Check out this blog! Created by a friend of mine, 16-year old Josephine from NYC, it includes the art of different photographers and interviews with them about their lives and work.
Kalup Linzy is an American performance and video artist who lives and works Brooklyn, NY. Linzy is originally from Clermont, Florida and in 2003 he received his MFA from the University of South Floridsa. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture video art workshop. In 2005,
Linzy received a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and was named a Guggenheim fellow. Kalup’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum.
Linzy’s most known for his series of video art pieces satirizing the tone and narrative approach of television soap opera. Most of the characters are performed by Linzy himself (many of them in drag). Kalup also performs many of these same characters on stage. In 201o, Linzy made his debut appearance on the soap opera General Hospital after being invited by the actor James Franco.
Watch one of Kalup Linzy’s pieces here.
John Baeder is an well known artist in the realm of photorealism. Photorealism is when the artist combines the mediums of photography and painting. His work, which consists of rural pastines, relics and old cars, came from a passion for capturing the society’s antiques. Though Baeder was born in Indiana, he was raised in Atlanta. At a young age he was taking pictures with a Baby Brownie Camera. Brownie cameras were inexpensive cameras produced by Kodak that were extremely popular from the 1920s to the 1970s. After graduating from Auburn University, Baeder took a job in Atlanta as the art director of a New York advertising agency. In 1964 Baeder moved to New York. Once there, Baeder was influenced by the works of artists such as Walker Evans and Ben Shahn which he’d see at MOMA. During the late 1960s Baeder began to collect postcards from around the nation. These postcards would soon become a great inspiration. He soon created a style of work that consisted of photographs, oil paintings and even water colors. His work mostly depicts American diners and cars. What is really shows is the evidence of a changing country and what America used to be. His work has been shown at places like the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, MOMA and Whitney. Baeder has become a highly respected and renowned artist for his unique approach to photorealism. In 2009 he received the Tennessee Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award. Baeder still lives and works in Tennessee.
Born in 1910, painter Franz Kline was a New York based artist whose work epitomized the Abstract Expressionism movement. Kline was raised in Pennsylvania until he attended the Girard College, a school created for children of single-parent households. He later attended Boston University. After graduating from B.U. in 1935, he studied in London at the Heatherley School of Art from 1937-1938. Kline was influenced by his friend Willem de Kooning along with Japanese calligraphy to create his own artistic style. Kline’s paintings also saw influence from the tones and colors he knew so well from growing up in Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region. Kline is known for using a style often called action painting, or gestural abstraction, a style of painting in which the artist seems to spontaneously splash and smear paint across a canvas instead of focusing on detail. The truth was that Kline would often say “spontaneity is practiced” and most of his work was the final draft of many sketches and drafts. Kline is most well-known for his paintings that are black and white, though he does have many works in color. In 1950, Kline had a one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York City that established Kline as a unique and innovative artist. Kline’s works were considered unstable and unbalanced, making them extremely provocative at the time. Much like his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Kline strove to maintain a particular “style” within his paintings. Using sweeps and odd curves, Kline’s monolithic paintings were completely his own. Though Kline quickly gained recognition in the 1950s, his success was cut short by his death in 1962. Kline died from rheumatic heart disease. Kline’s work can be seen across the nation at places like MOMA and many other contemporary art galleries.
Jacob Gordon, a good friend of mine and a Scholastic Gold and Silver Key winner, agreed to let me interview him for this week’s Teen Artist post. Jacob, or Jake, is a seventeen-year old student at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York. When Jake isn’t taking photos, he enjoys playing with his cats, learning about chemistry, and reading. Jake shoots solely film photography.
Thank you for interviewing with ArtSpotNYC! To start off, has photography always been your preferred medium, and how long have you been taking photographs for?
A: Photography has indeed always been my medium of choice. I have dabbled in other art forms, but photography has always been my largest medium. I’ve been taking pictures for a very long time. When I was a kid, I used to mess around with my mom’s cameras (she is a photo editor) and take silly pictures just for fun. Officially, I’ve been taking pictures for about 3 or 4 years.
What types of subject matter do you enjoy photographing and why?
A: I guess people. People are both more fun and interesting to photograph than landscapes or still life (which are pretty, but dont make good conversation). It’s also more enjoyable to photograph people because you have that person frozen in time, so even as that person changes, that image of them will always exist.
What do you think of when you hear “contemporary art”?
A: I think of stuff the New Museum likes to show; white rooms with sculptures, or some kind of small paint splatter on a blank canvas, or something artsy like that. The term never makes me think of realism, and especially not photography. It reminds me of that minimalist MoMa stuff.
Do you know of any contemporary artists? If so, who are your favorites?
A: Eesh. I’m honestly not a huge art critic by any means, I dont have any kind of eye for art, and i dont really look at art or go to museums.
Lastly, what do you think defines “art”?
A: I think art is defined by the person who makes it. If it comes out of someones mind as ‘art,’ then thats exactly what it is. It’s not within anyone but the artist’s power to decide if their work is, or is not, art.
Check out Jacob’s work here.
Georges Dambier was born in 1925 in France. Initially trained in painting and graphic design, Dambier only picked up a camera when he began to work for photographer Willy Rizzo. Rizzo mentored him, teaching him the fundamentals of photography. After World War 2 ended, Parisian nightlife exploded and Dambier attended many nightclubs and cabarets in the Left Bank of Paris around Saint Germain Des Prés. He met artists, models, celebrities, and took their photographs. He began to sell his photographs to France Dimanche, a daily magazine. He quickly earned the job as the magazines photo-reporter. He was able to travel the world and photograph current events. He eventually began to evolve towards fashion photography. He was hired by ELLE magazine’s director Helene Lazareff and began to shoot fashion photography. He redefined french fashion photography of the time. No longer were models posing lifeless, they were laughing, playing, and running around. In 1954 Dambier was asked to lead Magnum Photography’s fashion department. This job never worked out due to Robert Capa’s death though. Dambier still does freelance photography and has a magazine with his friend Maurice Siegel called VSD.
Artist Picasso needs no introduction. From April 14th- June 25th some of his work involving Marie-Thérèse can be seen at the Gagosian Gallery. Marie-Thérèse met Picasso on the street of Paris when she was 17 years old. He was immediately infatuated with Marie-Thérèse and they began a secret love affair. She become the subject of many of his paintings, with her statuesque build and very square face. Marie-Thérèse can be seen in some of Picasso’s finest work including many of the pieces at this exbibit. There are also several pieces of Marie-Thérèse and Picasso’s daughter Maya. This exhibition shows work from the years 1927-1940 (the span of their relationship). Picasso left Marie-Thérèse in 1940 for artist Dora Maar. It’s believed that though Picasso fell out of love with Marie-Thérèse, she never fell out of love with Picasso. Marie-Thérèse killed herself in 1977, four years after Picasso’s death, in the south of France.
Last week I went down to Chelsea to see David Salle’s new exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery (541 West 24th st.). Having been slightly underwhelmed by the other galleries that day, this exhibition really stood out to me. Salle’s large paintings are composed of panels reprising the iconic women of his work from the 80’s, and a recurring motif of an empty canoe or raft adrift on water can be seen throughout the series. Within his paintings reside smaller paintings, creating a complex body of work. Being a lover of technically skilled art, these paintings were right up my alley; Salle’s great foundational skill was put into play in the large figurative (some in color, some in black and white) portrayals of the often slightly raunchy women. Overall, I greatly enjoyed this show and recommend it, especially to those who enjoy traditional painting.
David Salle (born 1952) is from Norman, Oklahoma. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York in the early 1980s. Some of his major exhibitions have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. He helped to define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language.
Read the David Salle: New Paintings press release here.
Yesterday I visited the Howard Greenberg Gallery. This is a small photography gallery located on 41 E. 57th street between Park and Madison. The gallery was definitely really small and the exhibit was limited, but wide scope of talented photographers within the gallery was quite impressive. The current exhibition was called Selections from Collections, and this exhibit showed a few selections from Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, and Weegee just to name a few. If you like photography I would definitely consider seeing this exhibition (it’s running from April 29th-August 1st). It shows a wide range of some of the most iconic and talented photographers ever as well as a great diversity of photographic styles ranging from landscapes, to portraits, candids, still life, and even fashion photography. This exhibit gives the viewer a sampling of the different types of photography in the ever-growing field.
This afternoon, I walked down to Tribeca to visit Steve Powers‘ studio with my good friend Paris Starn. Born in ’68 in Philadelphia, Powers started his artistic life as a graffiti artist under the tag “ESPO”. By the end of his illegal graffiti career, Powers had painted around 70 gates. Since 2000, he has been a full-time studio artist, with his work showing in places such as Deitch and the Venice and Liverpool Biennials. Powers’ most recent project, a mural in Philadelphia titled A Love Letter For You, consists of 50 murals along the elevated train on Market Street in West Philly. An accompanying book of the same name (shot by photographers Adam Wallacavage and Zoe Strauss) was released and is now available. In addition, Powers is the author of The Art of Getting Over, a book on graffiti’s history.
ESPO is part of a group of graffiti artists that includes Twist, Amaze, and Reas.
My trip to Powers’ studio was my second studio visit (first being to Tom Sachs‘). I expected the usual short bio and then Q&A session; I was wrong. Powers greeted us in a green suit, donning a golden “Brooklyn” pin he had just received from Marty Markowitz after a quick visit to his office. The walls of his studio were completely covered by his art, as well as by the works of artists such as Os Gemeos. Powers was not only extremely friendly, but also remarkably smart, and spoke about art in a casual, not intimidating way. Steve discussed his change from illegal to legal work, while fully condoning any aspiring graffiti artists to keep doing what they’re doing. When asked about what artists inspire him, he told us that he didn’t really like many contemporary artists (with specific snabs at Schnabel and Hirst), except for Tom Sachs and his graffiti buds (Twist, etc.). He also listed Matisse as one of his inspirations. After finishing, he sent us away with cupcakes, coffee, and white lighters he had designed with the word “Stolen” printed on them.
 | Steve Powers Studio… on Os Gêmeos |
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| ArtSpotNYC on John Currin |
| ur so creative on John Currin |
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