Do you miss going to art galleries? I sure do. I know that many galleries have reopened, but as a fairly enthusiastic fan who used to spend nearly every Thursday evening roaming the streets of Chelsea, the scene just feels so dead while Covid keeps us from gathering together to celebrate our shared passion for art. Art! Because of this — even though I’ve been hitting the museums pretty hard — I’ve been feeling rather art-starved over the past year, and that’s just a shame.
Photo By Gail
Ross Bleckner’s Count No Count (1989) is one of a series of memento mori paintings that the artist began to make in the mid-1980s. The suggestion of flickering lights in the work serves as a reminder to viewers of their own mortality, and for Bleckner — an AIDS activist — of the many lives lost to the AIDS epidemic. Bleckner engages both the formal and metaphorical qualities of light, yielding a work that shifts between abstraction and symbolic representation. To achieve the appearance of light within a darkened void, the artist blended wax into oil paint, creating a luminous surface that conveys what he describes as “this almost continual light that comes from inside.”
Photographed as Part of Fast Forward: Painting From The 1980s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on Exhibit Through May 14th, 2017.
All Photos By Gail
For this week’s Eye on Design, we are presenting a fabulous visual recap of the 20th annual Dining By Design event, sponsored by Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA). Continue reading Photos From DIFFA’s 20th Annual Dining By Design!
Photo By Gail
During his short but prolific career, David Wojnarowicz worked in writing, painting, photography, film, music, performance and installation. Unapologetically making art about homosexuality during the peak of the AIDS crisis in New York, Wojnarowicz exposed the marginalization and suppression of a stigmatized community.
As a self-taught artist, Wojnarowicz created an iconography that is at once personal and universal. His work as an artist is inseparable from his work as an activist, in which he aimed to bring awareness to that which was made invisible, namely homosexuality.
David Wojnarowicz died from AIDS in his Manhattan home on the night of July 22, 1992. More than 20 years after his untimely death, Wojnarowicz’s work continues to elicit strong reactions and provoke censorship. His work has served as an inspiration to many artists, including Zoe Leonard, Victoria Yee Howe, Matt Wolf, Emily Roysdon, Henrik Olesen, Mike Estabrook, and Carrie Mae Weems.
David Wojnarowicz, The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the U.S.A. (1986) was Photographed in The Broad Museum in Downtown Los Angeles.
November 24th, 2012 marks the 21st anniversary of the passing of Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury. An interesting way to honor Freddie’s enduring status as a Rock legend and Gay icon might be to purchase a limited edition print portrait of the Freddie Mercury Lego character seen above, which is being sold by Little Artists for the tidy sum of $436! Ten percent of the profits from each portrait sold will be donated to the Terrence Higgins Trust, one of Great Britain’s biggest sexual health organizations. Read more about the story at This Link.
Thanks to Ivy Vale for The Tip!
