, who was opening the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Catalonia that September and had embraced Arnold as his protégé.
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The legendary surrealist, known to tire of people in a matter of minutes, was utterly enchanted with the 31-year-old artist and dubbed him the “prince” of his Court of Miracles – his eccentric, eclectic coterie that included Donyale Luna, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Ultra Violet, and Amanda Lear, as well as Arnold’s dear friends Pandora and Kaisik Wong.
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“They made a scene,” says Vishnu Dass, Director of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archive. “In Spain, Dalí was occupied with getting press. He would have them dress and take them to public events as his entourage for the months leading up to the museum. There are newspaper clippings from Spanish newspapers that talk about riots with Dali’s transvestites.”
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Their cosmic connection was just one of the extraordinary relationships Arnold had throughout his life. “I call Steven a Queer Mystic,” Dass says. “His ultimate goal was to create a space where he himself and all those he loved could exist in a place that wasn’t binary or judging.”
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As an artist who never pursued fame, status, or wealth, Arnold was an integral figure in the American counterculture for 30 years, a true influencer whose legacy is being reexamined now, 25 years after his untimely death from complications due to Aids. In advance of an exhibition of his work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD – which opens today – Dass takes us on a magical journey through Arnold’s life and art.
Sombre church bells sound as Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 begins. An eerie, unsettled feeling unfolds as Jackson recites the “Pledge” her voice layered to suggest a group who are bound together on this journey as one: “We are a nation with no geographic boundaries, bound together through our beliefs. We are like-minded individuals, sharing a common vision, pushing toward a world rid of colour-lines.”
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Then she dropped “Rhythm Nation” and the world would never be the same. On her fourth studio album, Jackson transformed from pop star into an icon.
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Forever defiant and entirely her own, Jackson refused to give the record label what they wanted, a sequel to Control. But she had bigger things on her mind, and used her art to make a political statement about issues of race, bigotry, gun violence, poverty, drug abuse, illiteracy, and ignorance.
Last Friday night, as part of the 777 International Mall at Free Range Miami during the city’s annual Art Week, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist RAFiA Santana took to the stage. She wore a black bustier and thigh high boots, her bright, tight cropped curls accented by touches of fuschia coloured fluff at her wrists and around her waist, as she performed a six-song set in front of vibrant projections of pink and purple audio-reactive geometric patterns that she designed for a show.
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“It was a crazy Miami night, and there was so much going on that there was a crazy ebb and flow, and every thirty minutes there would be almost a different crowd of people,” RAFiA says. “There was a separate private birthday party going on upstairs with older white people who kept poking their head down, and I was like, ‘Bring your friends, bring them down!”
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The sounds of Fela Kuti, James Brown, and Soul || Soul filled the air, as DJs including Fulathela, Young Wavy Fox, Loka, and Michael Mosby kept the vibes going for a steady ebb and flow of guests making their way through the converted mall that is now home to Mana Contemporary Miami, a community-based arts center hosting numerous events throughout Art Week.
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“The week has been so exhausting,” laughs African-American artist Tschabalala Self, who is in town to present Lee’s Oriental Deli & Market, the latest work from her ongoing Bodega Run series: a site-specific installation for Fringe Projects Miami located inside a store owned by a Filipino local.
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.”
An image by Stevens Añazco featured in Fashion and Race: Deconstructing Ideas, Restructuring Identitiesvia @stevensanazco
When Vogue Italia published the ‘all black’ issue in July 2008, it asked: “Is Fashion Racist?” In the decade since, the question has come to the fore countless times, demanding investigation, critique, and, ultimately, dismantlement.
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Inspired by the conversation the question posed, Kimberly M. Jenkins, a fashion educator and independent researcher, began developing an academic initiative. It began with the course “Fashion and Race”, which she has taught at the New School’s Parsons School of Design since Autumn 2016. “The first thing we do in the class is to go about discussing what race, systemic oppression, and white privilege are to set up the terms we will be relying upon in order to look at how the construction of race has shaped fashion and beauty industries,” Jenkins explains.
The artists featured in the show confront and subvert racism to assert their vision and claim their space as people of colour navigating worlds of fashion and beauty. In How to Be Black, Avery Youngblood, a ‘Beyoncé Formation Scholar’, simulates a ‘how-to’ guide,’ recording the everyday life of a young, multidimensional black woman, while Jamilla Okubo created Hair as Identity, a zine that explores preconceived notions of black hair. Kyemah McEntyre presents her dashiki prom gown, which went viral in 2015. Jenkins also organised a free film screening of The Gospel According to André, followed by a Q&A with André Leon Talley and director Kate Novack. Here, Jenkins speaks about how the next generation of artists are becoming the change they want to see in the world.
“I’m from the east side of Harlem, which was the power base when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. I was always in awe of the Rat Pack – they influenced fashion. Before that, it was James Cagney and Edward G Robinson, the guys who played gangsters in Hollywood movies. But my biggest influence came from the Italians in East Harlem. Those were the first people in the ghetto we saw with Cadillacs, diamond rings, silk suits, all that.
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“The experience that shaped my relationship with clothes and how transformative they could be came about as a result of how poor we were. We used to put paper in our shoes to cover the holes in the sole. Then we got more innovative and started putting in linoleum, because it didn’t wear out as fast. One day, when I was eight years old, I came home and my feet were killing me. My oldest brother took me to a Goodwill store. He asked, ‘You see any shoes you like?’ I saw some split-toe shoes with tassles. I took off my shoes and tried them on. They felt good. He said, ‘OK, take your shoes, put them on the rack. Let’s go.’ I will never forget that. I took care of those shoes like they were a living thing. They made me feel like somebody.
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“Those shoes were also my initiation into elements of criminality. Later on, I used to boost my own clothes. I call it the ‘Robin Hood complex’. It’s OK if you need it. That led to me being involved in street things. I grew up before the drug epidemic. When that came, I chose to retreat. I went back to school and got pretty radical.“
In 1958, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff moved to Paris and met Jeanne-Claude, a Moroccan-born French woman who had studied philosophy at the University of Tunis. The young Bulgarian artist received a commission to paint a portrait of her mother and fell in love with the vibrant redhead, who serendipitously shared his birthday: the 13th of June, 1935. Fate conspired to unite this extraordinary pair of Geminis, who worked together until Jean-Claude’s death in 2009, transforming the experience of public art into something equal parts powerful and profound.
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“I have a real need to appropriate reality,” Christo reveals in the stunning new book Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects (D.A.P./Verlag Kettler), the first volume to give a comprehensive account of their work inside cities around the globe.
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“The real is the real. The work is not a photograph, a film, or an image. It is the real thing,” Christo says, speaking with passion over the phone from the US. “This is because I have the enormous visceral pleasure of the real thing. I understand many people do not like to be in an uncomfortable place that is windy, hot, boring, because it is demanding of your effort, but if you have a physical pleasure to only do things like that (laughs), you understand. It is something.”
Bill Cunningham was more than a photographer – he was a social anthropologist documenting the interplay between fashion, the street, and high society over the course of four decades for The New York Times. Outfitted in his signature blue worker’s jacket, Cunningham hopped on his trusted bicycle and sped around the city, hopping off to photograph New York’s most stylish figures from all walks of life before returning to his humble apartment at Carnegie Hall.
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His love of glamour, style, and grace had existed since the early days of his childhood, where he fawned over women’s hats during Sunday church services. In 1948, at the age of 19, he dropped out of Harvard University after just two months and moved to New York City to give life in fashion a go. He launched a line of hats under the name ‘William J’, and by the 1950s his clientele included no less than Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Bouvier, and Katherine Hepburn.
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Although Cunningham lived a spare, simple life, his creations were anything but. His love of grandeur and glamour are present everywhere in his work — from his exquisite hats to Façades, an early art project he did with Editta Sherman, also known as the ‘Duchess of Carnegie Hall’. From 1968 to 1976, they created a series of photographs featuring Editta and other models wearing vintage costumes posing in front of Manhattan landmarks dating to the same period.
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When Façades was completed, Cunningham gave a selection of 88 gelatin silver prints from the series to the New-York Historical Society, launching a lifelong relationship with the organisation that spanned the next 40 years. After his death, his friends began donating Cunningham’s personal effects to the Society, giving us a rare glimpse into the life of a man who maintained an incredible balance between the public and private spheres.
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In honour of one of fashion’s greatest documentarians, the New-York Historical Society will present Celebrating Bill Cunningham, an exhibition of objects and rare ephemera, along with a selection of work from Façades, from June 8. Here, we speak with exhibition curator Debra Schmidt Bach, as well as John Kurdewan, Cunningham’s collaborator at The New York Times, artist Paul Caranicas, and filmmaker James Crump, to illuminate the life of the man behind the camera.
