Photo: Glenn O’Brien. Photo by Robin Marchant/Getty Images.
“Andy Warhol died 30 years ago today. I remember thinking “who’s opinion will I care about now?” and I still don’t know. I hope to become more like him every day. He was and always will be my (dear) boss,” Glenn O’Brien wrote six weeks ago in what would prove to be his final Instagram post. He died today at the age of 70.
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Writer. Editor. Renegade. Glenn O’Brien might be best known as “The Style Guy” at GQ magazine, but to those who lived and loved below 14th Street, he will always be so much more than that.
This Saturday, April 8, please join Janette Beckman and Julie Grahame at the Bond Street Print Shop (30 Bond Street, 3 Floor, NY) for the a photography exhibition and print sale to benefit The Southern Poverty Law Center.
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The event will feature a selection of prints starting at $100 from New York’s finest photographers and artists including Charlie Ahearn, Joe Conzo, Martha Cooper, Jane Dickson, Godlis, Lisa Kahane, Joseph Rodriguez, Michael Lavine, Danny Clinch, Chi Modu, Sue Kwon, Bill Bernstein, and Jonathan Mannion, among others.
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“Curator Julie Grahame and I decided to organize a photography exhibition and print sale to benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Janette Beckman explains. “The idea is to bring our photo community together in a grass roots way and give some love for a great cause that has been fighting hate and prejudice since the 1970’s. At the same time we hope to do something positive to counteract the gloom that has cast a shadow over our creative community since the election of the president last November. Our ‘rock star’ photographer friends and have donated an amazing collection of images, photographs of Prince, The Clash, Tupac Shakur, the Dalai Lama, Mahershala Ali, John Lennon, Miles David, Keith Haring, Rebel soldiers in Gambia, Nelson Mandela, Nan Golden, and more.”
Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 1983.
Art is not a crime—but that doesn’t stop police departments and D.A. offices nationwide from pursuing the capture, arrest, and prosecution of graffiti writers and street artists to make a political point. Crave has compiled a list of some of the most high-profile street art and graffiti arrests in the United States.
Photo: TAKI 183 gets up in house paint. Wall also features EVA 62, HELLAFIED SISTERS 184 and more. Circa 1971. Photo by Andrea Nelli.
On July 21, 1971, The New York Times ran a story titled “TAKI 183 Spawns Pen Pals,” in which journalist Mark Perigut interviewed a 17-year-old high school graduate who wrote the name TAKI 183 up and down the streets of New York City. With marker in hand, he got up everywhere from lampposts to trains, airports to train stations.
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The story makes note of a call-and-response effect, where the appearance of TAKI 183 created a chain effect. Suddenly names like BARBARA 62, EEL 159, and LEO 136 could be seen sharing the walls, as well as find their own spots. Perigut immediately takes note of the cost required to remove graffiti, estimating $300,000 worth of damages ($1.8M today). He confronts TAKI about the cost, TAKI is nonplussed, observing, “I work, I pay taxes too and it doesn’t harm anybody.”
Back in the 1970s, the Lower East Side of New York City had been devastated by the government policy of “benign neglect,” which denied basic services to the community. Fires had destroyed buildings reducing them to rubble leaving vacant lots in their wake, while other buildings were abandoned and reclaimed by squatters, creating a new community born out of resilience and necessity.
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By the 1980s, a subculture was finding its way through acts of outlaw art. “Cowboy” Ray Kelly, founder of the No Se No Social Club, cultivated a space where patrons could express themselves in any way they wished. It was a space unlike any other in the city that combined the performance art with bar life to spectacular effect.
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From this world, the Rivington School came forth, an outdoor guerilla art gallery located across the street from No Se No, on the corner of Rivington and Forsyth Streets. The Rivington Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1985, began as a memorial to Geronimo, a homeless Puerto Rican man who died that year. It quickly developed into a space for exhibitions, concerts, performances, and festivals, taking the D.I.Y. approach to making art. Anyone could do anything they liked and they did, effectively sharpening the cutting-edge.
Artwork: LeRoy Neiman. Round 2, February 25, 1964. Mixed media and collage on paper.. Courtesy LeRoy Neiman Foundation
Muhammad Ali and LeRoy Neiman were a match made in heaven. When the two met here on earth, they changed the art of boxing forever. A new exhibition, Muhammad Ali, LeRoy Neiman, and the Art of Boxing, currently on view at the New-York Historical Society now through March 26, 2017, celebrates their winning combination.
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LeRoy Neiman (1921–2012) began working as an illustrator for Playboy in 1954, just a year after the magazine launched, becoming a seminal contributor that gave the publication its look and feel outside of the seductive photographs. Neiman’s style, which could best be described as American Impressionism, was bold, rugged, and captivating, keeping painting and drawing fresh at a time when photography was replacing illustration in the print media.
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Neiman regularly covered athletic events, and in 1964, he found himself at the World Heavyweight Championship between Sonny Liston, the title-holder, and Cassius Claw, the No. 1 Contender. In his seminal volume, LeRoy Neiman Sketchbook (powerHouse Books), Neiman writes, “The two black American prizefighters were about to play out their parts as only the times could have scripted them, a good guy and a bad fut. Only who was who?”
Photo: House’s Barber Shop series, 1987-1992, by Jeffrey Henson Scales.
Located just half a block from the legendary home of bebop, Minton’s Playhouse, House’s Barber Shop did business inside a plate-glass storefront in Harlem, New York, for nearly 70 years. Luminaries such as Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Lee Morgan and Max Roach would come to House’s for a fresh cut before a show. Word had it that Malcolm X, whose mosque was on Lenox Avenue and West 116th Street, would frequent the spot. House’s served everyone from musicians, artists and scientists, to bus drivers, postal workers and scoundrels for the better part of the 20th century.
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Founder Jesse House set up shop on Seventh Avenue and West 118th Street when he returned to the neighborhood after serving as a GI during World War II. When he retired, his son, David, kept the shop going until David’s own retirement in 2004. David died a year ago, but before he died, he learned that House’s Barber Shop would be preserved for future generations in a book of photographs.
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The book, simply titled House (SPQR Editions), presents the work of Jeffrey Henson Scales, currently the photography editor of The New York Times Sunday Review. His pictures, shot between 1986 and 1992, provide a front-row view of life inside the barbershop. With jazz music wafting through the room, we enter a world where men of all ages share their lives while getting a shape-up, a fade, or even a conk.
Like a prophet, Jean-Michel Basquiat was ahead of his time, alternately embraced and exploited by the art world. The artist, who first became known in the late 1970s, produced more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works before his death in 1988. He also kept an unknown number of notebooks, where he recorded his private thoughts and ideas, some of which would later be realized in his finished works.
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It is into these notebooks that we can glimpse the artist’s mind at work, the process of working through ideas in images and words, of things that pass through the mind like “Higher Monkeys” “Spring Onions” and “The History Of The World” at the end of a list that began as “Rubber Monkey At A Buffet.” The pages of Basquiat’s notebooks string together like memories of a dream. Reading through these notebooks is like reading a diary of sorts. It’s a deeply private space that exists between the brain and the eyes. It is being inside and outside of your self at the exact same time.
As we enter a brave new world filled with threats unfolding against the citizens of this nation by the very hand of the government it purports to serve, we can look to the recent past to find inspiration in the power of the people and their will to speak truth to power by any means necessary.
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From race relations, policy brutality, and war to gay rights, abortion, and housing, ever issue facing the common man and woman was addressed by organizers who understood the power of mass protests. Civil disobedience, a term coined by no less that Henry David Thoreau in an essay of the same name penned in 1849, takes the high road of political activism. Grounded in the moral welfare of the people, it is a practice that is American at its core, for this country was founded upon the refusal to accept state-sanctioned abuse that openly violated human rights.
Ming Smith is the quiet storm, her photographs evoking the soul of Billie Holiday’s music in photographic form. She has lived as an artist all her life, creating a body of work that captures the mysterious beauty of eternal truth. “Images outlive us,” Smith observes, and at the same time, without them, things disappear and the moment is gone. In this way, photographs become not only a work of art or an artifact—they become part of the collective consciousness that defines human experience.
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“Something flows through you,” Smith explains. The photographer becomes a channel open to the world, transforming three dimensions into two then delivering them so that we may feel and understand their point of view. Smith’s perspective is as singular as she is. The first African-American woman to have her work collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Smith is a pioneer, an innovator, and a rebel imbued with ineffable elegance.
On August 11, 1973, Hip Hop was born when DJ Kool Herc spun a back-to-school jam in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Entrance was 25 cents for the ladies, 50 cents for the fellas, and the spot could only hold 40 or 50 people—but from the footage shot, you could tell they put the Boogie Down in the Bronx.
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So what made this Hip Hop and not a regular jam? Well, Herc was the first person to spin just the breaks, the drum (or drum and bass) solo on classic soul and funk records. He brought two copies of each record so he could set them up on the turntables and extend the break just as long as he wanted to. Herc not only created a style and a sound: he turned the turntable into an instrument all its own.
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The thing about Hip Hop was, it was the sound of the streets. It was created, innovated, and updated by cats who had music in their blood and a need to dominate. Hip Hop’s formative years were an underground phenomenon; back in the days most stations wouldn’t play it on the radio let alone on MTV. But its isolation gave it strength and integrity—there was no selling out inside the community.
