“Episode #175: Filmed in San Francisco in 2000, Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) discusses the female figures she incorporated into many of her paintings and graffiti tags. Loosely based on women she discovered while listening to folk records, watching buck dance videos, or reading about the history of swimming, Kilgallen painted her heroines to inspire others and to change how society looks at women. Three of Kilgallen’s heroines—Matokie Slaughter, Algia Mae Hinton, and Fanny Durack—are shown and heard through archival video, images, and audio recordings. Kilgallen is shown tagging train cars with her husband, artist Barry McGee, in a Bay Area rail yard and painting in her studio at UC Berkeley.
Margaret Kilgallen’s work reflects her encyclopedic knowledge of signs drawn from American folk tradition, printmaking, and letterpress. Kilgallen has a love of “things that show the evidence of the human hand.” Painting directly on the wall, Kilgallen creates room-size murals that recall a time when personal craft and handmade signs were the dominant aesthetic.”
Here are a few never-seen-before photos of The Assholes: Hole Invasion, a comic book by Shock G of Digital Underground. These photos are of the spiral-bound, one-sided dummy that was used for editing in 1999. Unfortunately, the book was never published, and this is one of the only—if not the only—copies in existence.
The photographer, playboy, and Warhol pal never seemed to care much about his legacy or making money. Now that he’s 75, his wife, Nejma, wants to change all that—even if it means clawing back work he used to pay off bar tabs and infuriating his friends.
“Pug, a thirteen year old boy living on a dangerous Westside block, has one goal in mind: to join the 12 O’Clock Boys; the notorious urban dirt-bike gang of Baltimore. Converging from all parts of the inner city, they invade the streets and clash with police, who are forbidden to chase the bikes for fear of endangering the public. Pug looks to the pack for mentorship, spurred by their dangerous lifestyle. He narrates their world as if explaining a dreamscape, complemented with unprecedented, action-packed coverage of the riders in their element, guided by the riders themselves as they take to the streets and clash with Police. The film presents the pivotal years of change in a boy’s life growing up in one of the most dangerous and economically depressed cities in the United States.”
On view now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Pump Me Up: D.C. Subculture of the 1980s is Roger Gastman’s gift to what was once Chocolate City. Tracing the history of the underground scenes in Washington, D.C., during the 80s, the exhibition is heavy on rare, cultural artifacts from the worlds of Go-Go music, graffiti, and a world famous punk and hardcore scene… as well as in-depth look at notorious “Mayor For Life” Marion Barry. A must see.
Every day, hundreds of tourists arrive in Iquitos, Peru, seeking spiritual catharsis or just to trip their heads off. But increasingly often their trip becomes a nightmare, and some of them don’t go home at all.
Seventy years ago in 1943, Ansel Adams volunteered to photograph life at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. The highly censored photos have often been criticized as propaganda for not showing the actual suffering of the Japanese interns.
“The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment… All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.”
