This year, on the 31 March, we lost Gilbert Baker, gay artist and creator of the gay pride flag. Today we would celebrate his 66th birthday. Let’s remember him as the wonderful person he was.
i just want to add to this post that the last update made to the official pride flag by Glibert Baker before he passed away was THIS:
the new lavender stripe at the very top was added to represent DIVERSITY and as far as i am aware, was added in retaliation against trump’s presidency. i’ve not seen many people use this version, and it deserves to be known.
prospect park / coney island, ny (17th january 2014) original diana, 120 rollfilm
i want you to come visit me. please. baltimore, new york, for 3 days, for 7 days, whatever it is, we can figure out the logistics. that’s the most important thing for you to know, but it’s also important to me that you know why. if you need to take a minute, that’s okay, there’s plenty of time for me to explain. - NicoVitti personal correspondence (4th january 2014)
Practice maps I made last week, 4 of the 7 rejections I got, the painting I started last night, and the lovely first words of an approval notice.
(I officially accepted my offer to attend UCDublin for the MScR in geospatial data analysis. Proposed thesis on mobility in over-exploited mining towns/soil destabilization.)
i thought it would be cool to show how i organize my window but failed to consider the screenshot would tell the world what celeb drama i was watching a 2hr video about
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens, New York. He studied drawing, painting, and sculpture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and after college lived in the Chelsea Hotel with his close friend Patti Smith: she’s written about those years in her award-winning memoir, Just Kids.
(More images and history under the cut; all SFW.)
Mapplethorpe moved into photography in the 1970s, creating iconic album cover art for Patti Smith and Television. As the 1970s continued, he became increasingly interested in photographing the local S&M scene. As the biography on the Mapplethorpe Foundation site puts it,
The resulting photographs are shocking for their content and remarkable for their technical and formal mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.”
Those were not his only subjects: among other photos, he did a series in collaboration with Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion. and he photographed many other artists, including this photo I’ve always loved of sculptor Louise Bourgeois holding one of her own works (possibly NSFW). His works are classically, almost austerely beautiful, and highly stylized. In 1986, his exhibit of eroticized photos of black men created controversy when it was accused of being exploitative and dehumanizing in its stylized depictions.
In the last years of his life, Mapplethorpe’s work became more popular, and there were three exhibits of his work in 1988. Although it was widely known in the art world that Mapplethorpe had been diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, the New York Times review of his Whitney Museum exhibit called it a “mid-career retrospective,” ignoring the disease.
One of those 1988 exhibits, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” traveled from Philadelphia to Chicago, and was then supposed to be shown at the Corcoran Gallery in DC. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), an extremely conservative and vocal Republican leader, learned that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had given $30,000 to the Philadelphia museum towards the cost of curating the show, and he got 100 members of the US Congress to write a letter of complaint to the NEA about subsidizing materials of “a morally repugnant nature.” The Corcoran, worried about its own NEA funding, pulled out of the show.
As a result, the Corcoran lost $1.5 million in promised bequests, several artists forbade their work from being shown there, and membership dropped by 10%. The exhibit – which kept the explicit works in a separate age-restricted gallery – was taken in instead by the Washington Project for the Arts, which had over 35,000 visitors in three weeks – still a record there. A large protest outside the Corcoran, uniting free speech advocates, artists, and gay rights activists, projected works from the show onto the Corcoran’s walls.
The exhibit would create controversy again in 1990, when the curator of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center was charged with obscenity for staging the exhibit.
The last image you saw when leaving “The Perfect Moment” was Mapplethorpe’s final self-portrait, taken just months before his death.
(Self-Portrait, 1988)
In this late photograph, Mapplethorpe is no longer playing a role, as he did in so many of his earlier self-portraits. It was taken a few months before he died from an AIDS-related illness in 1989. In it he faces straight ahead, as if he were looking death in the face. The skull-headed cane that he holds in his right hand reinforces this reading. Mapplethorpe is wearing black, so that his head floats free, disembodied, as if he were already half-way to death. Mapplethorpe even photographs his head very slightly out of focus (compared with his hand) to suggest his gradual fading away.
[image description: watercolor painting of Orville Peck, he’s dressed in a pink shirt with little cowboys on it, green pants, a white cowboy hat, and a black mask with light pink veil. he’s holding a white guitar. end id]
Next, the INCREDIBLE Freddie Murcury!!! My favorite band is Queen and Freddie has been a personal hero of mine since I was a kid. Who should I draw next?!
