Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.
Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”
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Read MoreIn the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.
A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.
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Read MoreRecently, I had the pleasure of writing an essay for a new monograph on the contemporary Colombian artist Federico Uribe – whose haunting mixed-media paintings and sculptures draw on a difficult childhood, his complex relationship with Roman Catholicism and the violence of his homeland to explore issues of sex/gender, passion and the body, among others. Now the book is set to be released. ...
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Read MoreWhat would Abigail Solomon-Godeau make of “Dieux du Stade,” the new book by photographer Fred Goudon, inspired by the “Dieux du Stade” calendars featuring members of the Stade Français Paris rugby club and athletes from other disciplines?
In her 1997 book “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation” (Thames and Hudson), the feminist art historian suggests that the nude male has been the primary sex symbol throughout art history, reaching an apotheosis in Neoclassical (turn-of-the-19th-century) Paris in the work of such artists as David, Ingres and especially Girodet, who often portrayed their subjects in the languid pose of women offered up for the male gaze. ...
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