On The Spot is a terrific new web series that seeks to document the histories of women artists in NYC from the 1950s to the 2000s. The ambitious mission is to document and present in three-minute videos the history of later 20th-century artists who have often been overlooked and underrepresented in the larger art world. They call themselves “a feminist art history nonprofit.” There are 40 videos so far produced, with plans for a great many more. The videos are a free public resource, accessible on the organization’s website.
Even Greater Days: Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World
In the latter third of Dr. Todd Boyd’s highly anticipated new tome Rapper’s Deluxe is a “A Great Day in Hip Hop,” a subsection of a chapter called “It Was All a Dream: The 1990s,” which covers a broad range of shifts and trends in and around hip hop culture over the course of a decade that many longtime fans of rap music consider, for various reasons, the genre’s golden era.
Guzman, Kurt Cobain In Bed, Los Angeles, 1992, Archival Ink on Mulberry Paper, 32 x 22 inches
Portraits are collaborations between the sitter and the artist. Sometimes the artist can be overwhelming or patronizing but in most cases the sitter’s vision of how they would like to be seen now and in perpetuity wins out. This is particularly seen in cases of well known personalities. Prime examples are the portraits of Andy Warhol exposing his scars after being shot to both Alice Neel and Richard Avedon. In these vastly different images Warhol clearly wanted the world to know what had been perpetrated against him and how his suffering lingered. When the portraits are images of celebrities, particularly those in the last few decades, the public has a strange sense of possession, teetering on full-blown obsession. The success of the portrait hinges on several factors from the artist including generosity, intelligence, empathy, skill, and creative facility. Fortunately this is what is on exhibition at LABspace in Hillsdale NY, Kurt and Courtney, by collaborative photography duo Guzman. Guzman is made up of Constance Hansen and Russell Peacock. In their 30+ years of photography they have solidified a reputation across all genres from conceptual and documentary work to bringing cool, enlightened, humanizing aesthetics to the commercial worlds of fashion, advertising, and celebrity portraits. As summed up in a recent discussion about their work, Constance Hansen said the intent is not to make a mean photo, but a photo that embraces the person.
