OJ JOTTINGS

from Zee Digital • Volume 3 • 2018-2019

Ethnic Feast

Oj Hofer writes about two exhibits and a Broadway show that highlighted his two-week hiatus at The Big Apple.

It was the fastest and shortest two weeks that I had ever spent in New York. I had initially cancelled the trip but decided on the last minute to fly-- thanks to the prodding of Charles Lahti, a serigraph and mixed media artist who is also a creative force within New York’s art community and his partner Greg Urra, a vintage fashion connoisseur who owns a posh boutique on Lafayette Street.

I was juggling a schedule of teaching Taiji and holding Reiki healing sessions at my nephew’s mixed martial arts gym called Fight Lab USA while allocating time for brunches, luppers, and dinners arranged by good friends and relatives. On top of that, I had to purchase dress shop supplies and go to fashion and art exhibits plus watch my first Broadway show.

I somehow managed to do all of those mentioned above. Thus, here’s the story on the Warhol exhibit at The Whitney Museum. The stories on the color pink at The Fashion Institute of Technology Museum and The Band’s Visit Broadway show will be shared in our next issue.

ANDY WARHOL-From A to B And Back Again

Very few American artists are as ubiquitous, influential, and instantly recognizable as Andy Warhol (1928–1987).

I couldn’t fully appreciate Warhol’s work prior to this show. Luckily, I had the chance to walk through the exhibit with Charles Lahti (charleslahtistudios.com/about/) who actively shared techniques and artistic precepts through lectures and collaborative work with artists in the US and other parts of the globe. It was much easier for me to grasp pop art this time because of Lahti’s practical and technical explanations since he worked with Donald Judd, Leroy Nieman, Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol himself.

Andy Warhol understood the growing power of images in contemporary life and helped to expand the role of the artist in society. Through his carefully cultivated persona and willingness to experiment with non-traditional art-making techniques he predicted and heralded the advent of selfies, vlogs and everyone’s claim to going viral or enjoying “15 minutes of fame.”

The ongoing Warhol at The Whitney exhibit, which runs until March 31, 2019, is currently the first Warhol retrospective organized by a U.S. institution since 1989. Its mounting reconsidered the work of one of the most inventive, influential, and important American artists. Building on the wealth of new materials, research and scholarship that had emerged since the artist’s untimely death in 1987, the exhibition revealed new complexities about the Warhol that we thought we knew, and introduced a Warhol for the 21st century.

Here are images from different sections of the Warhol exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art.