Photo By Gail
John Giorno (1936 – 2019) had a rare gift for turning language into a visual event. In We Gave a Party for the Gods and the Gods All Came (2015), words don’t sit quietly on the canvas — they announce themselves. Rendered in stark black and white, the poem painting reads like a proclamation, part invitation, part cosmic punchline.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: John Giorno, We Gave a Party for the Gods and the Gods All Came
Photos By Gail
Despite having grown up in the ’60s and ’70s, I never met anyone whose parents were hip and cool enough to have decorated their Family or TV Room with as many iconic pieces of furniture as you see in the above photo (and forget about the hallucinatory-print wall paper, which is just insane). It might surprised you to know that these retro-futurist styles are still in-demand today. Let’s check them out.
Continue reading Eye On Design: 1960s TV Room
Story and All Photos By Gail Worley
When you think of the concept of Retrofuturism –an exploration of past visions of the future — this five-sided, console Television set might fit in perfectly.
Photo By Gail
American Totem (1960) is one of a series of black-and-white paintings that Norman Lewis made which explore the emotional and psychic impact of the civil rights movement. Lewis, one of the few Black artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, created a form that evokes the infamous hooded Klansman, but the monolith is composed of a multitude of smaller forms resembling apparitions, skulls and masks.
Lewis’s work suggest that terror is both representable and abstract, conscious an unconscious, visible and hidden. The painting was made more than decade after Lewis’s first solo show at the Willard Gallery in New York in 1949, which had earned him considerable renown but neither the financial rewards nor exhibition opportunities if his peers.
Photographed in The Whitney Museum in NYC.
Photos By Gail
Magnet TV (1965) is an early example of Nam June Paik’s “Prepared Televisions,” works in which he altered the television’s image or its physical casing. This work consists of a seventeen-inch, black and white set with an industrial-size magnet resting on top of it. The magnetic field interferes with the television’s reception of electronic signals, distorting the picture into an abstract form that changes when the magnet is moved. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Nam June Paik, Magnet TV