Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat
Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project
Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project May 13–June 10, 2018 Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College September 14–December 14, 2018 Curated by Sara Driver, Carlo McCormick, Mary-Ann Monforton, and Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl A/P/E Volume 1 No. 24
Ted Barron Tire Shop, East Houston Street, 1985 Photo mural 117 x 176 inches
City-As-School By Sara Driver
The exhibition Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat came together in the same way as the making of the film Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film and exhibit both sprang from the same energy and force of collaboration that once drove a spontaneous art scene in lower Manhattan, here focusing on the years 1978-1981. Jean-Michel Basquiat is the touchstone for the film and the exhibit. He is perhaps the most well known of the artists in this movement—but the movement and talents that energized it were vast, and are worthy of attention and illumination. In the late fall of 2017, I met with my distributor Eamonn Bowles of Magnolia Pictures and his colleagues. He wondered if there were going to be any related exhibitions up in the spring when he planned to release the film. This gave me an idea. So many talented people generously contributed their memories and other thoughts on or off camera, along with their artwork and archives, to help create and illustrate the story in the
film. Why not create an exhibit highlighting the work of the artists who participated in the film? It seemed a perfect concept for Howl! Happening. The gallery is located in the East Village, an area that was the epicenter of the art scene in the late 70s and early 80s. Ever since Howl! first opened a few years ago, in honor of the artist and Ramones designer Arturo Vega, I have wandered in and checked out their very cool shows. I approached Jane Friedman, executive director, and Ted Riederer, gallery director at Howl! Happening, with the idea. Jane’s first and very quick response was, “No, we are booked ‘til 2020.” I handed them the list of artists. After Jane and Ted glanced at the list, they looked at each other. Jane said, “I think someone just dropped out from the May timeslot. I’ll let you know tomorrow.” The next day, Jane and Ted confirmed that the gallery would happily create and welcome an exhibit in conjunction with the release of the film. It couldn’t be more perfect. Soon after, the Maier Museum in Virginia, which had been tracking the Basquiat Before Basquiat traveling exhibit of Alexis Adler’s archive, found
out about the exhibit and booked it—sight unseen—for the museum in the fall of 2018. Mary-Ann Monforton and Carlo McCormick joined Jane, Ted, and myself to cast a wide net and bring in the many artists we all admire to show their work in the context of Jean-Michel’s history, their history, and the history of New York City. Many of them worked, played, hung out, housed and collaborated with Jean-Michel in his late teens—specifically during 1978 to 1981. Most of these accomplished artists were several years older than Jean-Michel. He was drawn to them and they to him like a magnet, absorbing ideas, techniques, and building the skills to blast out in his own unique way. These become his important formative years. These are the artists who were his fine arts program. Jean-Michel and Al Diaz went to the City-As-School High School. The philosophy of the school was to take bright troubled teenagers and have them learn from being active in the city itself (working at museums for example). After leaving high
school, Jean-Michel continued his education in the Downtown NYC (1978-1981) art scene. I am deeply indebted and truly want to thank all these imagination soldiers still making great art, still sending out their signals—now stronger than ever—of the past and present meeting. We need these soldiers more than ever in this corporate world to keep us compassionate and human, to help us reflect our culture and times, and most importantly, to inspire a younger generation of artists and imagination gangsters. I would not have been able to make this film without their time, the collaborations, and their inspiring work. For that I thank all of those involved. With this exhibit we can all experience the visual signals artists gave at this particular moment in New York City’s history, and feel the joy of creating art while living in a destroyed, dangerous, and bankrupt city. Sara Driver April 19, 2018
Nan Goldin You Are Not I Original poster front and back 14› x 24› inches
Robin Winters Money, mid-1970s Velvet with drawing attached 36 x 24 inches
opposite
Jim Jarmusch Untitled, 2017 Newsprint collage 7 x 5 inches Jim Jarmusch Untitled, 2017 Newsprint collage 5 x 7 inches
Alexis Adler Untitled (Glasses #22) From Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-80 C-print 16 x 24 inches
James Nares Red X, 1977 Mixed media Framed dimensions 11› x 12› x › inches
Coleen Fitzgibbon and Robin Winters GunMoneyPlate, 1980 Mixed media assemblage 15fl x 10› inches
above right
Coleen Fitzgibbon Untitled, 1980 Ink on paper 12 x 9 inches above left
Coleen Fitzgibbon Untitled, 1980 Ink on paper 12› x 9 inches opposite
Coleen Fitzgibbon Colab, 2016 Ink on paper Signed on verso
Mary-Ann Monforton NFL, 2017-18 Chicken wire, plaster gauze, paint, pencil, synthetic mortar, and cement 35 x 36 x 18 inches opposite
Anonymous (Philippe Bordaz) We Have No Intention..., 1978 Digital fine art pigment print on paper 16 x 11 inches
opposite (back) and above Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jennifer Stein Untitled, 1979 Collage 4› x 5 inches From the collection of Katie Taylor Legnini
previous spread
Richard Hambleton Man with Candle, 2000 Oil on wood door 80 x 36 inches From the estate of Arturo Vega
Christy Rupp Rubble Rats, 1980-82 Cast concrete and rubble from the backyard of ABC No Rio 20 x 20 x 18 inches
Jane Dickson Big Peepland, 2016 Oil on linen 70 x 44 inches
Alexis Adler Untitled (Shaved Head #16) Grape Jelly From Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-80 C-print 16 x 24 inches
Incubating Art By Alexis Adler
Jean-Michel Basquiat and I moved into the apartment on East 12th Street in the fall of ’79. The building was semi-abandoned, surrounded by shooting galleries, and run by a tough Puerto Rican with a shotgun stashed behind his door. Apt F8 quickly became Jean’s laboratory. After all, I worked in a laboratory at Rockefeller University growing malaria parasites; he too needed a place where he could perform his own experiments. Jean was testing different media and developing ideas, fueled by our neighborhood the Lower East Side, which Luc Sante has also described as a laboratory. We lived among the burnt-out remnants of a once great, then fallen-into-hard-times city, an incubator for art and ideas, ripe for exploration and development. We went out every night; we shared, cross-pollinated, investigated, and explored in a place and time rough and dangerous, yet untethered and free. The street provided a wealth of discarded materials. Old suitcases became Jean’s frames for Joseph Cornell-like collages. Broken TVs made it up the six flights of stairs to be painted;
a child’s broken school chair was affixed to a compressor and painted; and in homage to Andy Warhol, a half dozen electronics boxes were stacked and arranged, taped together and painted, all inhabiting the middle room of the railroad flat. Jean was 24/7 art—soon the entire apartment was his canvas, with a wall mural, parts of the floor, appliances, and clothing all being used in lieu of proper art supplies. He even expanded out into the hallway of the building to partake in a graffiti battle with a younger teen downstairs. Jean himself would become the object of art, directing me to photograph his home performances. The apartment provided stability for Jean, the first set of keys in his pocket since leaving home. F8 was like a Petri dish, a place to plant himself and incubate ideas. Jean absorbed imagery from my college biology, chemistry, and biochemistry texts, giving newfound significance to exothermic reactions. My Janson’s History of Art was also a reference, as was a Picasso monograph passed on by a college friend moving out of town. Jean was definitely a challenging roommate who was always direct, cutting through
the BS and making sure to call out the “bad fools” in every circumstance. We were all searching for ways to express ourselves. Jean knew he would be a famous artist one day. In 1979, I recognized that spark brewing, ready to take off like a rocket—an awesome image at the end of Sara Driver’s film Boom for Real. The late 70s and early 80s were a time of unfettered growth and little regulation or restraint, and our apartment on East 12th Street offered Jean a place for experimentation and exploration. There we shared art and science, love and life, and politics and friendship. Outgrowing the Petri dish in 1980, he moved on to the world at large.
above
Alexis Adler, Untitled (Shaved Head #10) Naked Lunch From Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-80 C-print 24 x 16 inches opposite
Becky Howland Guns, 1979 Painted wood 42 x 6› x 1› inches and 34 x 7 x › inches
Anonymous (Philippe Bordaz) On the Occasion of John Paul II’s Visit to New York City, October 1-8, 1979 Digital fine art pigment on paper print 16fl x 11fl inches
opposite
Vivienne Dick Rent Strike (Beauty Becomes the Beast), 1979 Super 8 film still printed on Hahnemühle rag paper 11.81 x 15fl inches Vivienne Dick (L) Pat in Front of WTC (She Had Her Gun All Ready), 1978 (R) Avenue C (She Had Her Gun All Ready), 1978 Super 8 film still printed on Hahnemühle rag paper 11.81 x 15fl inches
previous spread
Ted Barron Lower East Side and East Village, 1978-90 Photographic prints
above
Ann Messner An Entanglement (Administration of Torture), 2012 Mixed media assemblage 15› x 10› x 1› inches
above and next spread
Henry Chalfant Panama Cocaine, 1980 Kodak Professional Endura metallic paper 18 x 96 inches Courtesy of the artist and Eric Firestone Gallery
Charlie Ahearn Battle Station, 2018 Mixed media collage on canvas 50 x 60 inches
Becky Howland Smudgepot, Hot-hot Bomb, 1981 Cement, tin, and oil paint 23 x 11 x 11 inches
opposite
Kenny Scharf Elroy Bug, 1981 Paint and marker on paper Framed dimensions: 18≠x 15≠inches From the collection of Mary-Ann Monforton Michael Holman East Village Rhapsody, 1981 Super 8 still Dimensions variable
Tessa Hughes-Freeland Countdown, 2018 16 mm film, wood, and glue 13 x 23 inches
opposite
Fab 5 Freddy Jack Johnson, 2018 Mixed media on velvet 25fi x 21≠ inches following spread
Original P.S. 1 poster, 1981 Offset print 22 x 33› inches From the collection of Godlis
Stranded By Luc Sante
Stranded began in 1977 as a wildcat publication by employees at the Strand Bookstore when we were trying to unionize and thought that a strike might prove necessary. As it happened, we unionized successfully (District 65, United Auto Workers) and the strike never occurred, but Stranded kept on for four issues until the end of 1979 (the contents page here says 1980, but that only reflects the chaos that attended every aspect). There was no editor or editing; anyone was welcome to contribute as long as their contribution consisted of the requisite number of items, whether copies of a page or pages or individual artifacts. The number was 300 for the first issue, but as this taxed the budget of many potential contributors, it was reduced to 200 thereafter. I designed the packaging of issues one to three (respectively: side-stapled, manila envelope, plastic bag); number four was packaged by Richard Lilly (a black rubber sheet held closed with yellow duct tape). I designed the contents page shown here. For all that the zine began as a political effort, it did not
remain that way for long. People had other things on their minds. Contents included poems, collages, odd slices of memoir, microfictions, song lyrics, results of employee music polls, bits of 8 mm film, primitive lithographs, random movie and restaurant reviews, random pages from disbound 19th-century tomes, random pages from 1966 issues of The Saigon post, random ad pages from glossy magazines, an ad for Cynthia Sley’s nascent clothing-design business, and the late Louis Sarno’s exquisitely abstruse science fiction, written in impenetrable pseudo-scientese. Collages predominated overall; it was a nonverbal time. The contributions were often unsigned, and although the contents were theoretically collated in alphabetical order by contributor, people did not always honor their promises in time to match with the contents page. For that matter, the publication always exuded a whiff of the clandestine—management was not amused by its existence—so that contributions sometimes arrived with no signature at all, or under pseudonyms that could not be identified even then.
Most but not all contributors were Strand employees. There was a constellation of friends on the outside. For that matter, people then sometimes worked at the Strand for a month or two before hitchhiking to some other city; it was hard to keep track. In this issue, 19 of the 30 contributors worked at the Strand and 10 didn’t (one employee contributed under both his own name and a pseudonym—that would be me). Twenty of the contributors were men; nine were women. Six were African-Americans, three of whom worked at the store. The one big star was Kathy Acker, recruited via a mutual friend; she produced enough work in those days to be represented in a plethora of zines. Nowadays the big star is Jean-Michel Basquiat, who contributed as Man-Made©. He wasn’t a star then, except among a small group of people; he was slightly better known under his discarded moniker Samo. I asked him because he was a friend, and I was in awe of his talent. He had no money at all, so I offered to pay for the photocopies. He gave me an extraordinary drawing/collage which presaged the paintings he
was to make a few years later but which, I found to my dismay, couldn’t be photocopied because it contained relief elements. I asked him for something else and he handed me a collage that looked as if he’d thrown it together in 15 minutes. At 200 copies, Stranded did not have much reach. (The first issue, at 300, was actually consigned in bookstores; the list makes for melancholy reading since all of them are long defunct—East Side, West Side, Eighth Street, Gotham, Phoenix, New Morning, New Yorker, Papyrus, Soho.) Of those 200, many were presumably thrown away, damaged, left behind in temporary dwellings. Over the years I’ve been approached twice by dealers who had acquired one or more issues; a full set was recently sold to a collector for an unspecified price. Stranded is an artifact of a time when nobody had any money and expected none, but when creativity was as constant and relentless as hunger.
Luc Sante Title Page of Stranded #4, 1979 Collage on paper 8› x 11 inches
Anonymous (Philippe Bordaz) Did You Ever..., 1981 Digital fine art pigment on paper print 16› x 11fl inches opposite
Anonymous (Philippe Bordaz/Robert Cooney/ Jorge Mendez/Tom Otterness) Power Strike, 1981-82 Digital fine art pigment on paper print 16fl x 11fl inches
Al Diaz I Am Man - I Eat, I Nap, I Pee, I Mate, 2014 I Weep in Pain and in Time, I Die., 2014 Mixed media collage 9 x 48 inches
above following spread—reverse
Franc Palaia Magazine, 1980 Polystyrene, plaster, paper, paint, spray, aggregate stone 48 x 96 x 5 inches
Justen Ladda Monster with a Whiskey Glass Bonnet, 2015 Gum bichromate on red cedar wood 30 x 24 inches
Barbara Ess Abject Angel, 1992 Silver print 8 x 10 inches
Jean-Michel Basquiat Famous Negro Athletes, 1983 Crayon on paper 18 x 24 inches From the collection of Brett De Palma
Bob Gruen Unknown Man in Front of Keith Haring Subway Graffiti in NYC, 1984 C-print 16 x 20 inches
Bobby G ABC No Rio poster, 1981 Ink on paper 23 x 16› inches opposite
Bobby G B-boy, 1984 Acrylic and spray paint on canvas 38 x 28 inches
Walter Robinson Fight Tyranny in All Forms, 1984 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 50 inches Courtesy of the artist and ABC No Rio
opposite
Jean-Michel Basquiat Untitled (TV Party Heavy Metal Night), 1981 Crayon on paper 17 x 11 inches Courtesy Gina Nanni and the Estate of Glenn O'Brien Ted Barron Watching a Building Burn on Stanton Street, 1984 Photographic print 11 x 14 inches
Brett De Palma Doctor Frankenstein, 1984 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 51 inches
Lee QuiĂąones The Creation of Three Mile, 1989 Spray paint on linen 120 x 96 inches
It Took A Village By Mary-Ann Monforton
I moved to the East Village in 1978. My rent was $175 a month, which was more than most people I knew were paying. On the other hand, the tub was not in the kitchen, which made the place kind of deluxe. In 1978 the subway fare had gone from 35 to 50 cents. The cost of a slice of pizza jumped to 50 cents too. I have come to realize that the price of a subway fare and the price of a slice of pizza are in tandem. This was a time before the city was overrun with restaurants, a time when going out to dinner wasn’t considered doing something. There were no foodie offerings, only a few Polish restaurants where a three-course meal could be had for $3.50 and a breakfast for half as much. There were no cell phones in 1978. It was even before the large clunky telephone-answering machine that would record phone messages on a cassette. Fliers were our way of getting the word out, our smoke signals. They were plastered all over the city on every boarded-up building, mailbox, telephone, and streetlight pole. The fliers were nothing fancy—a DIY paste-up on which you might draw or put a picture of your band. Most of the lettering was stenciled. You’d make a hundred or so copies on 8.5 x 11” paper at a xerox copy shop, and then paste them up in the wee hours of the night. They publicized poetry readings, music events, and film screenings. Between the fliers and event listings in The Village Voice and The Soho Weekly News, and in our hometown paper East Village Eye, we knew the clubs, galleries, and venues to hit that week. Our calendars were overflowing. Looking at some of those datebooks today, the number of venues you’d hit in an evening was remarkable. As for getting in touch with people,
you either phoned them or showed up at their building (sans intercom) and yelled up. If they were home, they stuck their head out of the window and threw a key down in a sock so you could let yourself in. Funny thing though, even in this low-tech environment, I never missed anything: never an appointment, never an art opening, and never a rendezvous. The East Village was a hotbed of energy in 1978, artistic and otherwise. Bands rehearsed in underground cellars the length of Ludlow Street. On the ground, dealers hawked their drugs. I remember hearing a recording taken while walking down 2nd Street. Instead of blasting music, a friend’s boom box was on record. The playback was amazing. It sounded like an open marketplace, the kasbah of drug sales. Citibank offered the first cash machines and getting a $20 bill for a full evening’s activities was plenty. That included a taxi ride. In those days my best bud was the writer, actress, filmmaker, and Queen of the Mudd Club Tina L’Hotsky. A statuesque blonde, Tina was the first to don a long braided hairpiece, which she affixed to her teased platinum hair and wore over one shoulder. After arriving at the Mudd Club’s chain barricade with Tina one time or two, my entrée was secured from there on. In 1978, you could pay your rent on less than three days of work. This was an immeasurable luxury. It gave us the time to experiment, to hang out, to hear and see things. People liked to say that New York City was given up for a loss and yet, from all across the country and beyond, the Generation Gap generation was packing their bags and converging on lower Manhattan. The iconoclasts, the rebels, the misunderstood, and the dismissed were moving in. There was a place for everyone. We had rejected our parents, the establishment, and, in essence, the art
academy as well. A new and rambunctious expressionism took hold, offering a joie d’art that was palpable. Without regard for sexual orientation, color, income bracket, level of education, legacy, or privilege, we formed a vibrant and welcoming community of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers. I was living on East 1st Street at the time, between 1st Avenue and Avenue A. I won’t lie—I had the most desirable stoop on the block. The main attraction was the constant parade of people going to and coming from the 2nd Avenue subway stop. Before Mayor Giuliani’s crackdown, it wasn’t unusual to find me sitting out there smoking a joint with my neighbors. Next door to my building was a Flat Tires Fixed joint, replete with a tire filled with concrete supporting a pole that held a tire painted white with letters spelling Flat Fixed. Much of the signage in the Lower East Side, a vibrant Hispanic neighborhood at the time, offered a colorful handmade quality—something that proved to be a huge influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat. I remember writing Richard Marshall when he was planning Jean’s first big Whitney Museum survey in 1992 and suggesting he open the exhibition with an honor guard of freestanding Flat Fixed signs. I am not exactly sure where I met Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom everyone—except maybe Rene Ricard—referred to simply as Jean. It might have been at a club or out there on my stoop. I think he took one look at me and saw an all-girls Catholic high school girl with her uniform skirt rolled up midthigh. Jean was fun and full of energy and mischief. I would accompany him to SoHo to sell his xerox post cards or his painted sweatshirts and lab coats that he sold under the copyright Man-Made. At the end of one afternoon he gave me a Man-Made lab coat.
Before he had any kind of studio, Jean was known to paint on just about anything he could get his hands on. It was rumored that if he was staying at your place you might come home to missing doors. One of the first paintings I bought from him was on a cupboard door. Jean and I spent many late nights discussing what he was making or contemplating making. I’ll never forget him telling me he was thinking of making paintings like game boards with net corner pockets. We would also point out the Catholic iconography in his work. I learned a lot from his very sensitive and highly-perceptive take on things. There was so much I needed to learn. But then, like everyone in this show, I was teeming with so much I wanted to offer as well. It was a complete pleasure putting Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat together—seeing the work come in, and feeling what it felt like back then. I realized that my attraction to New York City, and the East Village in particular, was something akin to a close encounter of the third kind. That all of us found each other (and ourselves) here at this time had to be the work of divine intervention. Forty years on, this community is still solid and supportive. We have lived through something profound together, a-once-in-a-lifetime experience—if you are lucky. We were lucky. Mary-Ann Monforton April 2018
previous spread
David Schmidlapp Walter Steding on and Under the Williamsburg Bridge, 1986 16 mm film still dimensions variable opposite
Barbara Ess No Title (Woman and Knife), 1985 C-print 30 x 40 inches
following spread
Robert Carrithers (L) Jean-Michel Basquiat in Front of Todd's Copy Shop in Soho, 1980, 2018 Digital fine art pigment on paper print 16 x 20 inches (R) Samo: As an End to Mindwash Religion, Nowhere Politics and Bogus Philosophy, 2013 Silkscreen on canvas 22 x 27 inches
Godlis Fire, St. Marks Place, 1984, 2018 C-print 16 x 20 inches
The Mathematics of Being There By Carlo McCormick
It was a time of progressive regression and knowing innocence. Empty and gutted, the city submitted to silence, so we made noise to wake the dead and shake the dread. Relationships formed from shared alienation and the commonality of difference, the togetherness of youth in retrospect so temporal but at the time seemingly infinite. Inhabiting a paradisiacal hell and carrying the oxymoron as a kind of manifesto, living with contradictions offered serious fun, transgression a path to transcendence, the post-modern condition a convoluted path to discovery. As a generation finding its voice at the tail end of the baby boom and coming of age to the cloying corporate manufacture of MOR entertainments, we knew well that we had pretty much missed the party. So, everyone set out to create their own party out of the rubble of neglect: reinventing the modern and reviving the mischief on the furthest margins of
mainstream mundane. We turned galleries into nightclubs and nightclubs into galleries, lifestyle into an autonomous mode of social practice. This was the no future blank generation learning to live and revel in the moment while rejecting and unlearning all the rest. Part of the genius of Jean-Michel Basquiat was that he remained throughout his short time with us as a most enigmatic kind of cipher. Much of the greatness of Sara Driver’s movie Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean Michel-Basquiat, from which this show is based, is that she allows him still this distinguished place amidst the undistinguishable. Less an explication than an evocation, Basquiat is never so much revealed as recollected like some mimetic trigger to what was so utterly revelatory about his times. Neither a biopic nor a documen-
tary in any traditional sense of the terms, Sara Driver has issued a cinematic love letter to New York City when it was a much-maligned and misunderstood metropolis, and to those few fabulous people who truly adored it as a home, muse, and canvas unlike any other. History may celebrate JeanMichel as a solitary figure, but he was not alone. This then, in film and exhibit, is a cacophonous chorus of the myriad voices that, however briefly, listened to one another and took some comfort as well as inspiration from what was, in a weirdly small-town sense, something we called community. Rarely apart but always individuals, these artists addressed the world with tongue in cheek and heart in hand, stumbling their way arm in arm, all for one, indivisible and, as such, what we call an irrational number.
Al Diaz Untitled, 2018 Mixed media on canvas 12 x 16 inches
HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS Dan Cameron Cut Hoppe Carlo McCormick Marc H. Miller Maynard Monroe Lisa Brownlee James Rubio Debora Tripodi Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Founder and Executive Director: Jane Friedman Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Program Coordinator: Sam O’Hana Collection Manager: Corinne Gatesmith Production Team: Ramsey Chahine, Josh Nierodzinski Gallery Coordinator: Scout Woodhouse Marketing and Public Relations: Susan Martin Social Media and Development: Michelle Halabura Videographer: Yoon Gallery designed: Space ODT/ Teddy Kofman Creative Consultant: Some Serious Business
Special thanks to: Alexis Adler, Felice Rosser, Lee Quiñones, Al Diaz, Michael Holman, David Schmidlapp, Paul Tschinkel, Felice Rosser, Marc H. Miller, Curt Hoppe, Robert Carrithers, Shawn McQuate (Ammo), Magdalena Wysocka, Steven Englander, Peter Cramer, Jack Waters, Gina Nanni, Katie Taylor Legnini, David Hershkovits, and Walter Steding. Also a special thank you to Al Diaz for the Samo-isms throughout the catalog and to Ted Barron for letting us chop up his photographic images to help give a feel of the neighborhood from the era. Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat at the Maier is supported by the generosity of Mary Gray Shockey, class of 1969, making it possible to share an expanded version of the exhibition with the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College as its 107th Annual Exhibition of American Art. Special thanks to Martha Kjeseth Johnson, Director, At the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College.
Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project May 13–June 10, 2018
Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College September 14–December 14, 2018 © 2018 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 24 ISBN: 978-0-9995847-4-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2018 Sara Driver © 2018 Alexis Adler © 2018 Mary-Ann Monforton © 2018 Luc Sante © 2018 Carlo McCormick Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NY, NY 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Gallery Photographer: Jason Wyche Curatorial Advisor: Maynard Monroe
front and back covers
Jean-Michel Basquiat Untitled, 1979 Collage 4› x 5 inches From The collection of Katie Taylor Legnini
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Howl! Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater——a cultural stew that defies easy definition. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event——a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and the Lower East Side. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project www.howlarts.org / info@howlarts.org
HOWL! ARTS INC. ARCHIVE / PUBLISHING / EDITIONS 6 EAST 1ST. STREET, NYC 10003