ART: Hipsters, Hustlers and Handball Players

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art thru Oct 17, a retrospective of photos by famed street photographer (and West VA native) Leon Levinstein (d. 1988). From the Met:

Leon Levinstein (American, 1910–1988), an unheralded master of street photography, is best known for his candid and unsentimental black-and-white figure studies made in New York City neighborhoods from Times Square and the Lower East Side to Coney Island. This exhibition, drawn exclusively from the Metropolitan's collection, will feature some forty photographs that reflect the artist's fearless approach to the medium. Levinstein's graphic virtuosity—seen in raw, expressive gestures and seemingly monumental bodies—is balanced by his unusual compassion for his offbeat subjects from the demimonde.

Born in West Virginia in 1910, Levinstein moved to New York in 1946 and spent the next thirty-five years obsessively photographing strangers on the streets of his adopted home. (source) <---click there to read more

ART: William Christenberry "House and Car and"

Now thru 2/6 @ Pace MacGill midtown:

William Christenberry: House and Car and,” a selection of photographs, encaustic paintings, drawings, sculpture and found signs. The exhibition illuminates Christenberry’s multimedia approach to capturing the spirit of his

native South as reflected by the culture, natural landscape, and vernacular architecture of rural Alabama.

William Christenberry returns to his home in Hale County, Alabama annually. Like Walker Evans, his images of the region’s architectural sites and material culture provide a window into the rural South by offering prolonged studies of a place over time. For example, Christenberry’s sequence of 20 photographs, House and Car, near Akron, Alabama (1978-2005), chronicles the physical transformation of a

single building over the course of 27 years. A related sculpture gives three-dimensional form to the photographed building, however,it is not intended to be seen as a replica. Rather, the sculpture is a hybrid of both the actual image and Christenberry’s own memory of it. Christenberry elaborates: “[t]hey are not models. They are re-creations. Imaginative re-creations, like dreams.” The powerful combination of memory and imagination is particularly evident in Christenberry’s abstract drawings of gourd trees that reference the regional tradition of hanging hollow gourds to attract nesting birds and generate new life.

The iconography of the rural American South is intrinsic to Christenberry’s oeuvre. His found signs are literal records of place, while his images of egg crate crosses on graves and gourd trees allude to deeper cultural legacies. Perhaps the most potent symbol is an elongated, conical shape suggesting Ku Klux Klan members’ hoods. Christenberry translates this symbol into a more gestural, inverted “V” in a variety of his pieces, including the painted triptych, K House (1998).

William Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

(text from exhibition press release - issued by Pace MacGill)

ART: William Eggleston @ Cheim & Read (1/7 - 2/13)

An exhibit of new Eggleston photos opens today @ the Cheim & Read gallery thru 2/13!

From the C&R site: William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, is widely credited with having elevated the medium of color photography to the status of serious art. In the 1960s and 70s color photography was most commonly associated with such middle-brow phenomena as commercial advertising and the family snapshot, and only the black and white photograph was
deemed acceptable for display in a museum or gallery setting.

Indeed, Eggleston’s first one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1976, organized by John Szarkowski, marks the moment in the history of photography when color
photographs were first admitted for exhibition to the ranks of a major museum.

Eggleston’s most recent photographs, exhibited at Cheim & Read, give themselves over almost entirely to problems of composition, color, and texture; and yet they do so – remarkably – only within the confines of what could have been seen by the casual observer, whose distracted glance would normally pass-over the surfaces of the world and retain virtually nothing of it.

For instance, Eggleston’s photograph of bags of ice in a frosted-over freezer (the sort one finds at a gas station or convenience store on the outskirts of town) initially reads as a study in the subtle gradations of color and texture in the freezer’s whitish blue-green interior, thickly coated in tiny ice crystals, which form horizontal ridges that run from edge to edge of the vertically-oriented picture. Only when we make-out the red lettering on the clear plastic bags of “party ice,” are we able to orient ourselves with respect to what the photograph is a photograph of: a freezer of ice.

Eggleston’s photographs of the American south, for which he is best known, are highly regarded for the candor with which they document the ordinary barrenness of the rural and suburban southern landscape. But it is a mistake to regard Eggleston’s project as essentially documentary in nature. The artist’s painstaking attention to formal concerns such as color saturation and
pictorial composition in the images he captures gives his photographs a particular strikingness that stuns the viewer, compelling him or her to fixate his or her concentrated attention on the photographic image. Eggleston himself has explained his approach to photography as follows: “Essentially what I was doing was applying intelligent painting theory to color photography.” Perhaps we do best to understand Eggleston’s photographic practice in terms of the artist’s visual acuity, his gift for being able first to discern, then to isolate, those exceedingly rare moments when the banal materials of the everyday world are aligned just so to make that perfect, momentary image which transcends its own fleetingness through its coincidental engagement with artistic convention.

GIFT IDEA: 20x200 Limited Edition Art Prints

ART FOR EVERYONE! Launched in September 2007, 20x200 uses the power of the Internet to bring the value and joy of collecting art to a wider audience than has ever been possible. Named for its signature $20 prints, which are released in editions of 200, the site offers photographs and works on paper in a variety of sizes, ranging in price from $20 to $5000. Curated and personally introduced by founder Jen Bekman in twice weekly newsletters, 20x200's exhibition-quality prints are delivered with artist-signed certificates of authenticity. Collectors clamor for original works from our artists and our editions frequently sell out. They are passionate about art and the Internet at 20x200 and they are excited about creating a place where any art lover can be an art collector.

The prints below were created in the South. You can view the work of artists from the South here.

think-make-think (second edition) by Clifton Burt

Hank Williams' Bed, Georgiana, Alabama by Scott Eiden

Penguin, Memphis, TN by Geoffrey Ellis

Hint: That "Penguin" is my fave!

ART: Sally Mann @ Gagosian thru 10/31

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present "Proud Flesh", a series of new photographs by Sally Mann.

Children, landscape, lovers—these iconic subjects are as common to the photographic lexicon as light itself. But Mann's take on them, rendered through processes both traditional and esoteric, is anything but common.

Her latest photographic study of her husband Larry Mann, taken over six years, has resulted in a series of candid nude studies of a mature male body that neither objectifies nor celebrates the focus of its gaze. Rather it suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more. While the relation of artist and model is, traditionally, a male-dominated field that has yielded countless appraisals of the female body and psyche, Mann reverses the role by turning the camera on her husband during some of his most vulnerable moments.

Mann's technical methods and process further emphasize the emotional and temporal aspects of these fragile life studies. The images are contact prints made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate. Mann exploits the surface aberrations that can result from the unpredictability of the process to produce painterly photographs marked by stark contrasts of light and dark, with areas that resemble scar tissue. In works such as Hephaestus and Ponder Heart, the scratches and marks incurred in the production process become inseparable from the physical reality of Larry's body.

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, VA in 1951. She has received numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of major museums and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. (source)

PHOTO: Robert Frank @ The Met

Robert Frank - Trolley - New Orleans 1955

Frank was not Southern but many of his photos, including the one above, were taken there.

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans
September 22, 2009–January 3, 2010

	Learn more about a special one-day lecture and panel event.

This exhibition will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Americans, Robert Frank’s influential suite of black-and-white photographs made on a cross-country road trip in 1955–56. Although Frank’s depiction of American life was criticized when the book was released in the U.S. in 1959, it soon became recognized as a masterpiece of street photography. Born in Switzerland in 1924, Frank is considered one of the great living masters of photography. The exhibition will feature all 83 photographs published in The Americans and will be the first time that this body of work is presented to a New York audience. In addition, the exhibition will include a full set of contact sheets that Frank used to create the book; earlier photographs made in Europe, Peru, and New York; a short film by the artist on his life; and his later re-use of iconic images from the series. (source)

RE-POST! BOOK: Take Me To The Water by Jim Linderman & Luc Sante

OUT NOW! Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950. With essays by photograph collector Jim Linderman and noted author Luc Sante. Click here to view the CD's track list and to listen to audio samples.

I finally have this book in hand and it's just wonderful. Reading it feels invasive, like you've stumbled upon a forgotten box of family photos hidden in a mildewed corner of the basement.

Take Me to the Water from Dust-to-Digital on Vimeo.

STAGE: Disfarmer @ St. Ann's Warehouse

In the small mountain town of Heber Springs, the Arkansas artist known as Disfarmer captured the lives and emotions of the people of rural America between 1939-1945. Critics have hailed Disfarmer's remarkable black and white portraits as "a work of artistic genius" and "a classical episode in the history of American photography."

JAN. 27 - FEB. 8 @ St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn: Dan Hurlin, who last presented at St. Ann's Warehouse in 2004 with his award-winning puppet-theater work, Hiroshima Maiden, returns with the World Premiere of Disfarmer. The story is inspired by the over forty-year career (1915-1959) of portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer, who for decades shunned his family and neighbors while operating the only portrait studio for miles around Heber Springs, Arkansas. Using "Table-top puppetry," an oddly funny text by Sally Oswald and an original banjo score by Dan Moses Schreier, Hurlin's Disfarmer seeks to create a visceral sense of the photographer's interior and exterior worlds, illuminating the contradictions in the life of this American hermit whose intimate and revealing portraiture documented an entire community.

In addition, for the first time since the discovery of Mike Disfarmer's unique body of work, archival quality limited edition Disfarmer prints are available for purchase online authorized through Disfarmer.com.

BOOK: Pure Country (out 11/15); Celebratory Event in BKLYN 12/10

PURE COUNTRY
THE LEON KAGARISE ARCHIVES 1961-1971
Introduction and Text by Eddie Dean, Foreword by Robert Gordon

Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, country music’s most legendary performers played backwoods stages in outdoor music parks, live and unfiltered. It was a time when Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and George Jones mingled up close with fans like kin at a mountain family reunion. These dollar-a-carload picnic concerts might have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for Leon Kagarise. An audio engineer by trade, he began recording the live shows on reel-to-reel tape and shot hundreds of candid color slides of the stars and their fans.

Music journalist Eddie Dean spent many hours interviewing Kagarise before his death in early 2008. His introduction and accompanying text tells how an obsession created a view into a lost world that challenges easy assumptions about Country and reveals a secret history of Country music in the ‘60s, when the industry largely turned its back on its rural roots and produced a slick, studio-centric product known as the Nashville Sound.

Forced into commercial exile, traditional country performers scratched out a living in the outdoor-music park circuit, where Kagarise served as their unofficial court photographer. With a meticulous and loving eye, Kagarise captured dozens of classic country and bluegrass artists in their prime, including June Carter, Dolly Parton, Bill Monroe, Hank Snow, The Stanley Brothers, The Stonemans, and many others.

Over a decade, he amassed an archive of over 600 color slides and 4,000 hours of pristine sounding live performance as well as radio and television recordings, some of the only known surviving documents of the era. Pure Country presents 140 of Kagarise’s stunning color images, most never seen in print, from an archive now considered by historians to be one of the richest discoveries in the history of American music. (source)

NEW: The Bell House will host a celebration for the release of the book "Pure Country" on December 10. The show includes extremely rare color slides of hillbilly stars and their fans from the '60s music park scene, with stories by the book's writer Eddie Dean and a live performance by legendary banjo picker Roni Stoneman. Both will sign books after the show.

WED 12/10 @ 7:30pm ($10) - ALL AGES SHOW
Arthur Magazine & Process Books present
PURE COUNTRY: THE LEON KAGARISE ARCHIVES, 1961-1971
A very special evening with the first lady of banjo
RONI STONEMAN
THE TALL PINES
THE JONES STREET BOYS

Bell House
149 7th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
(718) 643-6510

ART: WILLIAM EGGLESTON: Democratic....Camera

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera

Photographs and Video, 1958-2008

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

November 7, 2008-January 25, 2009

Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski

One of the most influential photographers of the last half-century, William Eggleston has defined the history of color photography. This exhibition will be the artist's first retrospective in the United States and will include both his color and black-and-white photographs as well as Stranded in Canton, the artist's video work from the early 1970s. The exhibition will travel throughout the United States as well as to the Haus der Kunst in Munich following its New York presentation. Eggleston was born in Memphis, TN in 1939. (Source: Eggleston Trust)

ART: WILLIAM EGGLESTON: Stranded In Canton

Shot in 1974 with a Sony Porta-pak, the crazily careering ''Stranded in Canton'' documents a cast of hard-drinking Southerners with the intimacy, ease and instability of a seasoned participant.
In one sequence, a man with peroxide hair, makeup and a sequined T-shirt sings old love songs, swanning around with a toilet-paper boa. In others shots are fired; good old boys decapitate chickens; and a young bearded man with an angelic face raves about being stranded in Canton, a colloquialism for being out of one's mind on drugs or alcohol. Whiffs of Southern Gothic are not new to Mr. Eggleston's work, but here they rise to the surface -- fierce, tragic and proud.

(New York Times)

William Eggleston's "Stranded in Canton"

Directed by William Eggleston - Twin Palms, 2008

Book and DVD to be released Fall 2008 to coincide with Whitney exhibit

GONE FISHIN' - BE BACK MONDAY!

SCENE: 10/10 & 11 - Art & Design converge in Tuscumbia, AL

Award-winning creative director/designer/photographer Robert Rausch has launched a series of design exhibitions at his GAS Design Center in Tuscumbia, AL. In conjunction with the upcoming exhibitions, GAS will host workshops, lectures and community events. This weekend he welcomes “Ceremony” by fellow Shoals native and esteemed design maven Natalie Chanin:

Friday, Oct 10 @ 6:30PM – Lecture on Design & Community by Natalie Chanin
@ GAS – 109A West 6th St., Tuscumbia, AL
Saturday, Oct 11 @ 4PM – Alabama Stitch Book signing at Cold Water Books
Saturday, Oct 11 @ 6PM – Ceremony Reception at GAS

Robert Rausch combines his talents as a designer and photographer with interest in sustainable and slow design. Be sure to check out his Etsy shop for cool upcycled glassworks.

GONE FISHIN' - BE BACK MONDAY!

In the meantime, please visit Poof NY for some fab photo finds!

ART/BOOK: Still Here and Sanctuary capture post-Katrina New Orleans

STILL HERE - Tonight (10/2) @ PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn: August 29, 2008 marked the third anniversary of the horror that Hurricane Katrina inflicted upon the north-central Gulf Coast. Its devastation is a wound not yet healed and its survivors are the subject of Joseph Rodriguez’s fourth powerHouse Book, Still Here: Stories After Katrina. In it, he documents the ongoing expressions of hope, perseverance, and suffering in the affected communities.On Thursday, October 2, 2008, Rodriguez will present a slide show of images from the book and will speak of his experiences while photographing and interviewing families and individuals throughout New Orleans and Texas. Like the photographers who worked with the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Rodríguez’s work alerts readers to the ongoing pressures faced by some of the country’s most distressed and vulnerable people. His black-and-white photographs remind the viewer that despite the loss of home, community, and culture, so many continue to push forward, and are “still here.”

Date: Thursday, October 2, 2008
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: powerHouse Arena
Street: 37 Main Street
City/Town: Brooklyn, NY
Phone: 718-666-3049

ALSO: SANCTUARY on exhibit thru October 4 @ Soho Photo:

Sanctuary features six photographers from New Orleans–Victoria Ryan, Samuel Portera, Lee Area, Eric Paul Julien, Jennifer Shaw and Michel Varisco—all brought together by the devastation and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It allowed them to reexamine their own sacred places and the refuge that is New Orleans. Sanctuary is about this seductive city of dreams and inspiration where one can muse about life and death, direction and vision. For these six photographers, sanctuary literally came in the refuge of their art and resulted in six unique visions of the city. The 30 images in the show describe life spawned by the Mississippi, its rich wetlands and fragility of the land, its historic architecture, and free spirited people. Photographer Michel Varisico’s exhibit was sponsored in part by the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation.

Soho Photo
15 White St, NYC 10013
212-226-8571

ART: WALKER EVANS: Carbon & Silver

BOND STREET GALLERY is pleased to present Walker Evans: Carbon and Silver, curated by John T. Hill and Sven Martson. The exhibition showcases many of Evans' seminal images from his most prolific years, 1935–36.

Beginning in the 1930s, Walker Evans' work has left an indelible mark on the arts, extending well beyond the boundaries of photography. His incidental approach towards printing makes quality vintage prints extremely rare. Although he recognized the value of a carefully made print, it was more often considered a necessary step in revealing his subject — which was the signs of our universal humanity. The definitive fine art print was never an interest in of itself.

This exhibition juxtaposes gelatin silver prints with carbon pigment prints of these iconic images, made by two of Evans' associates; John T. Hill, a friend, teaching colleague, and the executor of Evans' estate and Sven Martson, a friend and printer of Evans' later work. Together Hill and Martson have interpreted Evans' work from this monumental series. Together they have made a dedicated study of Evans' own prints as well as several publications produced under his supervision. By taking advantage of current digital technology, they are producing archival images that lengthen the tonal range of traditional gelatin silver printing and allow the viewer to discover tiny details of Evans' photographs.

Throughout his career, Evans delegated printing to trusted friends and professional labs. He was intensely curious about the details of commercial printing processes, including sheet fed gravure. He used oversized prints in both of his retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1973 he eagerly exploited the latest technology of the instant Polaroid. He was the supreme pragmatist, realist, and experimenter. Evans' vision and the physical expression of that vision were his graphic denial of the fine art tradition. This exhibition is an extension of that spirit.

ABOUT WALKER EVANS: Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1903 and was largely a self-taught photographer. He was the first photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, American Photographs, in 1938. American Photographs and the later collaboration with James Agee for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) are among Evans’s most famous bodies of work. Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, where he made some of his most recognizable photographs.

ON VIEW: Wednesday, September 10 – Saturday, October 11, 2008
BOND STREET GALLERY 297 Bond Street Brooklyn, NY 11231 (Carroll Gardens)718.858.2297 DIRECTIONS: F/G to Carroll St. or R to Union St.
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday – Saturday 11 am – 6 pm

ART: Like A Rolling Thunder Tent Revival Revue

My brother always threatens to leave town. Like that would magically solve all his problems. What people like him fail to realize though is that wherever you go, there you are. I don't mean that in a Zen way either. I mean, you take your problems with you, especially if it's you that is the problem.

The weight of lies will bring you down
And follow you to every town
Cause nothing happens here that doesn’t happen there
So when you run make sure you run
To something and not away from
Cause lies don’t need an aeroplane to chase you anywhere
(The Avett Brothers, "The Weight Of Lies" from Emotionalism)

But running away....It does hold the hopeful mirage of a clean break, a fresh start where no one knows you. And all your wrongs can be made right or maybe never even existed. You can be the person you always believed you could be. The you that you know you are, but maybe nobody else can see. There is no possibility like that of a new place...and the story whose end has yet to be told. And besides, it's just a few tracks later on Emotionalism that the Avett Brothers sing that "all my mistakes, They brought me to you."

So, I guess you never know...

When he's not making music with his brother Seth, Scott Avett is painting. An exhibit of his work, in collaboration with husband & wife photography team Crackerfarm, is up now thru August 29 at the Envoy Gallery on the Lower East Side, NYC. The Avett Brothers The Gleam II is out now.