Month: April 2018

Crawford Barton

Crawford Barton, “Gay Pride, San Francisco”, 1978, Silver Gelatin Print

Born in 1943 and raised in fundamentalist community in rural George, Crawford Barton, a shy and introspective boy, escaped family tensions when he received a small art scholarship at the University of Georgia. After his first love for a man was unreciprocated, he returned at the end of the first semester to the family farm. Barton enrolled, at the age of twenty-one, in an Atlanta art school, making new friends and releasing his energy in the city’s gay bars and clubs.

During his time in Atlanta, Barton received a gift of a used 35mm camera and learned the basic darkroom techniques, making photography his calling in life. He moved to California in the late 1960s, settling in the San Francisco area, to pursue his photography and life as an openly gay man. By the early 1970s Barton was a leading photographer at the emergence of the gay awakening, a participant as well as a chronicler of this time.

Many of Barton’s images documenting love-ins in the park, cross-dressers in the Castro, and leather men prowling at night have become classics of the gay world. He photographed street protests, some of the first Gay Pride parades, Harvey Milk campaigning in San Francisco and celebrities such as actor Sal Mineo and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It was, however, Crawford Barton’s circle of friends and acquaintances that inspired his most intimate photography, Considered as a single body of work, his photographs of his lover of twenty-two years, Larry Lara, dancing in the hallway of their flat, standing in a doorway, or nude in the hills of the Golden Gate Recreation Area, show the richness and complexity of the man he loved most.

In the early 1980s, San Francisco and the gay community were devastated by the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, with its onslaught of illness and death. Larry Lara died from complications from AIDS and Crawford Barton later succumbed from AIDS at the age of fifty in 1993.

In addition to his fine art photography, Barton photographed on assignment for “The Advocate”, the “Bay Area Reporter”,  “The Examiner”, “Newsday”, and the “Los Angeles Times”. The GLBT Historical Society, an archives, research center and museum in San Francisco, holds the complete personal and professional papers and studio archives of Crawford Barton.

Top Insert Image: Crawford Barton, Untitled (San Francisco), circa 1970s

Middle Insert Image: Crawford Barton, “Castro Street, Men in a Truck”, circa 1978, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Crawford barton, “Castro Street”, circa 1977-78, Private Collection

Jorge Mendez Blake

Jorge Mendez Blake, “The Castle”, 2007, Bricks, Book

“The Castle” is a 2007 project by Mexican artist Jorge Mendez Blake that subtly examines the impact of a single outside force. For the installation, he constructed a 75 x 13 foot brick wall that balances on top of a single copy of Franz Kafka’s “The Castle”. The mortarless wall bulges at the site of the inserted text, creating an arch that extends to the top of the precarious structure.

Although a larger metaphor could be applied to the installation no matter what piece of literature was chosen, Méndez Blake specifically selected “The Castle” to pay tribute to Kafka’s lifestyle and work. The novelist was a deeply introverted figure who wrote privately throughout his life, and was only published posthumously by his friend Max Brod. This minimal, yet poignant presence is reflected in the brick work—Kafka’s novel showcasing how a small idea can have a monumental presence.

Calendar: April 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of April, Solar Year 2018

A Dash of Gray

Thomas Hart Benton, the American painter and muralist, was born on April 15, 1889, in Neosho, Missouri.

in 1907 Thomas Hart Benton enrolled at The School of The Art  Institute of Chicago. Two years later, he moved to Paris in 1909 to continue his art education at the Académie Julian. In Paris, Benton met other North American artists, such as the Mexican Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, an advocate of Synchromism.

On Benton’s return to New York in the early 1920s, Benton declared himself an “enemy of modernism”; he began the naturalistic and representational work today known as Regionalism. He expanded the scale of his Regionalist works, culminating in his “America Today” murals at the New School for Social Research in 1930-31. In 1984 the murals were purchased and restored by AXA Equitable to hang in the lobby of the AXA Equitable Tower at 1290 Sixth Avenue in New York City; in 2012 the murals were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1935, Benton settled in Kansas City, Missouri, and accepted a teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute. This base afforded Benton greater access to rural America, which was changing rapidly. Because of his Populist political upbringing, Benton’s sympathy was with the working class and the small farmer, unable to gain material advantage despite the Industrial Revolution. His works often show the melancholy, desperation and beauty of small-town life.

In the late 1930s, he created some of his best-known work, including the allegorical nude “Persephone”. It was considered scandalous by the Kansas City Art Institute, and was borrowed by the showman Billy Rose, who hung it in his New York nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe. It is now held by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, founded the Abstract Expressionist movement. Benton’s students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who contributed significantly to American art: Pollock’s brother Charles Pollock, Frederic James, Reginald Marsh, Margot Peet, Jackson Lee Nesbitt, and Glenn Gant.

Kristen Mayer

Kristen Mayer: Geometric Precision

Prop stylist and designer Kristen Mayer melds quotidian materials into distinctive outlines in her series of geometric flat lays. The multi-media artist, who is based in New Haven, Connecticut, gathers crackers, sticks, spaghetti, herbs, and other common raw materials and arranges them in circles and squares. The finesse comes in her use of negative space, creating implied borders lines that help complete the shape without a full density of “ingredients.”

Felix d’Eon

Nautical Art by Felix d’Eon

Felix d’Eon was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, to a French father and a Mexican mother. At a very young age, he and his family moved to Southern California, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. He attended college at the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco. He lived in San Francisco until 2010 when he returned to his native Mexico. He now lives in Mexico City with his mini schnauzer, Caperucita Satori.

He is enraptured by various art-historical styles, such as Edwardian fashion and children’s book illustration, Golden-Era American comics, and Japanese Edo printmaking. In his work, he attempts to make the illusion of antiquity complete, using antique papers and careful research as to costume, set, and style. His goal is perfect verisimilitude.

Felix d’Eon subverts their “wholesome” image and harnesses their style to a vision of gay love and sensibility. D’Eon treats vintage illustrative styles as a rhetorical strategy, using their language of romance, economic power, and aesthetic sensibility as a tool with which to tell stories of historically oppressed and marginalized queer communities.

Kai Engel, “Modum”

Kai Engel, “Modum” from the Album “Caeli”

Anton Fedchenkov is a young composer from Moscow, Russia. Anton has been working under pseudonym ‘Kai Engel’ since summer 2012 and creates solely instrumental music. His areas of interest are quite diverse, ranging from neoclassical and epic soundtrack music to meditative ambient and experimental tracks which could be described as IDM.

Reuben Wu, “Lux Noctis” Series

Reuben Wu, “Lux Noctis” Series

For his ongoing series Lux Noctis, Reuben Wu, the Chicago-based photographer, utilizes modified drones as aerial light sources, illuminating obscure landscapes in a way that makes each appear new and unexplored.

The light from his GPS-enabled drones create a halo effect around some of the presented cliffs and crests when photographed using a long exposure. An elegant circle of light traces the flight of the drone, leaving a mark only perceptible in the resulting photograph.

“I see it as a kind of ‘zero trace’ version of land art where the environment remains untouched by the artist, and at the same time is presented in a sublime way which speaks to 19th century Romantic painting and science and fictional imagery.” – Reuben Wu

Calendar: April 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of April

A Man of Distinction

On April 14, 1865, the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army, ending the American Civil War.

In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, John Wilkes Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy. Learning that Lincoln was to attend a performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth masterminded the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into disarray.

On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth leapt to the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis! –the South is avenged!” Although Booth broke his leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he managed to escape Washington on horseback.

The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, Lincoln, age 56, died–the first U.S. president to be assassinated. Booth, pursued by the army and other secret forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground. Of the eight other people eventually charged with the conspiracy, four were hanged and four were jailed.

On April 18, Lincoln’s body was carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state on a catafalque. Three days later, his remains were boarded onto a train that conveyed him to Springfield, Illinois, where he had lived before becoming president. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad route and paid their respects to their fallen leader during the train’s solemn progression through the North. Lincoln and his son, Willie, who died in the White House of typhoid fever in 1862, were interred on May 4, 1865, at Oak Ridge Cemetery near Springfield.