Robert Mapplethorpe is forever associated with scandals that erupted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, as well as the crippling drawdown of federal funding that rendered the National Endowment for the Arts a casualty of the late-1980s culture wars. More recently, Mapplethorpe, or the foundation that bears his name, made headlines with two significant acquisitions made by the J.[…..]
Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles–based artist who works with video, film, photography, and performance. She is also a contributing member of the band Lucky Dragons. Rara was most recently an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, where she worked on a new video, Broken Solar, and a libretto for a new opera, Neglected Treaty, that considers the sonic impacts of climate change[…..]
Born on the Danish island colony of Saint Croix with two generations of slaves behind him, the champion heavyweight boxer Peter Jackson cuts a lean and noble figure in his 1889 photographic portrait, his top hat perched level upon his head, his elegant Victorian garments pressed, his stylish accoutrements placed as evidence of his social persona as a gentleman–dandy. The portrait was taken just a[…..]
Rachel Granofsky’s approach to photography is akin to puzzle making, a balancing act between meticulously connecting individual parts while holding an unwavering attention to the whole. She creates her photographs at her Bushwick studio, which is set up as a miniature stage for building life-size installations. Granofsky constructs, frames, and captures; this labor-intensive process is her way of subverting the immediacy of digital photography. In[…..]
Today from our friends at BOMB Magazine, we bring you a conversation between artists Deana Lawson and Henry Lawson. They speak about the commonalities of their practices, their travels, and the importance of color in their work. Lawson says of her photographs, “I often think of Carrie Mae Weems’s titles in the Colored People series, in which she names the nuances of black and brown bodies[…..]
This week at Daily Serving we’re remembering the life and work of photographer Malick Sidibé (1935–2016), whose studio portraiture and candid images of nightlife in Mali during the 1960s and ’70s recorded a powerful time for the recently liberated country. As author Lia Wilson comments in her 2014 review, Sidibé’s photographs “chronicle a flourishing of human hope, ambition, and newfound opportunity” while remaining timeless. This article[…..]
Although International Transgender Day of Visibility was over a week ago (March 31), the need to show support for the transgender community only increases in urgency with the recent passing of anti-LGBTQ laws in North Carolina and Mississippi. Today at Daily Serving we’re thinking about the importance of amplifying trans narratives, including visual stories of personal experiences. As Shauna Jean Doherty shares in this Shotgun Review of[…..]
