Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s

Jean-Michael Basquiat

Artist’s Name here Title of work, 19?? medium 36 ¥ 36 inch Collection Credit

Title of work, 19?? medium 36 ¥ 36 inch Collection Credit

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URBAN THEATRE: NEW YORK IN THE 1980s

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URBAN THEATRE: NEW YORK IN THE 1980s

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Francesco Clemente

I like squalor and energy—places where you have to use your wits as well as your inner spirit. When I first came here (1981?), I had amazing dreams. I had dreams that it was raining shit. In the painting Perseverance, I carry my Italian heritage through the streets, and it’s raining shit. ... Great cities are spiritual and depraved. It’s where artists have to live today to make art.

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URBAN THEATRE: NEW YORK IN THE 1980s

Eric Fischl

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URBAN THEATRE: NEW YORK IN THE 1980s

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Artist’s Name here Title of work, 19?? medium 36 ¥ 36 inch Collection Credit

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URBAN THEATRE: NEW YORK IN THE 1980s

Artist’s Name here Title of work, 19?? medium 36 ¥ 36 inch Collection Credit

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Nan Golding I left home when I was 13 or 14 and lived in communes and went to one of those free schools in the Sixties based on Summerhill in Massachusetts called Setya, which means the existence of the knowledge of truth. Rollo May’s daughter was one of the teachers at Setya and she got a grant from Polaroid. I became the school photographer and that’s how I started. I was about fifteen or sixteen. When I was eighteen, I started living with this man who was in his thirties in downtown Boston and I fell in with these drag queens. I started living with them and photographing them. That’s when I started taking pictures seriously. . . . My desire was to show them as a third gender, as another sexual option, a gender option. And to show them with a lot of respect and love, to kind of glorify them because I really admire people who recreate themselves and who manifest their fantasies publicly. I think it’s really brave. I just really have so much love and respect and attraction for the queens. . . . When I look at a queen I don’t see a man dressed as a woman; I see a merger of a third gender. I see a kind of freedom.

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URBAN THEATRE: NEW YORK IN THE 1980s

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Sample text only organic fragments, hair strands, vein-like convolutions and single, isolated objects – a wide- brimmed hat or a skull – become central motifs in a weightless, fantastic, imaginary world, interspersed with forces that were thought to be extinct. Viewers of Monika Baer’s paintings are confronted with bits of motifs whose connections have gone astray, the pale relics of a familiar world that perhaps once determined thoughts and feelings and once granted them understandability within aesthetic conceptions. Whereby a special significance falls to a setaside and spent, perhaps even almost outdated, pictorial vocabulary – like the kitschy, the pompous or the psychedelic, which in an altered context the artist charges with fresh energy. In the drifts left by this store of images that human civilization constantly reuses, discards, disarranges and forgets, Monika Baer has become a huntress in a snowstorm, as the title of one of her paintings proclaims. We very much look forward to being able to mount the first, long-overdue museum exhibit of this artist, owed to the initiative of Paula van den

Keith Haring Times Square Show, New York, 19?? Photo Credit

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