text:
Art Blart
Dr Marcus Bunyan writes Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive
Marcus Bunyan writings
Marcus Bunyan black & white archive 1991-1997
Australian artists/exhibitions by name & posting
International artists/exhibitions by name & posting
Marcus Bunyan website
Posts Tagged 'Statue of Liberty
Exhibition: 'Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang' at Cleveland Museum of Art
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment
Categories: american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 1950s American street photography, 1950s lust and love, american photographer, American photography, American photojournalism, American social documentary photographs, American street photography, American youths, an outsider on the inside, Artie Giammarino, bad boy, bad boy image, Beach at Coney Island, blue-collar clothing, Bob Powers, Brooklyn, Brooklyn Gang, Brooklyn Gang photographs, Brooklyn Prospect Park, Bruce Davidson, Bruce Davidson Brooklyn Gang, Bruce Davidson Brooklyn Gang series, Cathy O'Neal, cinematic antiheroes, Cleveland Museum of Art, Coney Island, Coney Island boardwalk, disadvantaged youths, first tattoo, gang members, greasers, James Dean, James Dean Rebel without a Cause, Junior Rice, lust and love, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando The Wild One, New York City, Park Slope, Park Slope Brooklyn, photojournalism, pompadours, Rebel without a Cause, rebellious youth subculture, sexual vitality, social documentary photogaphy, Statue of Liberty, street photography, tattoos, teenage romance, teenage street gangs, the Jokers, The Wild One, visual and social homogenisation of the 1950s
Exhibition dates: 25th October 2020 – 28th February 2021
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.)
Gift of an anonymous donor
© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
For a few brief moments, rebels with a cause
This is one of my favourite photo essays of all time. The story Davidson tells of this male-orientated Brooklyn gang and its culture through his photographs is one of brotherhood, friendship, rivalry, love, longing, agony, depression and death at a time of utter poverty and rock 'n roll rebellion. He produced "unflinchingly honest images of these American youths." Now, all these years later, the photographs possess a powerful nostalgia for the era mixed with the desolation of destroyed lives and lost youth.
Davidson gets under the skin of his subjects, embeds himself firmly in their milieu. The subjects allow him to photograph their most intimate moments, seemingly free from worry or anxiety. There is an insouciance to their attitude, a knowing insouciance. In one photograph inside Helen's Candy Store, Bob Powers stares directly and disarmingly at the camera while the girl playing with the yo-yo and the youth in the background also stare directly into the lens, forming a strong compositional triangle of the gaze. Powers said he was voted "most likely to die before I was 21 years old." He lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.
There is a dark undertone to the narrative. While there are moments of joy and happiness, you can sense the isolation and despair of these disaffected youths. Cathy O'Neal, seen in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, committed suicide by shotgun. Jimmie and his family were wiped out by drugs. Junior Rice became a heroin dealer. Lefty od'd in bed at 19. "He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose… within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood." In picturing their lives, the photographs gather moments (in time), enunciating how the gang members railed against the conformity and materialism of 1950s America whilst imbibing its rebellious iconography. Only occasionally does the artist pull back to show us the wider picture, the context of the action, with photographs of New York skyscrapers seen in the distance and the Statue of Liberty.
Davidson does not let his spontaneity slip. He is informed, aware, absent (but present) in all of these photographs waiting for that special moment. In the photograph above, a bird-like creature swoops down on something invisible on the ground. In informal yet tightly focused photographs – of sunbathing or walking the boardwalks of Coney Island, gang members fixing their hair, rolling up their sleeves, dead beat(s) in the back of the bus, making out in the back seat of a car, walking in the park or hooning around on the Metro – Davidson is there to capture the off-beat moments of gang existence and the members relationship to each other.
Through a superb eye, a feeling, a sensibility and connection towards the gang members desperation and isolation, universally acknowledged by the photographer himself, Davidson sets them all on the path to immortality. Do not forget, these photographs seem to be saying. For a few brief moments these people did exist, their lives were valuable, these rebels with a cause.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Cleveland Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
One of Davidson's best-known series, Brooklyn Gang was inspired by a news story he read about a teenage gang called the Jokers.
Davidson contacted the Jokers, one of Brooklyn's roughest gangs, through their social worker. In the summer of 1959, Davidson roamed the streets of New York with these teens, loitered in stores that the Jokers called their own, and sunbathed with them on the beach at Coney Island. Eventually they allowed him to photograph even their most intimate, private moments. He responded by producing unflinchingly honest images of these American youths.
Gang membership was exclusively male, but the members' girlfriends appear frequently in Davidson's photographs. Some of the pictures depict the teenagers exploring lust and love and the boys struggling to define and prove their masculinity. Looking back at the series in 1998, Davidson said that he felt "the reason that body of work has survived is that it's about emotion. That kind of mood and tension and sexual vitality, that's what those pictures were really about."
Paper: 27.9 x 35.6 cm (11 x 14 in.)
The pleasures and agonies of teenage romance are captured in Bruce Davidson's photographs of the gang's dance parties, which were held variously in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, at a neighbourhood school, and in members' homes. The basement wallpaper seen here – with its fairy-tale figures, including horses, queens, knights, marionettes, and jokers – suggests a domestic setting. The event could have been a farewell party for an older gang member going off to join the army, which was a common occurrence.
Paper: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Image: 16 x 23.9cm (6 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
Paper: 20.3 x 25.2cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.)
This rooftop view in Park Slope, Brooklyn, was taken from a building in the gang's "turf," which was a block anchored by the intersection of 17th Street and 8th Avenue. Davidson spent the summer hanging out with the gang and photographing them. Describing his process, the artist said, "I stay a long time. … I am an outsider on the inside." Park Slope, now one of New York's most desirable neighbourhoods, was then a poor, mostly Irish area.
Image: 21.9 x 14.6cm (8 5/8 x 5 3/4 in.)
Paper: 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.)
The pleasures and agonies of teenage romance are captured in Bruce Davidson's photographs of the gang's dance parties, which were held variously in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, at a neighbourhood school, and in members' homes.
Image: 16.1 x 24.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Childhood pastimes like playing yo-yo were a thing of the distant past for 15-year-old Bob Powers, a Joker seen here leaning against a fixture in Helen's Candy Store. He had already been in and out of the court system numerous times by 1959. Powers stabbed someone when he was 12 and had been incarcerated for bringing zip guns (homemade firearms) and chains to school, where, Powers said, he was voted "most likely to die before I was 21 years old."
The gang members, most of whom were 15 or 16 years old, thought tattoos made them look older and might help them get served at bars. Tattoos were also a demonstration of masculinity and a rite of passage. Bob Powers, seen here at age 15 displaying his first tattoo, recalled years later that "the first time you get a tattoo it's scary. I was sitting back with a cigarette like it's nothing. Meanwhile, it was killing me. … I got 'Bobby' with stars around it. … They said, 'Get your name.' … I hated it forever."
Paper: 61 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.)
One of the gang members – Bob Powers – suggested that Davidson follow him to a rooftop on the gang's block. "I remember thinking," said Davidson, "'This kid's going to throw me off the roof and then rob me,' but he's pointing down at the stickball game (an informal form of baseball played in the street) and saying, 'Get that,' and saying: 'Oh, there's the Statue of Liberty. You can see it through all these television antennas.'"
The gang members were very concerned with their appearance, although they did not have much money to spend on grooming or clothes. "If you see a picture of me," said former gang member Bob Powers, "the broken tooth, my teeth were green because I didn't go to the dentist. We never had any money even though my father worked. … We used Vaseline petroleum jelly to make our hair stick like iron in a pompadour. We combed our hair constantly, wore sunglasses, and all thought we were Marlon Brandos."
The Jokers' slicked-back pompadours … and their clothing echoed the greaser style, a rebellious youth subculture that was promoted by cinematic antiheroes of the era. Role models included Marlon Brando's portrayal of a motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean as a troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The "bad boy" image flouted the aspirational role model of the time, the upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.
Petey, a Jokers member who looks out the second-story window here, was injured in that fight. Petey's best friend, fellow Jokers member Bob Powers, walks by the house. Housing in the gang's neighbourhood, the then-impoverished Park Slope, Brooklyn, was overcrowded and rundown. Powers lived with his seven siblings and alcoholic parents in a three-bedroom apartment that had a coal-powered cookstove and no hot water or central heating.
One of the most highly respected and influential American documentary photographers of the past half century, Bruce Davidson spent several months photographing the daily lives of a teenage street gang for his 1959 series Brooklyn Gang. A new exhibition in the Cleveland Museum of Art's Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang features 50 black-and-white photographs from that series, which are part of a recent anonymous gift to the museum of extensive selections from the artist's archives. The exhibition is on view now through February 28, 2021.
Brooklyn Gang was Davidson's first major project after joining the distinguished photo agency Magnum and was the fruit of several months spent immersing himself in the daily lives of the Jokers, one of the many teenage street gangs worrying New York City officials at the time. He recorded the teenagers' pleasures and frustrations as they attempted to define masculinity and mimic adult behaviour. The photographs reflect the group's camaraderie but also their alienation from societal norms. While many officials and commentators at the time saw the gangs as evidence of social deterioration resulting from poverty, others regarded them as the most visible manifestations of a socially disengaged generation of males – rebels without a cause.
"Bruce Davidson: Brooklyn Gang presents an intimate portrayal of the teens' lives," said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. "Davidson was an outsider, but one who spent so much time with the gang that he became, as he liked to say, 'an outsider on the inside.' Davidson offered an independent look at the lives of these disadvantaged youths; this view of society was quite different from the age of visual and social homogenisation of the 1950s presented in mainstream magazines such as Life and Look and predicts the social turmoil of the 1960s."
The images reflect the time Davidson spent with the teens hanging out on street corners and in the local candy store and accompanying them to the beach at Coney Island with their girlfriends. Included are several sets of variant images, affording a rare glimpse into Davidson's working process.
"Despite a more than ten-year age difference, Davidson describes recognising his own repression in his subjects and feeling a connection to their desperation," said Barbara Tannenbaum, the CMA's chair of prints, drawings, and photographs and curator of photography.
Press release from the Cleveland Museum of Art
The museum owns several groups of images from the series taken during the same shoot at Coney Island. They provide a rare glimpse of the artist's selection process (see 2018.688, 2018.696, 2018.697, 2018.701, 2018.706, and 2018.735). The size of these prints, and the fact that the artist printed them long after they were shot, suggest he considered all four images worthwhile. In an exhibition print, the white marks on the woman's cheek here, made by dust on the negative, would have been covered up with ink or dye, a process known as spotting. This may be a work print, made to aid in decisions on exactly how to print this picture. It has become one of the better-known images from Brooklyn Gang.
In this photograph, gang member Bob Powers talks with friends in one of the many Coney Island bathhouses where people could change, shower, or swim in pools. "We'd come down on a Friday and sometimes we'd stay the whole weekend till Monday, down on the beach, me, Lefty, Junior," Powers recalled. "The girls would stay too… We would light fires and bury all the cans of beer. I remember stealing cars and driving down there. We'd drive the car under the boardwalk and bring it right onto the bay and leave it there."
Paper: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24 in.)
Shown here on the Coney Island boardwalk, from left to right, are gang members Junior Rice, Bob Powers, and Lefty, who "was a pretty tough guy in the gang and then he went to jail for about a year," according to Powers. "He came out and he just lost it. He wasn't the same guy. Something happened and nobody knew what. … We protected him a bit, but he caught a couple of bad beatings and lost his reputation. He ate a lot of pills one night and never woke up. His mother found him dead. OD'd in bed at 19. He was the first in the group to die from a drug overdose."
Image: 16.1 x 24.1 cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.2 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
This print is vintage – made soon after the picture was shot – and its 8 x 10-inch size was typical of the period and preferred for making reproductions for magazines and books. As photography began gaining acceptance into the gallery and museum world in the 1980s, larger prints became the norm. The museum also owns an unusually large print of the same image, made in the 1990s or 2000s, which was created to be exhibited in galleries and museums. The two may look the same on the computer screen, but do not feel the same when viewed in real life.
Image: 15.8 x 24.1 cm (6 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
Paper: 20.1 x 25.4 cm (7 15/16 x 10 in.)
After a day at the beach at Coney Island, the teens "would take the long bus ride back to their neighbourhood," remembered Bruce Davidson. "As they sat in the rear of the bus, the sunlight burned through the windows, giving them an angelic glow. They would drift into their dreams and awake alert to the mean streets awaiting them."
Barbara Tannenbaum
Curator of Photography
A hot topic in the 1950s, gangs were avidly analysed by sociologists, the press, and artists. Gordon Parks's photographs of a young black Harlem gang leader were published in Life magazine in 1948. The musical West Side Story, which pitted a Polish gang against a Puerto Rican one, debuted on Broadway in 1957. The following year, a seven-part series in the New York Times analysed the social, economic, and psychological causes of this juvenile delinquency.
In the summer of 1959, Bruce Davidson went to Brooklyn to meet and photograph a teenage street gang called the Jokers. Davidson's series Brooklyn Gang provided an in-depth view into the daily activities of an Irish and Polish gang whose turf was a block in the impoverished Park Slope neighbourhood. The Jokers were teenagers who were mostly students at the neighbourhood Catholic school or dropouts. They shoplifted and fought with members of rival gangs in rumbles that involved bricks, bats, knives, and occasionally zip (homemade) guns.
At age 25, Davidson was an outsider to them. He had been raised in a Jewish family in suburban Chicago and held an MFA in photography from Yale University. His images were being published in major magazines, and he had just joined Magnum, a distinguished, artist-run photographic agency. The Jokers' role models were the greasers, a rebellious youth subculture promoted by cinematic antiheroes such as Marlon Brando's motorcycle gang member in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean's troubled teen in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The gang members' "bad boy" image, replete with Vaseline-slicked pompadours and blue-collar clothing, flouted the era's aspirational role model of an upwardly mobile white-collar worker in a business suit and short haircut.
Davidson did not sport a pompadour, but making a living as a freelance photojournalist was itself a rebellion against the nine-to-five office world. He spent the summer with the Jokers, hanging out on street corners, in the local candy store, and on the beach at Coney Island. His images reflect their alienation and anxieties but also their camaraderie. The boys explore male bonding rituals and act out their visions of maleness and adulthood. They may roughhouse, but gang ethics dictated that they were not to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for rival gangs and, like their criminal acts, was not shown by Davidson.
He did capture the teens' early experiences with lust and love. The Lothario in the back seat of a car is Lefty, of whom Bob Powers, a gang member who wrote a memoir 40 years later, remarked, "We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him." This well-known image of Lefty is joined in the exhibition by three others from that same make-out session. Together they form an almost cinematic progression. Several other groups of related images of events are also included in the exhibition. These rare glimpses into the artist's shooting and editing processes are all drawn from the recent anonymous gift to the museum of 367 works from Davidson's archive, selections that span his 70-year career.
Davidson was careful not to pass judgment in his Brooklyn Gang photographs. The youngsters' hairstyles, tattoos, and underage drinking, smoking, and sex were considered ruinous behaviour at the time. The memoirs of Bob Powers and the reminiscences of other members give the Jokers' story a dark tone. The best-known image in the series, taken in front of a cigarette machine at Coney Island, shows Artie Giammarino, who later became a transit police detective, and Cathy O'Neal, whom the boys considered "beautiful like Brigitte Bardot." Cathy is seen here at age 13 or 14, around the time she began dating the "coolest" of the gang, Junior Rice. At 14 she got pregnant. Though they were both under the legal age, they married. They later divorced, and Junior became a heroin dealer and user; within a few years, drugs would claim the lives of many in the gang and in the neighbourhood. Years after their divorce, Cathy committed suicide by shotgun.
Davidson would always remain an outsider to the gang, but his working process allowed for intimacy and trust to grow between the gang members and the photographer. By the end of the summer, Davidson realised that he and the Jokers were all considered outsiders in the conformist, materialistic 1950s. "I could see my own repression in them, and I began to feel a connection to their desperation," he remembered. "I began to feel their isolation and even my own."
Cleveland Art, Fall 2020
Paper: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
Although most of the gang members' time was spent in their neighbourhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Jokers sometimes took excursions. Few had access to cars, so most travel was by bus and subway. The subway fare of 15 cents – the equivalent of $1.33 today – would take them anywhere in New York City. Here a gang member and his girlfriend wait for a train on the neighbourhood subway platform. The beach at Coney Island was a favourite summer destination for the gang.
"We used to hang out in [Brooklyn's] Prospect Park all the time," recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. "We did a lot of drinking and sleeping overnight in the park. … The cops with their bats would push us along, tell us to move. We were very defiant. If we moved, we moved ten feet. Then they had to tell us to move another ten feet. We'd kind of like move around in a circle and come back to where we originally started. The cops were mean at that time, but then we weren't the best of kids either."
The Jokers roughhoused and fought among themselves but were not allowed to hurt each other. Real violence was reserved for those in other gangs or occasionally for civilians. "Did we fight with chains and pipes and knives? Yeah," gang member Bob Powers reminisced years later. "Did people get stabbed? Yeah, people got stabbed. And people got their heads cracked open with bats."
The gang member making out in the back seat of a car on the way home from Coney Island is Lefty, identifiable by his tattoo. "We always wondered why the girls liked him," recalled Jokers member Bob Powers. "We never thought he was good-looking, but all the girls loved him. It was amazing."
Jimmie, an older member of the gang, watched over the younger members with his brother Johnny. In 1998, Jokers member Bob Powers recalled, "Later, the whole family, all six of them … died, wiped out, mostly from drugs. It's amazing because at this particular time, if you see Jimmie, he's like the 'Fonz,' like James Dean – handsome. He was good-looking, he had the women, and he was always working on cars."
11150 East Boulevard
Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays 10.00am – 5.00pm
Wednesdays, Fridays 10.00am – 9.00pm
Cleveland Museum of Art website
LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK
Exhibition: 'Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York' at the Museum of the City of New York, New York City Part 2
Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, book, Cecil Beaton, colour photography, curator, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, illustration, installation art, intimacy, Japanese artist, jewellery, light, memory, New York, painting, photographic series, photography, postcards, printmaking, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, street photography, surrealism, Susan Sontag, time, video and works on paper
Tags: African American photographer, Alice O'Malley, Alice O'Malley Melanie Hope, Alvin Ailey, American art, american artist, American gay culture, An Oval Braid, André Tellier, André Tellier Twilight Men, androgyny, andy warhol, Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Cecil Beaton's Feet, Andy Warhol Gee, Andy Warhol Gee Merrie Shoes, Andy Warhol Kiss, Andy Warhol Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol Studies for a Boy Book, Andy Warhol Studies for a Boy Book exhibition, Ann Bannon, Ann Bannon I Am a Woman, Anna May Wong, Antony Tudor, Art Against AIDS, Art and Underground Culture in New York, Art in Transit, Asian American actress, Beau of the Ball, Beauford Delaney, Beauford Delaney James Baldwin, Bill T. Jones, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Bill T. Jones Body Painting with Keith Haring, black New Yorkers, Blair Niles, Blair Niles Strange Brother, body painting, Candy Darling, Carl Van Vechten, Carl Van Vechten Alvin Ailey, Carl Van Vechten Anna May Wong, Carl Van Vechten Hugh Laing, Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, Cecil Beaton's Feet, Chantal Regnault, Charley Inside Ramrod, Chinese American movie star, Christopher Street, Clit Club, cruising, Danceteria, Design by Gran Fury for Art Against AIDS, Downtown invitations, Downtown invitations Shazork! invitation, DYKE, DYKE A Quarterly, dyke magazine, dykes, East Meets West, Edie Sedgwick, Edmund White, Edmund White Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Einsteins, Einsteins "Circus" window display, Eva Weiss, Eva Weiss Upwardly Mobile Home, Expeditionary Series, Fan Lady meets Cactus Lady, Fania Marinoff, flamboyant homosexual, Foujita, Foujita Helen Morgan Jr. And Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey, Frank O'Hara, Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits, gay cruising, Gay Gotham, Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York, Gay Power, Gee Merrie Shoes, Giovanni's Room, Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club, Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club in Harlem, Gran Fury, Gran Fury Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, Greenwich Village, Greer Lankton, Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe wedding, Greer Lankton Einsteins "Circus" window display, Greer Lankton Mini-Einsteins, Greer Lankton Siamese Twins, Harlem, Harlem Renaissance, Harmony Hammond, Harmony Hammond An Oval Braid, Harmony Hammond Fan Lady meets Cactus Lady, Helen Morgan Jr., Helen Morgan Jr. And Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey, homosexual issues, homosexuality, Huck Snyder, Huck Snyder Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hugh Laing, I Am a Woman, Isabelle Collin Dufresne, James Arthur Baldwin, James Baldwin, James VanDerZee, James VanDerZee Beau of the Ball, Jazz Age Manhattan, Jean Malin, Joseph Tseng, Judy Linn, Judy Linn Robert Gets Dressed at the Chelsea, Keith Haring, Kiss, Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do, Larry Rivers, Larry Rivers O'Hara Nude With Boots, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Leonard Fink, Leonard Fink Charley Inside Ramrod, lesbian, lesbian magazine, Liberation News Service, Light Gallery invitation, Liza Cowan, Lois Greenfield, Lois Greenfield Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Max Ewing, Max Ewing Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits, Mel Odom, Melanie Hope, Melanie Hope Clit Club, Muscleboy, Museum of the City of New York, nan goldin, Nan Goldin Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe wedding, New York, New York City, New York City street photograph, New York gay culture, New York Magazine, New York queer culture, New York's queer culture, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, O'Hara Nude With Boots, Panzy Craze, Paul Monroe, Paul Monroe and Greer Lankton, Paul Monroe Chanel No. 5 earrings, Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar Quentin Crisp, Peter Hujar Susan Sontag, posing, Queen of Lesbian Pulp, Quentin Crisp, Ramrod gay club, Robert Gets Dressed at the Chelsea, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jay Johnson, Robert Mapplethorpe Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Robert Mapplethorpe Jim Sausalito, Robert Mapplethorpe Light Gallery invitation, Robert Mapplethorpe Studio Portrait, Robert Mapplethorpe X Portfolio, Shazork! invitation, Smart Club Abbey, Statue of Liberty, Sterling Paige, Sterling Paige Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club in Harlem, Strange Brother, Studies for a Boy Book, Studies for a Boy Book exhibition, Susan Sontag, Teri Toye necklace, the Factory, The Piers Hudson River, THE RAMROD, The Young Physique, The Young Physique magazine, Tseng Kwong Chi, Tseng Kwong Chi Bill T. Jones Body Painting with Keith Haring, Tseng Kwong Chi East Meets West, Tseng Kwong Chi New York Statue of Liberty, Twilight Men, Ubangi Club, Ultra Violet, Ultra Violet modeling Mapplethorpe-designed jewelry, Underground Culture, Underground Culture in New York, Upwardly Mobile Home, Valerie Santagto, Valerie Santagto Robert Mapplethorpe and Jay Johnson, Vanity Fair
Exhibition dates: 7th October 2016 – 26th February 2017
An exhibition showcasing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer artistic life in New York City through the social networks of Leonard Bernstein, Mercedes de Acosta, Harmony Hammond, Bill T. Jones, Lincoln Kirstein, Greer Lankton, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Andy Warhol.
Curators: Donald Albrecht, MCNY curator of architecture and design, and Stephen Vider, MCNY Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow.
Part two of this monster posting on the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York at the Museum of the City of New York.
Highlights include photographs by Carl Van Vechten; art work by and of Andy Warhol; a video of the "Panzy Craze" of the the 1920s and 1930s; a photograph of a very young and skinny Robert Mapplethorpe and some of his early art work; some wonderful subversiveness from Greer Lankton; two glorious photographs from one of my favourite artists, Peter Hujar; and a great selection of book covers and posters, including the ever so sensual, German Expressionist inspired Nocturnes for the King of Naples cover art by Mel Odom.
Many thank to the Museum of the City of New York for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
"Helen Morgan Jr. And Jean Malin at the Smart Club Abbey"
Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (藤田 嗣治 Fujita Tsuguharu, November 27, 1886 – January 29, 1968) was a Japanese-French painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan, who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings. He has been called "the most important Japanese artist working in the West during the 20th century". His Book of Cats, published in New York by Covici Friede, 1930, with 20 etched plate drawings by Foujita, is one of the top 500 (in price) rare books ever sold, and is ranked by rare book dealers as "the most popular and desirable book on cats ever published".
André Tellier
Twilight Men (Greenberg, New York)
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
First published in 1931, this is an extremely uncommon early novel set in New York City of homosexuality and a young man whose gay tendencies infuriates his father, who attempts to set him upon the "path of normality" by hiring a mistress to seduce him.
"Like many early gay novels, the book does not have a happy ending: the main character becomes addicted to drugs, murders his father, and kills himself. This theme (the gay monster or the gay degenerate) occurs very frequently before the 1960's. Originally, this was the only way that a book with any kind of gay themes could even be published; that is, it was only palatable – or even legal – to feature a gay protagonist if that person "gets what's coming to him" in the end.
The February 1934 issue of Chanticleer, a gay literary "magazine," includes reviews by Henry Gerber of several novels, including Twilight Men. He wrote: "TWILIGHT MEN, by Andre Tellier, deals with a young Frenchman, who comes to America, is introduced into homosexual society in New York, becomes a drug addict for no obvious reason, finally kills his father and commits suicide. It is again excellent anti-homosexual propaganda, although the plot is too silly to convince anyone who has known homosexual people at all."
Little has been written about the author, Andre Tellier, himself. He wrote other books, including A Woman of Paris, The Magnificent Sin, Vagabond April, and Witchfire; but nothing else is really known about him." (Text from the Somewhere Books website)
Blair Niles
Strange Brother (Horace Liveright, New York)
Strange Brother is a gay novel written by Blair Niles published in 1931. The story is about a platonic relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man and takes place in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Strange Brother provides an early and objective documentation of homosexual issues during the Harlem Renaissance.
Mark Thornton, the story's protagonist, moves to New York City in hopes of feeling like less of an outsider. At a nightclub in Harlem he meets and befriends June Westbrook. One night they witness a man named Nelly being arrested. June encourages Mark to investigate. This leads Mark to attend Nelly's trial, where he is found guilty and sentenced to six months' imprisonment on Welfare Island for his feminine affections and gestures. Next Mark researches the crimes against nature sections of the penal code. Shaken up by his findings and the events, Mark confesses his own homosexuality to June.
Mark and June's friendship continues to grow, and June introduces Mark to a number of friends in her social circle. Various social interactions ensue including a dinner party for a departing professor, a trip to a nightspot featuring a singer called Glory who sings Creole Love Call and attending a drag ball. Despite reading Walt Whitman's poetry collection Leaves of Grass, Edward Carpenter's series of papers Love's Coming of Age, and Countee Cullen's poetry, Mark is afraid to come out. Subsequently, Mark is threatened with being outed at work. In response to this threat, Mark commits suicide by shooting himself.
Text from the Wikipedia website
I Am a Woman (Gold Medal Books, New York)
The classic 1950s novel from the Queen of Lesbian Pulp. "For contemporary readers the books offer a valuable record of gay and lesbian life in the 1950s. Most are set in Greenwich Village, and Ms. Bannon's descriptions of bars, clubs and apartment parties vividly evoke a vanished community. Her characters also have historical value. Whereas most lesbians in pulp are stereotypes who get punished for their desires, Beebo and her friends are accessibly human. Their struggles with love and relationships are engrossing today, and half a century ago they were revolutionary." ~ New York Times "Sex. Sleeze. Depravity. Oh, the twisted passions of the twilight world of lesbian pulp fiction." ~ Chicago Free Press "Little did Bannon know that her stories would become legends, inspiring countless fledgling dykes to flock to the Village, dog-eared copies of her books in hand, to find their own Beebos and Lauras and others who shared the love they dared not name." ~ San Francisco Bay Guardian "Ann Bannon is a pioneer of dyke drama." ~ On Our Backs "When I was young, Bannon's books let me imagine myself into her New York City neighborhoods of short-haired, dark-eyed butch women and stubborn, tight-lipped secretaries with hearts ready to be broken. I would have dated Beebo, no question." ~ Dorothy Allison "Bannon's books grab you and don't let go." ~ Village Voice
The Young Physique
Collection of Kelly McKaig
Muscleboy
Design by Gran Fury for Art Against AIDS/On The Road and Creative Time, Inc.
Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do
Bus poster
Gran Fury, Courtesy The New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division
Placemaking: Cruising
Anonymous photographer
New York City street photograph
Collection of Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, New York
Leonard Fink
Charley Inside Ramrod
Courtesy LGBT Community Center National History Archive
THE RAMROD, 394 West Street, (between Charles and West 10th Streets). Constructed in the 1850's this building (actually two, that were attached) housed S. J. Seely & Co., a lime dealer, and C. August, (on the corner) a porter house, and private residence. In the late 70's it was one of the most popular leather bars in New York. Attracting a large motorcycle clientele, West Street always had a plethora of bikes parked out front. The doorman, Rico, had a long black bushy beard, and an ever present black cowboy hat, also he wore on his hand a glove with sharp stainless steel blades attached to it, (sort of a precursor to Freddie Kruger). The bar, and Rico could be very intimidating, if you were new, or "Brown" as the uninitiated were called… referring to the brown leather they wore.
Greenwich Village: A Gay History
In June 1993, the Estate of Leonard Fink donated a photographic collection to The Center in New York City through its executor, Steven E. Bing. The materials in the Fink Estate was willed to four AIDS related organisations who gave all of the rights to the photos to the Center Archive. Some of these were signed "Len Elliot," which might have ben a pseudonym of Fink's. The collection consists of over 25,000 negatives and images capturing Greenwich Village and much of the spirit of the late 60s and 70s. Some of the most well known images in the collection are Fink's work at "The Piers" along the Hudson River. Fink documented over 25 years of gay life in New York City but his photography was never exhibited or published in his lifetime. He was self taught and used an old 35mm camera while working out of a homemade darkroom in his West 92nd Street apartment.
Text from the Gay Cities website
Leonard Fink was an amateur photographer who documented over 25 years of gay life in New York including parades, bars, and especially the west side piers. He worked in complete obscurity and was apparently very reclusive. His photographs were seen by only a few close friends and were never exhibited or published in his lifetime. He seems to have taught himself photography using an old 35mm camera and a homemade darkroom in his small apartment on West 92nd street. He lived frugally, spending much of his income on photographic supplies which he bought in bulk and stored in his darkroom and his bedroom. He stored the prints and negatives in a file cabinet. By the time of his death, the photos in the file cabinet covered a period from 1954 to 1992. His photographs of gay life begin with groups of gay men photographed in Greenwich Village in 1967. His photographs of Gay Pride parades begin with the first parade in 1970. His earlier photographs are of friends, trips to Europe, and scenes in New York. Leonard Fink was a colourful and ubiquitous character in the Village and at Pride parades, usually appearing on roller skates in short cut-offs, and a tight t-shirt with cameras always around his neck. He sometimes arrived on a bicycle or a motorcycle. He was born in 1930. His father and older brother were both physicians. He worked for many years as an attorney for the New York Transit Authority. He died of AIDS in 1993.
Text from The Center website
James VanDerZee
Beau of the Ball
Donna Mussenden VanDerZee
James Van Der Zee (June 29, 1886 – May 15, 1983) was an African-American photographer best known for his portraits of black New Yorkers. He was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Aside from the artistic merits of his work, Van Der Zee produced the most comprehensive documentation of the period. Among his most famous subjects during this time were Marcus Garvey, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Countee Cullen…
Van Der Zee worked predominantly in the studio and used a variety of props, including architectural elements, backdrops, and costumes, to achieve stylized tableaux vivant in keeping with late Victorian and Edwardian visual traditions. Sitters often copied celebrities of the 1920s and 1930s in their poses and expressions, and he retouched negatives and prints heavily to achieve an aura of glamour…
Works by Van Der Zee are artistic as well as technically proficient. His work was in high demand, in part due to his experimentation and skill in double exposures and in retouching negatives of children. One theme that recurs in his photographs was the emergent black middle class, which he captured using traditional techniques in often idealistic images. Negatives were retouched to show glamor and an aura of perfection. This affected the likeness of the person photographed, but he felt each photo should transcend the subject. His carefully posed family portraits reveal that the family unit was an important aspect of Van Der Zee's life. "I tried to see that every picture was better-looking than the person." "I had one woman come to me and say 'Mr.Van Der Zee my friends tell thats a nice picture, But it doesn't look like you.' That was my style." Said Van Der Zee.
Carl Van Vechten
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Carl Van Vechten
Little known today, Carl Van Vechten was a prolific novelist, critic, photographer, and promoter of all things modern, most actively engaged in the city's cultural life during the 1920s and '30s. The City Museum is rich in Van Vechten materials; its collections include about 2,200 photographs taken by him and 3,000 Christmas cards sent to him and his wife, film and theater actress Fania Marinoff. Taken together, they chronicle Van Vechten's influential circles of friends and colleagues – a hybrid mash-up that defines the modern America at the heart of White's new book. Images and correspondence in the City Museum's collection range from Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to writer Zelda Fitzgerald (wife of F. Scott), and playwright Eugene O'Neill.
Around 1920 Van Vechten gave up journalism for fiction and over the next decade wrote hotly debated novels about Jazz Age Manhattan. His 1923 book The Blind Bow-Boy, for example, is a classic of gay camp and a public expression of Van Vechten's sexual orientation; while he and Marinoff were married from 1914 until Van Vechten's death in 1964, he had numerous homosexual relationships… Van Vechten's role in the Harlem Renaissance remains a controversial topic. To some he's a valuable bridge between white and black New Yorkers, to others he's an outsider who patronised and exploited his African-American subjects…
Carl Van Vechten abandoned writing altogether in the early 1930s and embraced photography, a field he would pursue until his death. All told, it is estimated that Van Vechten took some 15,000 photographs. Because his inherited wealth offered him financial independence, Van Vechten took pictures for his own pleasure, usually inviting local and visiting celebrities to a studio he set up in his own apartment. While Van Vechten was aware of the stylistic artifice of such contemporary commercial photographers as Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton, he stood apart from them. He used a small-format camera, and his aesthetic, which included deep and dramatic shadows that sometimes obscured his subjects' faces, resulted in picture-making that was far more immediate and spontaneous than that of his contemporaries. Using this technique, Van Vechten photographed musicians Billie Holiday and George Gershwin, Hollywood actors Laurence Olivier and Anna May Wong, and writers Sinclair Lewis and Clifford Odets, to name only a few. The sum of Van Vechten's work, according to photography historian Keith F. Davis, "constitutes the single most integrated vision of American arts and letters produced in his era."
Donald Albrecht. "Carl Van Vechten and Modern New York," on the Museum of the City of New York website
Anna May Wong (January 3, 1905 – February 3, 1961) was an American actress. She is considered to be the first Chinese American movie star, and also the first Asian American actress to gain international recognition. Her long and varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage and radio…
Wong's image and career have left a legacy. Through her films, public appearances and prominent magazine features, she helped to humanise Asian Americans to white audiences during a period of overt racism and discrimination. Asian Americans, especially the Chinese, had been viewed as perpetually foreign in U.S. society but Wong's films and public image established her as an Asian-American citizen at a time when laws discriminated against Asian immigration and citizenship. Wong's hybrid image dispelled contemporary notions that the East and West were inherently different.
See an excellent short biography on the Wikipedia website
Hugh Laing
Hugh Laing (6 June 1911 – 10 May 1988) was one of the most significant dramatic ballet dancers of the 20th-century. He was the partner of choreographer Antony Tudor. Known for his good looks and the intensity of his stage presence, Laing was never considered a great technician, yet his powers of characterisation and his sense of theatrical timing were considered remarkable. His profile as a significant dancer of his era was almost certainly enhanced by Tudor's choreographing to his undoubted strengths and Laing is generally regarded as one of the finest dramatic dancers of 20th-century ballet. He remained Tudor's artistic collaborator and companion until the choreographer's death in 1987.
Alvin Ailey (January 5, 1931 – December 1, 1989) was an African-American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He is credited with popularizing modern dance and revolutionizing African-American participation in 20th-century concert dance. His company gained the nickname "Cultural Ambassador to the World" because of its extensive international touring. Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations is believed to be the best known and most often seen modern dance performance…
Ailey made use of any combination of dance techniques that best suited the theatrical moment. Valuing eclecticism, he created more a dance style than a technique. He said that what he wanted from a dancer was a long, unbroken leg line and deftly articulated legs and feet ("a ballet bottom") combined with a dramatically expressive upper torso ("a modern top"). "What I like is the line and technical range that classical ballet gives to the body. But I still want to project to the audience the expressiveness that only modern dance offers, especially for the inner kinds of things."
Ailey's dancers came to his company with training from a variety of other schools, from ballet to modern and jazz and later hip-hop. He was unique in that he did not train his dancers in a specific technique before they performed his choreography. He approached his dancers more in the manner of a jazz conductor, requiring them to infuse his choreography with a personal style that best suited their individual talents. This openness to input from dancers heralded a paradigm shift that brought concert dance into harmony with other forms of African-American expression, including big band jazz.
O'Hara Nude With Boots
Collection of the Larry Rivers Foundation
"Among Rivers' portraits of the mid-1950s, the most notable and controversial work for a discussion of the relationship among autobiography, sexuality, and art is O'Hara, which he painted during January 1954 as he re-entered an emotional relationship with the sitter. According to [poet Frank] O'Hara's biographer, Brad Gooch, Rivers and O'Hara had a relatively short, turbulent romance that began in 1952m but during 1953 the two men became involved in other romantic relationships…. Beginning in 1954, however, Rivers and O'Hara resumed their intimate relationship, which then lasted less than a year…
A nude of a contemporary figure on such a huge scale as O'Hara appeared unusual and even controversial in the 1950s New York art world. Rivers recalled that when the painting was first shown at the Whitney Annual in 1955, a guard often stood in front of it to ensure that the painting would not be defaced or damaged: "There was something about the male nude that seemed to be more of a problem than the female nude." Some contemporary viewers where shocked by O'Hara, given its depiction of a naked male body with meticulous attention to the genitals."
Dong-Yeon Koh. Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara: Reframing Male Sexualities Phd dissertation 2006, pp. 196-198.
Beauford Delaney
Oil on canvasboard
Halley K. Harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York
Beauford Delaney (December 30, 1901 – March 26, 1979) was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s.
In his Introduction to the Exhibition of Beauford Delaney opening December 4, 1964 at the Gallery Lambert, James Baldwin wrote, "the darkness of Beauford's beginnings, in Tennessee, many years ago, was a black-blue midnight indeed, opaque and full of sorrow. And I do not know, nor will any of us ever really know, what kind of strength it was that enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey."
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnameable tensions. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976).
Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalise fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration not only of black people, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalised obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. Such dynamics are prominent in Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, written in 1956, well before the gay liberation movement.
New York's queer cultures gained remarkable visibility on the city's stages in the 1920 and 1930s. Broadway producers and nightclub owners put on plays and acts exploring gay and lesbian themes. They launched a popular "Panzy Craze," where minorities where accepted. This period lasted until the mid-1930s when morals and ethics changed because of right-wing pressure. The film code was then in full force to protect society's "morals" and there was, once more, open hostility towards minorities that latest into the 1970s.
With permission of the Museum of the City of New York for Art Blart
Film compiliation
Produced by Cramersound
Max Ewing
Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits
Courtesy Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library
Max Ewing's Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits encapsulates the exhibition's wider exploration of queer communities in 20th-century New York. Ewing was a novelist, composer, pianist, and sculptor who created this gallery in the walk-in closet of his Manhattan studio apartment on West 31st Street. His semi-public closet exhibition paid homage to interracial, gay, and artistic communities with images of friends and celebrities plastered floor to ceiling, corner to corner.
Sterling Paige
Gladys Bentley at the Ubangi Club in Harlem
Courtesy of the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY
Studies for a Boy Book exhibition announcement for Bodley Gallery
Offset lithograph Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York
Gee, Merrie Shoes
Hand colored offset lithograph
Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York
Cecil Beaton's Feet
Black ink on buff wove paper
Philadephia Museum of Art
The Henry P. Mcllhenny Collection in memory of Frances P. Mcllhenny, 1986
Andy Warhol and Candy Darling, New York
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's
Candy Darling (November 24, 1944 – March 21, 1974) was an American transgender actress, best known as a Warhol Superstar. She starred in Andy Warhol's films Flesh (1968) and Women in Revolt (1971), and was a muse of the protopunk band The Velvet Underground.
Liberation News Service #624, featuring Harmony Hammond, right, with daughter, Tanya, at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Gay Pride March, photograph by Cidne Hart for Liberation News Service, July 3, 1974
An Oval Braid
Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York
Fan Lady meets Cactus Lady
Robert Gets Dressed at the Chelsea, #3
Modern digital print
Courtesy the Artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery
Gay Power, Volume 1, No 16, April 15, 1970
Alternative Press Collection, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries
Light Gallery invitation
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles California
Ultra Violet modeling Mapplethorpe-designed jewelry
Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Isabelle Collin Dufresne (stage name Ultra Violet; 6 September 1935 – 14 June 2014) was a French-American artist, author, and both a colleague of Andy Warhol and one of the pop artist's so-called superstars. Earlier in her career, she worked for and studied with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Dufresne lived and worked in New York City, and also had a studio in Nice, France…
In 1954, after a meeting with Salvador Dalí, she became his "muse", pupil, studio assistant, and lover in both Port Lligat, Spain, and in New York City. Later, she would recall, "I realized that I was 'surreal', which I never knew until I met Dalí". In the 1960s, Dufresne began to follow the progressive American Pop Art scene including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.
In 1963, Dalí introduced Dufresne to Andy Warhol, and soon she moved into the orbit of his unorthodox studio, "The Factory". In 1964 she selected the stage name "Ultra Violet" at Warhol's suggestion, because it was her preferred fashion – her hair color at the time was often violet or lilac. She became one of many "superstars" in Warhol's Factory, and played multiple roles in over a dozen films between 1965 and 1974…
In the 1980s, she gradually drifted away from the Factory scene, taking a lower profile and working independently on her own art. In her autobiography, published the year after Warhol's unexpected demise in 1987, she chronicled the activities of many Warhol superstars, including several untimely deaths during and after the Factory years…
In 1990 she opened a studio in Nice and wrote another book detailing her own ideas about art, L'Ultratique. She lived and worked as an artist in New York City, and also maintained a studio in Nice for the rest of her life.
Valerie Santagto
Robert Mapplethorpe, front, and Jay Johnson in Mapplethorpe designed jewelry
X Portfolio with Jim, Sausalito
Black silk clamshell case with gelatin silver print photographs mounted on pure rag board
Designed by John Cheim
Courtesy Yoshi Gallery, New York and Cheim & Read, New York
Greer Lankton
Einsteins installation designed by Paul Monroe for Gay Gotham, 2016
Courtesy of Greer Lankton Archives Museum
Mini-Einsteins
Cardboard, glass, paint, styrofoam board
Fabric, wire, glass, human hair
Teri Toye
Siamese Twins
Paper, wire, fabric
Greer Lankton (dolls and photo)
Einsteins "Circus" window display by Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe
Courtesy Paul Monroe for Greer Lankton Archives Museum
Greer Lankton (1958 – November 18, 1996) was an American artist known for creating lifelike, sewn dolls that were often modelled on friends and celebrities and posed in elaborate theatrical settings. She was a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s in New York.
Gender and sexuality are recurring themes in Lankton's art. Her dolls are created in the likeness of those society calls "freaks", and have often been compared to the surrealist works of Hans Bellmer, who made surreal dolls with interchangeable limbs. She created figures that were simultaneously distressing and glamorous, as if they were both victim and perpetrator of their existence.
In 1981 Lankton was featured in the seminal "New York/New Wave" exhibition at P.S.1 in Long Island City, and began to show her work in the East Village at Civilian Warfare. She gained an almost cult following among East Village residents from her highly theatrical window displays she designed for Einstein's, the boutique that was run by her husband, Paul Monroe, at 96 East Seventh Street. Besides her more emotionally charged dolls, Lankton also created commissioned portrait dolls. These include a 1989 doll of Diana Vreeland that was commissioned for a window display at Barney's as well as shrines to her icons, such as Candy Darling.
Critic Roberta Smith described her works in the New York Times as: "Beautifully sewn, with extravagant clothes, make-up and hairstyles, they were at once glamorous and grotesque and exuded intense, Expressionistic personalities that reminded some observers of Egon Schiele. They presaged many of the concerns of 90's art, including the emphasis on the body, sexuality, fashion and, in their resemblance to puppets, performance."
Photographer Nan Goldin said of her work, "Greer was one of the pioneers who blurred the line between folk art and fine art." She had spots in the prestigious Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, both in 1995, where her busts of Candy Darling, circus fat ladies, and dismembered heads gained her notoriety…
Greer was friends with photographer Nan Goldin, and lived in her apartment in the early 80's, often posing for her. She also played muse to photographers like David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar.
"Writing about the wax dolls of German artist Lotte Pritzel (to whom Lankton's own work bears a strong family resemblance), Rainer Maria Rilke noted: "With the doll we had to assert ourselves, because if we surrendered to it there was nobody there. It made no response, so we got into the habit of doing things for it, splitting our own slowly expanding nature into opposing parts and to some extent using the doll to establish distance between ourselves and the amorphous world pouring into us" ["Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel," tr. Idris Parry]. This relationship imbues the doll with its "soul," Rilke writes, arguing that it is the extremity of this attachment that leads us to both desire and reject the doll. Unalterable strangeness: Lankton's own work is plotted along the rejection-desire axis, granting the work a peculiar levity that hovers between fearsome and friendly…
Lankton's art is both realistic and unrealistic, a difficult balance that is not unlike Candy Darling's work as an actor, which often operated at the juncture between self-conscious play and unanticipated reality to evoke, again, unalterable strangeness. Following Douglas Crimp's description of the superstar as someone whose "self … recognizes otherness already there in itself [and] performs its own self-alienation" [Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012], Lankton likewise performs the double work of representing bodies (hers and others) while asserting their alienation. Darling rehearsed and played herself in order to be someone else. It might be said that Lankton rehearsed and played others in order to be herself."
Extract from "Unalterable Strangeness: Andrew Durbin and Paul Monroe on Greer Lankton," on the Flash Art website, March – April 2015
Paul Monroe
Chanel No. 5 earrings
Glass (actual miniature Chanel products filled with No. 5), 14k gold wire and glass pearls
Candelabra ring
Metal, chain, glass jewels and wax
Paul Monroe and Greer Lankton
Teri Toye necklace
Clay, acrylic paint, gold metal chain and rhinestones
Einsteins promotional cards 1986-1992
Einsteins business card, 1985
Greer Lankton and Paul Monroe wedding
Greer Lankton Archives Museum
Lois Greenfield
Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane
Modern print Courtesy Lois Greenfield Studio
Studio Portrait (Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane)
Private Collection of Bill T. Jones
Bill T. Jones Body Painting with Keith Haring
Silver gelatin selenium-toned print
© Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York. Body Drawing on Bill T. Jones by Keith Haring
© 1983 Keith Haring Foundation
Huck Snyder
Small mask from Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin
Painted cardboard and fabric
New York Live Arts
Huck Snyder was a visual artist and a designer of vivid stage settings for dancers and performance artists. He created sets and stage furniture that were surrealistic yet extremely simple and almost childlike at times. Imaginative and free in their execution and unmistakably his work, his sets often seemed inseparable from the vision of the performers with whom he worked. Huck had designed stage sets for the performance artist John Kelly beginning with sets for Diary of a Somnambulist in 1985…
Mr. Snyder also created sets for dances by Bill T. Jones and Bart Cook, and for theater pieces by Ishmael Houston-Jones. He conceived, directed and designed his own work "Circus," a performance-art piece presented in 1987 at La Mama E.T.C. Mr. Snyder's work has been displayed at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. His paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries throughout the United States and in solo and group shows in Europe and Japan.
Text from the Visual AIDS website
Downtown invitations
Shazork! invitation, Danceteria
Late 1980s
Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Carrie Goteiner and Miriam Montaug Ashkenazy in memory of Haoui Montaug
Vintage gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Quentin Crisp was born Denis Charles Pratt in Surrey, England, on December 25, 1908. A self-described flamboyant homosexual, Crisp changed his name in his early 20s as part of his process of reinvention. Teased mercilessly at school as a boy, Crisp left school in 1926. He studied journalism at King's College London, but failed to graduate. He then moved on to take art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic. Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho, London, and even worked as a prostitute for six months. Crisp was always true to himself and expressed himself by dying his long hair lavender, polishing his fingernails and toenails, and dressing in an often androgynous style. Despite the ridicule and violence often directed toward him, Crisp carried on. He tried to join the army with the outbreak of World War II, but was rejected by the medical board, who determined that he was suffering from sexual perversion. Instead, Crisp remained in London during the Blitz, entertaining American GIs, whose friendliness inculcated a love for Americans.
Crisp held a number of jobs, including engineer's tracer, life model, and author. His most famous work, The Naked Civil Servant, detailed his life in a homophobic British society. When the book was adapted for television, Crisp began a new career as a performer and lecturer. He moved to Manhattan in 1981, when he was 72 years old; settling in a studio apartment in the Bowery. Upon meeting and spending time with Crisp, Sting was inspired to pen his hit song, "An Englishman in New York."
Crisp continued to tour, write, and lecture; including instructions on how to live life with style and the importance of manners. Crisp landed a few roles on American television and the 1990s became his busiest decade as an actor. In 1992, Crisp took on the role of Elizabeth I in the film Orlando.
Quentin Crisp died in November 1999, just shy of his 91st birthday, while touring his one-man show.
Text from the Biography website
1975, printed 2014
Pigmented ink print
Peter Hujar (born 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar's photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his "difficult" personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace insured that it was his last publication during his lifetime.
Text from the Peter Hujar Archive website
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover, and In America.
Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about photography, culture and media, AIDS and illness, human rights, and communism and leftist ideology. Although her essays and speeches sometimes drew controversy, she has been described as "one of the most influential critics of her generation." …
It was through her essays that Sontag gained early fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art and expanded the dichotomy concept of form and art in every medium. She elevated camp to the status of recognition with her widely read 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'," which accepted art as including common, absurd and burlesque themes.
In 1977, Sontag published the series of essays On Photography. These essays are an exploration of photographs as a collection of the world, mainly by travelers or tourists, and the way we experience it… She became a role-model for many feminists and aspiring female writers during the 1960s and 1970s.
Liza Cowan (designer)
DYKE, A Quarterly
Courtesy Liza Cowan and Penny House
DYKE, A Quarterly Call for poster design flyer
Illustration by Liza Cowan Penny House
Christopher Street
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
Paperback edition with cover art by Mel Odom, 1980 (originally published 1978)
Courtesy New York Magazine
From left, Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin performing as Split Britches in 'Upwardly Mobile Home'
Contemporary archival print
Courtesy Eva Weiss Photography
Alice O'Malley
Melanie Hope, Clit Club
Alice O'Malley Photography
New York, NY (Statue of Liberty)
Muna Tseng Dance Projects Inc.
Tseng Kwong Chi, known as Joseph Tseng prior to his professional career (Chinese: 曾廣智; c. 1950 – March 10, 1990), was a Hong Kong-born American photographer who was active in the East Village art scene in the 1980s.
Tseng was part of an circle of artists in the 1980s New York art scene including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Cindy Sherman. Tseng's most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the "Expeditionary Series". In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his "Mao suit" and sunglasses (dubbed a "wickedly surrealistic persona" by the New York Times), and photographed himself situated, often emotionlessly, in front of iconic tourist sites. These included the Statue of Liberty, Cape Canaveral, Disney Land, Notre Dame de Paris, and the World Trade Center. Tseng also took tens of thousands of photographs of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring throughout the 1980s working on murals, installations and the subway. In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring's work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery's East Village location in a show titled "Art in Transit". Tseng photographed the first Concorde landing at Kennedy International Airport, from the tarmac. According to his sister, Tseng drew artistic influence from Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.
Chantal Regnault
From left, Whitney Elite, Ira Ebony, Stewart and Chris LaBeija, Ian and Jamal Adonis, Ronald Revlon, House of Jourdan Ball, New Jersey
© Chantal Regnault
1220 Fifth Ave at 103rd St.,
Open Daily 10am – 6pm
Museum of the City of New York website
Exhibition: 'Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 by Francesc Torres' at the Imperial War Museum, London
Categories: American, american photographers, book, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, London, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, reality, sculpture, space, surrealism and time
Tags: 9/11, 9/11 10th anniversary, 9/11 artifacts, 9/11 as seen live on television in Barcelona Spain, Because the Last Column had inscriptions and attachments on all sides, Cortlandt Street subway station, death, Deputy Battalion Chief Dennis Cross, During the recovery at the site some ironworkers would cut religious or other symbols, Firefighter Christian Regenhard, first responders, Francesc Torres, Francesc Torres 9/11 as seen live on television in Barcelona Spain, Francesc Torres Because the Last Column had inscriptions and attachments on all sides, Francesc Torres During the recovery at the site some ironworkers would cut religious or other symbols, Francesc Torres Steel beams taken from ground zero for storage at John F. Kennedy International Airport's Hangar 17, Francesc Torres The collapse of the twin towers created a series of iconic objects, Francesc Torres These three panels offering a view of the Statue of Liberty from 1977, Francesc Torres Though most of the vehicles at Hangar 17 came from first responders, Francesc Torres Twisted steel beams from ground zero dominate the space in JFK International Airport's Hangar 17, Francesc Torres View through a portion of the broadcast antenna that fell from the top of the north tower, Ground Zero, hangar 17, Hangar 17 at John F Kennedy International Airport, imperial war museum, jfk international airport, John F Kennedy International Airport, kennedy international airport, Last Column, memory, Memory Remains, Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 by Francesc Torres, Port Authority, remains, September 11 attacks, Spanish photographer, Statue of Liberty, Steel beams taken from ground zero for storage at John F. Kennedy International Airport's Hangar 17, terrorism, The collapse of the twin towers created a series of iconic objects, the Last Column, These three panels offering a view of the Statue of Liberty from 1977, Though most of the vehicles at Hangar 17 came from first responders, twin towers, Twisted steel beams from ground zero dominate the space in JFK International Airport's Hangar 17, victim, View through a portion of the broadcast antenna that fell from the top of the north tower, war, war museum london, World Trade Center
Exhibition dates: 26th August 2011 – 26th February 2012
Many thankx to the Imperial War Museum, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
Steel beams taken from ground zero for storage at John F. Kennedy International Airport's Hangar 17
© Francesc Torres
Twisted steel beams from ground zero dominate the space in JFK International Airport's Hangar 17, where 9/11 artifacts were housed for study and safekeeping
View through a portion of the broadcast antenna that fell from the top of the north tower. A number of fragments of the 360-foot antenna were kept at Hangar 17
The collapse of the twin towers created a series of iconic objects, transformed by force and fire from their daily uses into artifacts that tell a story. At Hangar 17, tented enclosures were built for artifacts of various kinds that, in the view of curators and conservators, needed the added protection of humidity control and stillness. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this transformation could be found inside the vehicle tent, where trucks and cars, normally left outside in all conditions, were given shelter
Because the Last Column had inscriptions and attachments on all sides, it was raised onto a specially constructed steel cradle at Hangar 17 so conservators had enough clearance to work. A mirror provides a glimpse of tributes on the underside of the column. Visible on the facing side are the taped-on memorials for Firefighter Christian Regenhard, 28, and Deputy Battalion Chief Dennis Cross, 60
The empty shell of Hangar 17 at JFK Airport became a storehouse of memories when it was filled with the material cleared from the World Trade Center site following the September 11 attacks on New York City.
Marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Francesc Torres's work features over 150 projected images which explore inside the hangar and reflect on the emotional power of what remained, from personal belongings to steel girders distorted by the force of the attacks. Alongside the photographs is a section of raw rusted steel over two metres in length from the ruins of the World Trade Center. As well as larger piece (over 1 tonne) that is due to go on display at IWM North in October, these objects are the first pieces of steel from Ground Zero to go on display in the UK. The exhibition will also be on display at the International Centre for Photography in New York and at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
Throughout his career, Spanish-American artist Francesc Torres has reflected on the diverse manifestations of culture, politics, memory and power. His latest exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Memory Remains, is a bold and haunting amalgam of all four.
In 2009, Torres was granted rare access to Hangar 17 at John F Kennedy International Airport, a gaping space of over 80,000-square-feet. Within the hangar lie the remnants deemed worth preserving from the September 11 attacks, taken from the 1.8 million tonnes of debris from Ground Zero. For five weeks Torres daily confronted the legacy of terror and the ghosts of that fateful late-summer day, capturing images of objects that stand as symbolic substitutes to the victims.
"Look at it this way", says Torres, relaying his experience, "it's a hanger constructed to house a plane, which was transformed into a weapon used for the attack on the towers and now the sediment of that attack is here. With the sound of planes constantly flying overhead it was absolutely surreal."
According to the photographer, the experience of walking around the hanger after the first day was so emotionally draining that he slept from four o'clock in the afternoon through to ten o'clock the next morning.
"I was absolutely exhausted; physically and emotionally… every single iota of energy I had was gone."
His efforts have produced some exceptional results, however, displayed on a rolling slideshow in a small room near the entrance of the museum. Among the objects photographed are large shards of rusted, burnt steel, crumpled filing cabinets and a plethora of flattened Port Authority vehicles. Some unexpected pieces of detritus were also found, including a nine-foot, three-dimensional Bugs Bunny, made completely bizarre when juxtaposed by a sign whose letters read chillingly: "That's All Folks!"
Prior to the Hangar 17 project, Torres documented the excavation of a mass Spanish Civil War grave that he said drew certain comparisons with the material at JFK.
"The clothing is something that just grabs you," he says, "it's very uncanny that nothing changes with the victims as historical subjects. The clothing [in Hangar 17] was exactly the same as the clothing I've seen in Spain or in the former Yugoslavia; it all has the same patina. The victim becomes universal… the remains have that quality."
Along with the photographs, the museum has also acquired a section of steel from the structure of the World Trade Center, displayed outside the projection room. It is the first section of raw rusted steel from the ruins at Ground Zero – thought to be the box section from one of windows – to be displayed in the UK.
For the past year, pieces from the hangar have made their way to be placed in memorials in each of the 50 American states, as well as seven other countries across the globe. Some, but not all, of the remaining pieces will be housed in the 9/11 Memorial Museum near the site of the attack, which is something that concerns Torres.
"We have to preserve the hanger as a container. It's an unbelievable narrative apparatus that had been created almost on the run," he says.
With a lifelong interest in questions of human memory and meaning, Torres' work is based on the concept that it is through the remains of history that memory remains. His latest show is an unforgettable testament to those horrendous attacks that capped the 20th century almost a decade ago."
These three panels, offering a view of the Statue of Liberty from 1977, were salvaged from the Cortlandt Street subway station under the World Trade Center. The spray-painted markings indicate that the area nearby had been searched by rescue workers for survivors or victims
9/11, as seen live on television in Barcelona, Spain. Photographed at roughly 3 p.m. local time by Maria Iturrioz de Torres, Francesc Torres' mother, while they spoke by phone
Though most of the vehicles at Hangar 17 came from first responders, this taxi, an emblem of daily life in New York, was also preserved. At left, the tags hanging from the frame indicate its Port Authority inventory number (white) and mark its selection for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Memorial Museum (yellow)
During the recovery at the site, some ironworkers would cut religious or other symbols out of pieces of steel from the World Trade Center and give them as keepsakes to family members or other visitors
Imperial War Museum, London
Lambeth Road
London SE1 6HZ
Daily from 10am – 6pm
Imperial War Museum, London website
Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, a photographic archive and form of cultural memory, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.
bunyanth@netspace.net.au
ARCHIVE OF ALL AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK
ARCHIVE OF ALL INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE BLOG AT THIS LINK
Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Dogs, chickens, cattle' 1994-95
Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Dogs, chickens, cattle' 1994-95
Art Blart RSS feed
Art Blart Email Subscription
If you would like to unsubscribe from the email list please email me at bunyanth@netspace.net.au and I will remove you asap. Thank you.
If you would like to unsubscribe from the email list please email Marcus at bunyanth@netspace.net.au and I will remove you asap. Thank you.
Exhibition: 'The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch's Photography' at the National Nordic Museum, Seattle
Exhibition: 'Max Beckmann: feminine-masculine' at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Exhibition: 'Unearthed: Photography's Roots' at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
European art research tour exhibition: 'Alberto Giacometti' at the Trade Fair Palace, National Gallery Prague
Season's greetings from Art Blart 2020
Objet d'art: French and German enamelled boxes at the Louvre, Paris
European art research tour exhibition: 'Cy Twombly: Sculpture' at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London
Photographs: Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Part 2
European art research tour exhibition: 'László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929' at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
European art research tour: Pinball art at the Flippermúzeum, Budapest
Exhibition: 'Photography's Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
European art research tour: Vasarely Museum, Budapest permanent exhibition
Exhibition: 'Thomas Ruff' at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Lastest tweets
Exhibition: 'The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch's Photography' at the National Nordic Museum, Seattle… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago
Exhibition: 'Max Beckmann: feminine-masculine' at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg wp.me/pn2J2-frk… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
Exhibition: 'Max Beckmann: feminine-masculine' at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg wp.me/pn2J2-frk "These pain… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 week ago
Exhibition: 'Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography' at the Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana Part 2
Exhibition: 'nude men: from 1800 to the present day' at the Leopold Museum, Vienna
Exhibition: 'The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch's Photography' at the National Nordic Museum, Seattle
Exhibition: 'The Naked Truth and More Besides: Nude Photography around 1900' at the Museum for Photography, Berlin
Exhibition: 'Masculine / Masculine: The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the present day' at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Exhibition: 'The Naked Man' at Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
Photographs and text: George Platt Lynes and the male nude
Review: 'Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Exhibition: 'Masculinities: Liberation through Photography' at the Barbican Art Gallery, London
american photographers
Australian cabinet cards and cartes de visite
cultural commentator
Edward Burtynsky
English artist
Fredrick White
gallery website
Marcus Bunyan
Marcus Bunyan black and white archive
Monash Gallery of Art
Paul Outerbridge
photographic commentator
Polaroid photography
Roman Vishniac
5B4: Photography and Books
ArtKritique
bLOGOS/ HA HA
Fredrick White Sculpture
Hey! Hot Shot
Lens Culture: Photography and Shared Territories
Marcus Bunyan [] Image Maker
Melbourne Art and Culture Critic
Melbourne Jeweller
Melbourne Museum of Printing
Rory Hyde architecture blog
The Theory of Nevolution


text:
Q: C : double pointer passed as parameters comes back empty At first, it may sound normal if I free the allocation within the function, but it's not the case. As I'm writting these lines, I've found a work around, but I would like to keep a certain homogeneity in my code and would prefer to keep it the way it ways but you know working properly, so is there another solutions or my workaround is the only option?
The main function:
void main(void)
{
    SHead head; // Custom struct
    unsigned char **array = NULL; // pointer to 2D array

    allocArray2D(&head, array) // the function signature: (SHead*, unsigned char**)

    // here, the array pointer is still NULL (0x0)
    //...

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

The allocation function malloc a very small amount of memory around 21 unsigned char* and for each simple pointer 21 unsigned char.
Within the function, the pointer is fine and points to a proper address.
So my work around was modify the function from:
void allocArray(SHead* h, unsigned char** arr)
{
    int x, y, i;
    getsize(head, *x, *y);

    arr = (unsigned char**)malloc(sizeof(unsigned char*)*y);
    if(arr)
        printf(">> Erro allocating memory\n"), return;

    for(i =0; i<y; i++)
    {
        arr[i] = (unsigned char)malloc(sizeof(unsigned char)*x);
    }
}

to the following:
unsigned char** allocArray(SHead*)
{
    int x, y, i;
    unsigned char **arr;
    getsize(head, *x, *y);

    arr = (unsigned char**)malloc(sizeof(unsigned char*)*y);
    if(arr)
        printf(">> Erro allocating memory\n"), return;

    for(i =0; i<y; i++)
    {
        arr[i] = (unsigned char)malloc(sizeof(unsigned char)*x);
    }

    return arr; // returning the address
}

As I said earlier, I'd like to keep homogeneity within my code and would prefer to keep a function signature similar to other function I have. My workaround work properly. And I'm wondering if it is the only solution, or perhaps I am missing something.
EDIT: Following the comments I added more code.
Thank you,
Alex.

A: You have to pass a pointer to the 2dimensional array to your function, to write in  the function to the value behind the pointer:
SHead head; // Custom struct
unsigned char **array = NULL; // pointer to 2D array

allocArray2D(*head, &array)
                 // ^ address of array

-
void allocArray(SHead* head, unsigned char*** pArray)
                                  // ^ pointer to char** because its an output parameter
{
    int x, y, i;
    getsize( head, &x, &y );

    *pArray = malloc( y * sizeof( unsigned char * );
 // ^ assigne somtething to the variable array refered by the pointer pArray
    if( *pArray == NULL )
    {
        printf(">> Erro allocating memory\n")
        return;
    }

    for ( i = 0; i < y; i ++ )
        (*pArray)[i] = malloc( x * sizeof( unsigned char ) );
}

Note, what you did was to pass a NULL-pointe to the function allocArray.
An other solution would be to return the allocated memory by the return value of function allocArray:
 SHead head; // Custom struct
 unsigned char **array = NULL;

 array = allocArray( &head );

-
 unsigned char** allocArray( SHead* head )
 {
     int x, y, i;
     getsize( head, &x, &y );

     unsigned char** arr = malloc( y * sizeof( unsigned char * );
     if( arr  == NULL )
     {
        printf(">> Erro allocating memory\n")
        return;
     }

     for ( int i = 0; i < y; i ++ )
         arr[i] = malloc( x * sizeof( unsigned  char ) );
     return arr;
 }

A: If I have understood you correctly what you need is something like the following
For simplicity I excluded the parameter that refers to the structure.
void allocArray2D( unsigned char ***a, size_t n )
{
    *a = malloc( n * sizeof( unsigned char * ) );

    for ( size_t i = 0; i < n; i++ ) ( *a )[i] = malloc( n * sizeof( unsigned char ) );
}

//...

unsigned char **array = NULL; // pointer to 2D array

allocArray2D( &array, 21 );

If you want that the original object would be changed after passing it to a function then you have to pass it by reference.

A: Your call looks very strange.
First, you are passing *head. head seems to be an uninitialised variable, so passing *head seems badly wrong.
Second, the function called has no way of seeing array. Your call is equivalent to allocArray2D (*head, NULL) and not having the array variable at all. This also seems very wrong.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


These days, the level of Fox builds has stepped up quite a bit. Large wheels, in-the-weeds stance, Coyote-swap combination under the hood, and custom interiors are becoming commonplace. All you have to do is attend events like Mustang Week, Foxtoberfest, and Ponies in the Smokies, just to name a few.
Our boy Robert Miller pointed us to Ernest Miller's (No relation) 1992 Mustang LX coupe. Robert and Ernest have been friends ever since Robert drove by Ernest's house 15 years ago, spying a red hatch in the yard. Ernest was building a 347 for that car, and it wasn't for sale. However, a friendship started that day, which has continued to this day.
Ernest says all engine parts have been powder coated, which leads to a well-detailed engine compartment. And it may not be a Coyote-swap, but in our mind, nothing beats the nostalgia of a GT40 intake.
These days, Ernest and Robert are still building Fox Mustangs, and Ernest's 1992 LX coupe is a car he built in his carport. Ernest did 90-percent of the work, and he had to farm out the car's fresh paint. Otherwise, Ernest did the rest of the work on his carport.
The engine is a fresh bottom-end with a Trick Flow Stage 2 cam, Ford Performance heads and GT40 intake, and Canton valve covers. Behind the warmed-up small block is a T5Z transmission, an aluminum driveshaft, and a built 8.8 rear with an Auburn Pro differential, US Alloy axles, and Ford Performance 3.73 gears. The 4-lug system is swapped out for a 5-lug arrangement with Baer brakes, using Russell stainless steel brake lines. Wheels are XXR 521 examples wrapped in Nitto 555 Extreme treads.
Ernest ordered up a TMI upholstery kit and door panels for his LX, and did the work himself to restore the coupe's interior to like-new condition. He also added new carpet, a new headliner, and a new package tray, as well. For gauges, Ernest added a Florida 5.0 cluster with Auto Meter Phantom II mechanical minders.
Suspension and chassis modifications include J&M lower control arms with Comp Engineering uppers, Maximum Motorsports subframe connectors, QA1 coilovers and bumpsteer kit up front, and Strange Engineering struts and shocks.
We were able to see Ernest's coupe in person at Mustang Week, and you can see it in person at Foxtoberfest October 14, 2017 at Intimidators Stadium in Kannapolis, North Carolina. We'll be there, too.


Some call the Shih Tzu "the chrysanthemum-faced dog" because of the flowering hair on its face. "Shih Tzu" translates from Chinese to "lion dog", and in view of their decorative coats, this also makes a great deal of sense. Alert, friendly, and confident, some might say arrogant, these dogs make wonderful companions. This 2006 slimline calendar is an elegant way to celebrate the beautiful and spunky Shih Tzuh. This 2006 Slimline Wall calendar was published by Browntrout.
Select your favorite 2013 calender from our thousands of choices including our Shih Tzu Calendars assortment. Our calenders include almost every type of Wall Calendar, Daily Boxed Calendar, Desk Calendar, Engaement Calendar and more. We hope you like the selection of Slimline Wall Calendars.


Deals Depo 312-19A3R-AS Toyota Tundra Right Hand Side Tail Lamp Assembly. Home for sale at 159 Governors Dr, Forest Park, GA 30297 - 1,400 sq. ft., 3 beds, 2.5 baths. View photos and property info at RealtyTrac - 1082683657.
Page 4 - Search apartments in the 30297 zip code in Forest Park, GA with Apartment Finder.Please direct any questions or concerns to the Technology Service Center at 1-866-252-4360.Nearest School: Huie Elementary School Grocery: Shell Food Mart.
Search apartments in the 30297 zip code in Forest Park, GA with Apartment Finder.Headstones will memorialize loved ones in Forest Park Georgia 30297 for many years to come.My Food Storage Deals If you doubt my words, perform a comparison of US government treasuries and gold.
My Food Storage DealsMy Food Storage Deals Be confident that the storage buckets you buy with the intent retain preppers food do not allow light infiltration.
Find homes below market value using our up-to-date listings of Gillem Enclv, GA 30297 foreclosed homes for sale.
All HUD homes that are currently on the market can be found here on HUD.com. Find HUD properties below market. Compare hotels near Hartsfield-jackson Atlanta International Airport with Airport Parking and Room Deals.
Cooper Armchair by Pasargad For Sale.
Additionally with a rugged, snug lid that typically accompanies your square bucket are able to rest assured that items inside your buckets become better preserved in the expansion of an earthquake or flood.
Search all Forest Park Ga 30297 As-Is deals, As-Is Homes, Cheap houses for sale available in GA. You can do without bulky tools if a person yourself a software application knife and Leatherman Accessory.
Order pizza online for fast pizza delivery or drop by for carryout.BOEING LOGISTICS SPARES, INC is located at 5690 SOUTHFIELD CT BLDG P, Forest park, Georgia.
Get reviews, hours, directions, coupons and more for Liberty Package at 4568 Old Dixie Hwy, Forest Park, GA.
Get reviews and contact details for each business including videos, opening hours and more.Search by location and cuisine to find deals to thousands of great local restaurants with Restaurant.com.Forest Park, GA 30297 Accepting Offers Price Click for Deals.
Tough chewers have met their match with Outward Hound Invincibles.Official site for Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, InterContinental, Staybridge Suites, Candlewood Suites.
View detailed information and reviews for 4652 Jonesboro Rd in Forest Park, Georgia and get driving directions with road conditions and live traffic updates along the.


For that reason the department uses the month of April to bring the public's attention to the problem of child abuse and neglect.
Children Services Administrator Lori O'Brien said they are participating in in a statewide campaign April 10, Wear Blue to Work.
Wednesday, April 10 is also the day pinwheels will again be planted in front of the JFS Building on Main Street (as reminders of how many children Lake County Children Services served the previous year).
"At noon, at our Department of Job and Family Services, we will be having a ceremony to talk about the importance of child abuse prevention, and also honor our advocate of the year, and that's a person in the community who really goes above and beyond all year to protect children," O'Brien said.
Altogether the department received 5,000 calls last year about children. The department responded to 2,365 calls and worked with more than 1,000 children. More than 200 children needed to be removed from their homes to be cared for by foster families, adoptive families or relatives.
* Awarding a bid contract to Chagrin Valley Paving, Inc. for the Girdled Road and Morley Road Resurfacing Project as required by the Lake County Engineer in the amount of $1,331,506.
Engineer Jim Gills stated this project was being paid for with the additional $5 license plate fee the commissioners approved last year.
"We will start this almost immediately, as soon as the asphalt plants open, should be in the next couple weeks," he said.
The work should be done sometime in June.
* Awarding a bid contract to Osborne Concrete& Stone Co. for roadway materials – 2019 as required by the Lake County Engineer's Road Department in the amount of $108,747.50 (limestone) and $119,500 (plant mix pavements).
* Awarding a bid contract to Karvo Companies, Inc. for the Middle Ridge, Narrows and River Roads Resurfacing Project as required by the Lake County Engineer in the amount of $1,853,636.25.
This is also part of the 2019 road plan to be paid for by the $5 license fee.
* Rejecting the bids received on Feb. 20, 2019, approving the revised specifications and estimate of costs, and authorizing re-advertising for bids for the Carter Road Arch Culvert Repair – 2019 Project with a bid opening date of April 17.
Gills said the bids received were much more than anticipated so they reduced the size of the project and requested new bids.
* Awarding a bid contract in the amount of $659,194.54 To Monte Construction, Inc. for Glyco II Forcemain Replacement (Contract B) Project 364-S.
* Accepting a three-year maintenance bond in the amount of $3,305.28 for Crile Road Sanitary Sewer Extension Job No. 18-07 in Painesville Township.
* Certifying unpaid sewer and water sums and administrative charges to the Lake County Auditor.
* Approving Lake County Department of Job and Family Services Vouchers date of warrant April 5, 2019, in the amount of $47,113.65.
* Reappointing Paul R. Malchesky as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Lake County Library District, for a seven-year term commencing March 24, 2019 and ending March 23, 2026.
* Authorizing execution of a professional services agreement between IAP Government Services Group, K2M Design and the Lake County Board of Commissioners in an amount not to exceed $99,626.64 for an interior assessment of the Lake County Jail Facility and Sheriff's Office.
County Administrator Jason Boyd noted the exterior of the Lake County Sheriff's Office and Jail were assessed last year.
"This year, as directed by the Board in a work session earlier in January, you asked me to look at some firms to take a hard look at the physical condition of the inside of the Lake County Jail," he said.
The engineering company will examine all aspects of the jail facility and provide its professional assessment.
* Authorizing the president of the Board of Commissioners to execute a lease agreement between the Board of Commissioners and Donaldson Properties, Ltd. for a three-year period commencing April 1 and expiring March 31, 2022 for the Lake County Clerk of Court West-End Title Bureau.
* Granting authority to the county administrator to act on behalf of the Board of County Commissioners with certain limits.
Board President Jerry Cirino said this was a late addition to the agenda since they just received notice that morning that the Lake County Republican Party Central Committee decided to appoint Chris Galloway as county auditor to replace Ed Zupancic, who needed to resign.
The Board's legal counsel, David Hackman, stated that according to Ohio Law, the Board of Commissioners needed to approve all bonds for county public officials.
* Approving payment of bills as listed on the commissioners' approval journal in the amount of $842,233.94.
* Approving purchase orders as listed on the commissioners' purchase order approval journal in the amount of $865,732.43.
* Increasing appropriations for various non-general fund accounts.
* Transferring an appropriation within various general fund accounts.
* The commissioners adjourned to executive session to discuss personnel –collective bargaining and legal matters - pending or imminent court action.