art

Summer Museum Hopping

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ilovenyBelieve it or not, I actually do take a break once in a while from all the business and journalism projects I am working on at any given time.  While it is very rare that I go on a actual vacation where I don’t think about business, I try to use the many business trips I do go on to do a mini vacation.

A couple of weeks ago I was in New York City to meet with some clients and to finalize the plans for GWA’s 10th anniversary party with my event planner. I did schedule in some time to do some fun stuff by visiting three museums.  I highly recommend visiting the following exhibits if you happen to be in the Big Apple this summer!

Museum of the City of New York:

Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand    

If you are a graphic designer, branding specialist or just a design history buff, you will appreciate this exhibit about the grand master of American design himself Paul Rand.  There are over 100 posters, advertisements, book covers, logos and corporate brand collateral that show the diversity of Rand’s career.  He is best known for creating the logos for IBM, UPS and ABC-TV.

Hip-Hop Revolution: Photographs By Janette Beckman, Joe Conzo and Martha Cooper

You know you are getting old when you start to see people you grew up listening to exhibited in museums!  I felt like I was stepping back into my teen years when I saw the exhibit of the dozens of photographs of memorable rappers from “back in the day” like MC Lyte, Run DMC, EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, A Tribe Called Quest, Salt N Pepa and Queen Latifah.  It was also pretty cool to see old copies of Word Up! magazine and pictures of some of the early movers and shakers in break-dancing and graffiti writing. This is a must-see exhibit for people who appreciate what real hip-hop used to sound like.

hip hop revolution

Cooper-Hewitt Museum

How Posters Work

So as a web designer, I get inspiration from seeing the work of other designers.  This exhibit shows how posters can be powerful forms of visual communication.  If you love vintage posters, this exhibit is worth checking out.

Guerilla Girls

David Adjaye Selects

Adjaye is the architect behind the upcoming National Museum of African-American History in Washington DC. He put together this exhibit displaying textiles from West and Central Africa, including some beautiful Asante Kente textile and Malian mud cloth.

David Adjaye Selects

The “Pen”

While the museum is housed in the former home of Andrew Carnegie, which was built in 1903, the whole space is very tech-savvy and design forward.  Once you pay your admission fee, you are giving this pen that works like a digitized USB drive and a specialized URL on a piece of paper. All the items in all the exhibits have small, black plus signs next to them.  If you like an exhibit item, you can press your pen on the plus sign and the information about that item is saved.  All the items you saved on the pen are saved on a webpage that can be accessed using that specialized URL for you to view later.  The webpage gives more in-depth information about the items you selected. You can also use the Pen to draw your own designs on computer-aided design tables that also get saved on that webpage. It’s a great to remember all the cool stuff you saw and did at the Museum.

I got to play furniture designer and created the following table, hanging lamp and vase using the CAD and the Pen.

Talia Whyte's Cooper Hewitt Designs

Brooklyn Museum

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks    

Most artists, writers, designers and other creative people keep a notebook to jot down items of interest and inspiration.  This is what Jean-Michel Basquiat did.  The Museum recently acquired newly discovered notebooks with sketches and writings that show the early process of many of Basquiat’s works of art.  The notebooks give a nuance perspective on his thinking, ranging from politics, racism, class warfare, history and everyday life in general.

Basquiat's Notes

Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence

Zanele Muholi is a famed photographer and activist who specializes in capturing images of black lesbian and transgender life in her home country of South Africa.  The exhibit showcases 80 of her photographs, commentary on homophobia and a short film of a lesbian wedding in a township.  While South Africa was the first country in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1996, it is still one of the most dangerous places for LGBT folks, where homophobic violence is commonplace.  As the United States moves forward on marriage equality, this exhibit will quickly remind you that there is still work to be done in other parts of the world.

Zanele Muholi

The Rise of Sneaker Culture

I thought this was the coolest exhibit at the museum.  Sneakers have contributed greatly to our social and cultural history.  There are over 100 pairs of sneakers to mull over, including Air Jordans, and the Adidas X autographed by Run DMC.  Again, I’m feeling the aging process!

sneaker culture

 

This is video of Adidas designer Rick Owens famed Vicious runway show celebrating sneaker culture, which was shown at the exhibit:

Diverse Works: Director’s Cut

I was only in this exhibit briefly, but I found these pieces of art to be interesting:

Evolution of Negro Fashion nefertiti queen elizabeth

women artists

Why Art is Political

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Kehinde Wiley Photo Credit: ArtInfoPiggybacking on last week’s post on the Caribbean economy, this week I wanted to take an artistic perspective on island politics. I am  a big fan of Kehinde Wiley’s work, and I always like finding an opportunity to talk about him. I had brunch last weekend with a couple of friends who were not familiar with his work. I told them that he is kind of an artistic interpreter for the hip-hop generation.

He is known for taking black and brown people and putting them in traditionally European portraiture. For the last few years he has been doing “The World Stage” series, where he paints poor people mostly from developing countries in heroic poses; poses that have historically been reserved for the privileged class. The portraits really make you think about history, race, class and power.

Here is World Stage Jamaica:

And here is World Stage Haiti (The book for this part of the series comes out 23 June!)

Finally, his new exciting project, An Economy of Grace, focuses on black women:

Life After: Kehinde Wiley

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Acclaimed painter Kehinde Wiley was first introduced to his craft when his mother enrolled him in art school as a child while living in South Central Los Angeles.  He used to visit museums and read art history books with paintings from the Renaissance age of chivalrous white men looking poignantly at their viewers.  Wiley realized early on that these larger than life portraits were more about representing the levels of access, power and racial identity in society.  Wiley has been on a journey to explore these issues ever since.  He recently came to town to deliver a 10-year retrospective on his work and discuss the evolution of identity politics in art.

Wiley started his career taking pictures of black men in the streets of Harlem.  He mainly focused on the power politics of hair and black masculinity.  He would invite the models up to his studio, where they would also view the portraits in his art books, asking “who are all these old white dudes?”  Like Wiley, most of the models were from areas that didn’t have access to this kind of art, which again explains the power dynamics in society.

Wiley took his craft to another level with the “World Stage” series, his best known work of fusing traditional art with the contemporary street life of men of color around the world.  The series began in China, where he was invited to work in a studio in Beijing.  Wiley had his African-American models assume poses from Chinese communist propaganda posters.  He says the models and the original people in the posters seemed to share the same characteristics of false hope through their smiles.

“The idea is more than a painting on a wall; this painting is a social wall,” Wiley said.  “I wanted to capture that social history.”

Wiley then took his World Stage, well, around the world.  From Tunisia to Senegal to India to Brazil, Wiley has captured the contemporary black male experience like never done before.  He recalled his time in Israel setting up shoots in the back of Tel Aviv night clubs and asking for drunken models.  Many of the Israeli portraits are of Ethiopians and native-born Jews and Arab Israelis.  Wiley says the experience opened his eyes up in many ways about the Arab-Israeli conflict.  One frame of a painting of an Ethiopian poser says “Can We All Just Get Along” in Hebrew, referring to the Rodney King beating incident.

In Rio de Janeiro, the model interaction was much more challenging, as he had to travel through the favelas with a camera crew and security guards with AK-47s.  He did one shoot at a woman’s home when word got out that an American was paying a lot of money for models, and a queue of people suddenly showed up at the house.   In other countries he has visited, Wiley found many people to be reluctant or even hostile towards a camera crew coming into their area.

“Often times it’s hard to get models, but sometimes there are people who want to be discovered,” Wiley said.  “There are people who are like ‘of course you found me.’”

Nowadays, Wiley doesn’t have a hard time getting models.  He has been commissioned in recent years to produce paintings for the World Cup and Michael Jackson.  Usually when he hosts opening receptions for his work, Wiley invites his models back to view the final products.  Many of them love the work; in fact, some of the models use their portraits on social media profiles.

Wiley’s work has finally come full circle.

“I am always wondering if there is a social good in this work,” he said.  “I meet young artists around the world who now feel it’s possible to be a part of this world.”

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