The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class.
Grease Plant.Įmploying his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant’s industry-critical to Pittsburgh’s history and character-by photographing its workers. That year, Roy Stryker-the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)-commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc.
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New.Ĭlass, race and labor in a Pittsburgh plant: a rarely seen series by Gordon Parksīy 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation/Carnegie Museum of Art, I00220615, 2022. Text by Philip Brookman, Mark Whitaker, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Peter W. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. It also marks the first time Basquiat’s extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre.
Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat’s work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future features Basquiat’s works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries-and sometimes collaborators-A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York. Faith Almiron, Dakota DeVos, Hua Hsu, Carlo McCormick. (BASQUIAT, JEAN-MICHEL) Edited by Liz Munsell, Greg Tate.