Tag: New York
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Artist a Day Challenge (20): Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims
1999 was steeped in Y2K mania. Prince’s 1999 and R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World” made notable musical comebacks and served as the soundtrack for our collective psyche dealing with the pending certainty that the world was hurtling toward a computer programmed apocalypse. The turn of the century came and went without much as much of a blip but that didn’t…
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Artist a Day Challenge (18, 19): Sanford Biggers and Looking to the Past to Question the Present
The other day when I was looking through Jennie C. Jones’ paintings I came across a photo that seemed out of place in relation to her current body of work; what I didn’t realize was that the picture was an important point of departure for the creation of her subsequent work. Homage to an Unknown Suburban Black Girl circa 1969 features a young black woman…
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The Let Down: Netflix’s Ambitious Take on the Birth of Hip Hop Falls Flat
The 2015 Netflix trailer for the Get Down gave us a glimpse of 1970’s New York and the birth of hip hop with the fire and drama you would expect from a Baz Luhrmann production. When the show launched August 12, they managed to deliver on lush cinematography, stunning style and familiar hip hop samples, but well after an…
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Camilo Jose Vergara’s “Old New York”
Camilo Jose Vergara’s work takes a historical photographic look at the dramatic evolution and dissolution of New York’s neighborhoods over decades. I really love his early early 1970’s work. For me, the most captivating series is “Old New York”, a body of photos that exposed the neglected, desolated, apocalyptic cultural landscape existing in the South Bronx. In these pictures you…
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What I’m Listening To: the Proto Disco Edition
Here’s some music for your Saturday. Love this mix of amazing songs from the early days of disco, Proto Disco. If this doesn’t get your day off on the right foot I don’t know what will. 🙂 Enjoy!
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The Fire and the Lotus: Proto Disco in New York
When I think about disco in New York in the 1970’s I think of the lotus flower. You can get so lost in the complexitiy of its beauty that it’s easy to overlook the murky waters the flower emerged from. We are entranced by a mythoized notion of disco marked by flashing neon lights and ribald…
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SUPERNOVA: The Rebirth of Disco
I have a slight obsession with disco. I honestly don’t know where it began but I’ve loved it since I was a little girl. Because of my love for disco, I get very defensive when it is routinely dragged as a vapid musical art form. WHY DO PEOPLE HATE DISCO? My quest to answer this…
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The Legacy of Larry Levan, the Soul of Paradise Garage
Legendary producer/ DJ Larry Levan’s birthday is today, so I thought I would pay tribute to the musical master by giving you a sneak peek of a project I’m launching on TONDI soon. This piece is best read by listening to Levan’s music and this 1979 live recorded set at the Paradise Garage is about as good as it…
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My Mourning of Synergy: The Legacy of Phife & a Tribe Called Quest
When De La Soul “officially” came on the scene with “3 Feet High and Rising” in the spring of 1989, I was in High School walking a not so fine line between my obsession with new wave synth pop and my love for rap (frankly I jumped between worlds), but when “Me Myself and I”…
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Artist a Day Challenge 2016-28: Shinique Smith
When I started Culture Shock Art in 2010, my goal was to explore street art and graffiti in Los Angeles, after I stumbled upon street artist JR’s work completely by accident. The process of discovery through investigating the origins of one of his murals led me to his 2010 TED talk after which I purchased one of his lithographs. That…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 