Book books books Ouattara, Symbols, Collage, Ray, Rock Art, War, and Poppy

Several exciting and inspiring books have been gathering around me. a known weakness.  I am slowly plowing through…i am a slow especially with dense writing...dozens of new books are on the night stand.  Here are a few and personal stories around them. 

Typing this out , this time with more self inspection, catching my messy live typing phonetic misspellings..so many!.. It’s getting worse with age…so awful so, lazy of me. To my friends i am sorry.  Overwhelming today is the harsh realization of the continued misspellings, for instance the art dealer Vrej Baghoomian and artist Ouattara Watts.. among countless others…the grave misspellings make my wordsmith friends worry about me..myself also for that matter..My only defense is my writings here are generally spontaneous sketches fast and live in a moment of inspiration .. remembrance.,,friends here inspire me to keep going.  

 Books books books

I am thrilled to read a first in-depth survey and biography of Ouattara Watts. A friend I worked with in 1980s is has a couple of great shows up with books. I have learned more at many levels, his story is very moving, an artists journey from Africa to Paris to NY till today. The two books are produced by the Karma gallery in concert with the Currier Museum. One simply Ouattara over 400 pages.  So happy i put photo credit stickers on the installation and artwork transparencies back in the late 80s. several full page and double page spreads show installation and interiors with credit! Hooray. 

And he and Jean-Michel at Vrej’s… that shot also made it into a NewYork Times review.  “ A Code Maker Cracks the Code of the Art World”

 It inspired me to pull a cherished relic out  from the 80s, the Vrej Baghoomian gallery catalog of Ouattra’s break out show. Very proud that I did the photography for much of it ..gosh 34 years ago. Some in trade for work. Just now revisiting a warm inscription and drawing in the front pages. I tingle so happy for Mr. Ouattra Watts a great powerful painter.

Jean-Michel keeps reaching out. A interesting recent film reveals his sources and appropriations. “ Basquiat’s work ethic” - YouTube “ Most knew the source books,  For me it was in exciting they used my “ Man Dies “ portrait of JMB shortly before his tragic death.   “Man Dies” and a symbol is on the painting behind him it came from a rare book by  “Henry Dreyfuss Symbol Source Book  An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols “ - Foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller” Receiving the book  It brought back memories of conversations with JMB i have written about in my diaries …symbols and adobe mud.

  At that time in the mid 1980s i was traveling on field trips with my sister, a cultural anthropologist , Carol Patterson, documenting the south western Pueblo Indian rock art with her and mentor and guide La Van Marntineau who parents were French sheepherders were unable to care for a new born baby left him on Paiute Indian reservation in Utah. ( a long great story about traveling  with my sis  and La Van and his teepee and daughters who traveled dancing at powwows (black and white spotted spotted flicker bird costumes ). LaVan wrote a book from his extensive field studies called “ The Rocks Begin to Speak “  Among many lessons in the field  he introduced me to how to begin to read many rock symbols  which was a epiphany moment for me … and showed me how to make arrow heads with a antler tip and leather on your knee ..he was fast ..which he threw a Folsom point he made over his shoulder laughing. “ for scientist to discover”. La Vans books and my sisters books were very exciting for me at the time, the mid 80s… ..Also learning how mix mud and the building Adobe structures. Back in NYC  i told anyone that would listen about these adventures. 

Jean-Michel was very animated and excited when i told him these stories. The ancient rock symbols  and adobe building I see now how this was also alined at this moment with his new  artist friend Ouattara Watts. JMB was lit up by Ouattara’s work and history and sacred symbols.  Jean-Michel told me he had bought some land in New Jersey or upstate NY?, he wanted me to show him how to make adobe from the dirt on the property. He wanted to bring me there to see it.  Busy simply surviving i never followed up .Just night coke talk or maybe probably, anger or jealousy. I was broke he was rich.  Once i ran into him at a Interview party downstairs at Indochine on Lafayette in NoHo for Bob Colacello I think .., I was there with my girl friend Pamela Edelsten .. standing on the dance floor JMB came right up to me screaming in my face because the music was so loud ..”I thought you were going to show me how to make adobe “ we chit chatted and he then handed me a lit cigar size joint with chunks of burning hash dropping out and asked my girl friend to dance..and away they went for many songs .. the poison of jealousy and anger was in my blood. So I blocked him out. Now I wished id tried harder visiting ..or getting the balance due on a trade due , transparencies slides for art.

Collage 

My current fascination and work with collage was rewarded with a GREAT new book on my hero Ray Johnson “ A Book About Ray” by Ellen Levy. MIT press  “I don’t make pop art, I make chop art.” Its a first in-depth career survey. Opens up countless new insights on his life and work… his brilliance. My wild Parisian artist friend Matthew Rose @maybemistahcoughdrop got me addicted to Ray. 

Alerted on the treasured “ Old News” art newsletter from Jeff Weiss gosh ..everyday a curated art news  for over a couple decades ..5,500 morning reads.. … https://weisslink.com/sortaold-news/index.html  Last month Old News alerted me to a beautiful fat new history of Collage.400+ pages. “FRAGMENTARY FORMS A New History of Collage” by Freya Gowrley…A must have preorder. At first was super excited. It does survey in depth a multicultural  history of collage most would not weave into the art form we know today. It’s enlightening and dense cultural art study. For me the bottom fell out when she passed over several of my heroes .. like Christian Marclay “ the clock” fame and Ray Johnson. And a shallow brief pass at San Francisco Punk street art movement. And worse a thin passover on the Dadaist’s and amazing Hanna Hoch.  She blew past current active groups and movements ..For instance hometown hero Mario Zoots’s amazing international Colle project  @revuecolle  @zoots I hope the book will become more redeeming.

The Big Picture Colorado..@the_big_picture_colo .. our 2023- 25 catalog is in print on Blurb books. With thanks to ace assistant on screen. @gracefriesphoto. Great great great new work is flowing in for 2025-2027. We will launch during MoP in March. @mopdenver

A gift came in …marvelous dark humor on religion and advertising  “ Churches ad hoc “ A divine comedy”came in from a photographer in his late nineties . ;Herman Krieger.  He submitted to the Big Picture Colorado calling for 2025-27. www.hermankrieger.com. He trained in Denver during WWII , i shared my fathers book War Stories 1944 journal of Charles S. Sink  i recently put up on Amazon.  

I am getting to wrapping up a catalog of my retrospective last year RedLine Contemporary Arts Center.. Took a year to get to it. Again thanks for a excutive assistant Grace.

Once we are on personal books.. Poppy has written and illustrated over 20 unique precious kitty adventure books .. and bookmaker maker. 

@ouattarawatts #ouattarawatts #jeanmichelbasquiat @basquiatofficial @curriermuseum @fusi_l @karmakarma9 @buddhabacon @pesterchester #streetart  #wheatpasting 

Ouattara Watts NY Times

A Code Maker Cracks the Code of the Art World 

Ouattara Watts stayed under the radar for the last few decades. 

He’s back with a show at Karma Gallery and the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.

Ouattara Watts stands with his arms stretched at his sides. Ouattara Watts at his art studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.  Photo: Mogoli for The New York Times By Zoë Hopkins Nov. 21, 2024

 The artist Ouattara Watts usually enters his studio in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn under the blanket of the night. He has often worked between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. for most of his five-decade career. It is in the relative quiet of these hours that Watts says he can most clearly hear frequencies otherwise muted by the daytime buzz: those of otherworldly and occult elements that appear in his paintings. Even during the day, Watts’s sanctum-like studio felt a world apart from its industrial environs. On the afternoon of my visit, jazz music culled from his vast CD collection hummed quietly in the background. Several works in progress were propped up on the walls, on which hung signs that read: “No Photos.” (He made an exception for this article.) During our interview, Watts spoke with laconic language and elegant metaphors that delighted in furtive indirection rather than straightforward explication. Watts’s artworks are charged with their maker’s enigmatic tendencies. Animated by African spiritual traditions, mysticism and metaphysical cosmologies, his paintings — large canvases and wood panels that hover between figuration, abstraction and collage — are dense with unknown elements. At his studio, he spoke of mixing pigments with a “magic potion” of ingredients that he wouldn’t name to create a color he calls “Watts blue.” The sequences of numbers on some of his canvases are “codes” that must be cracked. “Maybe one day people will know,” he said teasingly. “But not today.” Several of Watts’s paintings are on view through Dec. 21 at Karma Gallery, in New York, a solo exhibition focused on his work from the 1990s, the decade that set his career in motion. 

The gallery has also published a 570-page monograph to accompany the show — the first extensive book on Watts’s work. Concurrently, at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., several of Watts’s paintings are on view in the show “Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts: A Distant Conversation” (through Feb. 23, 2025). The two became fast friends and creative interlocutors after they met at a gallery opening in Paris in the 1980s. 

An abstract painting features shapes and multiple shades of blue. “Spiritual Gangster 02,” 2023, in the exhibition “Ouattara Watts: ’90s Paintings” at Karma Gallery. An abstract painting features a blue character in its top right corner. 

Watts’s “Spiritual Gangster 06,” 2023, at Karma Gallery

The two shows are golden opportunities for engagement with the work of an artist who has been seminal but somehow overlooked despite his impressive exhibition history. In 1993, he was included in an show of Ivorian and Senegalese artists at the Venice Biennale. In 2002, his paintings were shown in “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994,” curated by Okwui Enwezor at what is now MoMA PS1. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith called it “one of those rare occasions when the usually hyperbolic term ‘landmark exhibition’ is not an overstatement.” That same year, Watts’s work appeared in Documenta XI, another Enwezor production famous for its engagements with topics of postcolonial globalization. Still, if Watts’s name doesn’t ring bells, it is because he has been somewhat guarded from the hustle and bustle of the art world. After the early decades of his career, he took on fewer shows. He was, he said, “taking a break from galleries, but never from working in the studio.” When painting, he explained, “every step I make has got to be a real one.” Watts, who is 67, was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. His family is from Korhogo, a small city in the north, where people continue to practice centuries-old religious traditions. There, Watts developed a close relationship with one of his great-uncles, a shaman. “He always said to me, ‘You know what? You cannot be an artist only for your tribe or your village. No, you are an artist because the artist is connected to the cosmos.’” 

Ouattara Watts and Jean-Michel Basquiat next to each other. Ouattara Watts and Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1988. The two became fast friends after they met at a gallery opening in Paris that year...Mark Sink, via Currier Museum of Art In his paintings. 

Watts undertakes this cosmic search using a lexicon of imagery and iconography culled from African spiritual traditions Often, these appear alongside numbers and mathematical symbols, which, for Watts, are representations of the universe and its science. Many of his pieces also incorporate three-dimensional objects — animal horns, small sculptures, photographs and textiles. In early paintings like “OZB” (1993), Amharic script swirls above Albert Einstein’s book “Relativity: The Special and General Theory,” a copy of which is affixed to the canvas. Elsewhere, in works like “Vertigo #2” (2011), which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, spiral forms evoke the cosmogony of the Dogon, who are Indigenous people in Mali. In “Sacred Painting” (1990), which is on view at Karma, an insulated electric wire clipped to the panel pays tribute to Shango, the Yoruba deity of lightning. “All of Africa is influential in my work,” Watts said, reflecting on the bricolage of cultures and countries that appear in his paintings. “My spirituality does not come from one place. It is not just Cote d’Ivoire or Nigeria or Senegal. It is Africa.” 

Image Four paintings on a wall that stands in front of a bench. From left, Ouattara Watts’s ”Beyond Life,” 1990; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Procession,” 1986; Watts’s “Intercessor #0,” 1989; and Watts’s “Botanique,” 2004, at the Currier Museum of Art.Credit...Morgan Karanasios/Currier Museum of Art These days, Watts travels throughout Africa regularly. But he has lived off the continent for most of his life and calls himself a “citizen of the world.” (This phrase is emblazoned on a ceiling beam in his studio.) In 1977, he left the Ivory Coast for Paris, where he studied painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. There, he was captivated by French surrealism and modernism, echoes of which come to life in his paintings.

In 1988, Watts met Basquiat, who, impressed by his work, persuaded him to move to New York, where Basquiat believed broader horizons were possible for artists. After a short time in the city, Watts had become embedded in its artist circles, befriending the likes of George Condo, David Hammons and Francesco Clemente. He grew hooked on the city and has remained here ever since. 

Ouattara Watts rests his arms on a brown surface and looks downward. When painting, Watts said, “every step I make has got to be a real one.”Elijah Mogoli for The New York Times 

Though Watts has been keeping a low profile in New York, in recent years his tempo has shifted into a higher gear. Since 2018, he has had shows in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Dakar and his hometown, Abidjan. He also participated in the 2021 Gwangju Biennale and the 2024 Shanghai Biennale. Though the cadence of his shows has grown more rapid, the work is still pure Watts. “He’s one of those artists who has managed to be consistent throughout five decades of work. But also, the work has never stopped moving and becoming more complex,” said Lorenzo Fusi, who curated the show at the Currier Museum of Art. Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, has been following Watts for years. “He’s a brilliant painter, but he’s understated,” Nzewi said. “We typically only think about artists who make a lot of noise but he’s an introvert, he has a very quiet charisma.” At the same time, he noted, Watts is “finding his true position as a painter of merit on a global stage.” The early works at Karma are mostly rendered on wood panels and have a coherent palette of earthy browns, yellows and greens. The show at Currier — which includes recent and older work — tilts on a different axis, one of playful line and effulgent color. (His vibrant blues and reds are not unlike Basquiat’s.) Watts’s visual language has always been abstract, but in the past decade, his paintings have been venturing further. “Spiritual Gangster 06” (2023), for example, seems to live in a kind of dream space of layered pastel hues and unmoored abstract symbols. Though his stylistic sensibilities have shifted over time, Watts’s idiosyncratic technique has remained consistent. He typically works on the floor, à la Pollock, sometimes leaving footprints on the canvas. He then hauls the paintings to the wall to observe and complete them.

Ouattara Watts stands in front of a large canvas. Watts’s said his creative process is at once “very physical” and shot through with spiritual intensity. “I go somewhere that I don’t control,” he said.

Credit...Elijah Mogoli for The New York Times 

Watts, who likens his improvisatory process to jazz, always plays music while he works. His favorites include Fela Kuti, Bob Dylan and Thelonious Monk. For Watts, these artists are essential to his process: “They give me energy to think,” he said. “I drink all of it up. And after I drink that light, I give it to others.” Often, he uses a paint-coated glove instead of a brush, leaving a thick, rough texture behind. Organic materials like shredded leaves and paper, which Watts mixes into his paint, lend additional density and friction to his surfaces. His creative process, he said, is at once “very physical” and shot through with spiritual intensity: He describes entering a kind of trance state when he paints, recalling the shamanistic rituals he grew up observing. “I go somewhere that I don’t control,” he said. Standing in front of one of his paintings, Watts gestured toward it, then to his own chest and said, without elaboration or hesitation: “We are intercessors.”

STEFANO and Julian Eastman NYC and Denver

Teri Toye behind STEFANO 1983

Patrick Fox 

Recently  I was contacted by Patrick Fox a friend from my days in NYC, an art dealer, brilliant curator, writer, activist who worked in the field of historic preservation, and recently a member of Nan Goldin’s group P.AI.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) He has been a private art dealer/consultant for over three decades.

Patrick Fox and Robert Hawkins

Our introduction was by artist Robert Hawkins his gallery, the Patrick Fox Gallery in the early 1980’s was hot and he was a NoHo treasure…gosh thats 40 years now.

The Fox Gallery mounted two exhibitions by the street artist known as  STEFANO (Stefano Castronovo). He had painted a number of murals in lower Manhattan and Patrick hunted him down to see if he would be interested in making paintings to exhibit.  Fortunately, he was game and hey did a number of exhibitions at the gallery  The first Stefano exhibit featured large paintings variations of the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) in the main exhibition space.  

Stephen Sprouse

Stephen Sprouse

The Tin Room had Stephen Sprouse leather jackets on crucifix shaped tree branches on which Stefano painted political, pop and cultural icons - Andy Warhol, Elvis, Darth Vader, Jesus, Marilyn, etc..  The show was a sensation.  The art world took notice when it was reviewed by Glenn O’Brien in Artforum, and the show received international press. From London to Tokyo.  More bombast was expected for the second STEFANO exhibition the following year, but STEFANO'S approach was quieter, more reverential and self reflective. For this exhibition was an elaborate collaboration with musician Julius Eastman was a surprise to everyone including the gallerist who understood the importance of full artistic freedoms  The gallery was transformed this time into something resembling a Franciscan Munk’s Musical Chanting Order.  The austere work was created on site with Julius living at the gallery for over a week while he and STEFANO painted a musical scroll the length of the gallery wall - the piece measured 42” X36’ long.   When completed, the paper piece looked like an oversized medieval abstract illuminated manuscript - scroll.  Stefano also painted a thunderous sky in the Tin Room on which Mr. Eastman painted more of his music.  Patrick recently commented, ”that show had one thing for sale; an impossibly long very white piece of paper.  As beautiful as it was, there wasn’t a collector at that time who was comfortable taking it on.”   

STEFANO

Those in Denver might recall the Mona Lisa on the side of a two story building, back then the Lynne Ida Gallery on 15th street and Platte. Fading some, Its remarkable the painting still still looks great today. Back in 1983 in Denver it was dayglow ! Corresponding with an exhibition at Lynne’s gallery.  One of the large paintings in the show was a fixture in Cliff Trubowitz’s  wonderful restaurant Bump and Grind  that had the infamous drag queen Sunday brunch. See attached.

  

Patrick asked me if i had a any documentation of his exhibition in NYC in the early 1980s.  Felt I might.  Off i went into a big OCD looking.. Forty years… its always a head trip to go back…photos release memories. Makes my head spin … I have many portraits with Stefano and work.. This “Tin Room" I have a remarkable portrait time capsule,  Salons of sorts were always there, I would race down to after work often finding Patrick and Teri Toye, Rene Ricard holding court in a breath takingly beautiful 18th century skylit room .. the Tin Room. 

 I had no memory of Julius Eastman who was a friend of STEFANO’s and was only introduced to Patrick when he arrived at the gallery to begin painting the scroll and where he stayed for the next ten days. Unbeknown to Patrick until a curator at MoMA approached him with the old invitation postcard from the Stefano Castronovo Julius Eastman exhibition and explained the renewed interest by a younger generation in all things Julius Eastman.  ’Stefano never explained to me who this man was.  I knew that he posed for ”The Man Who Heard Everything’ which was exhibited in the first exhibitions w the Mona Lisa’s.  So of course it was a surprise to me that Julius has been receiving major recognition in Europe and the US since his death.  The Julian Eastman story is a great romantic, tragedy..a rise and fall, a tale of the times for many of artist friends in Downtown NYC, the brilliance and genius at the fin de siecle.  His remarkable story. I now obsessed with his music ..a very early “ Sampler “  … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Eastman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Eastman)

Julius Eastman

With GREAT excitement I discovered I have several portraits of Julius! And those in and around his presence there,   Robert Hawkins, Teri Toye, Edit DeAk, Mette Madsen, Cookie Muller, Nan Golden, Rene Ricard, Jean Michel, Taylor Mead , Keith Haring, Bill Rice. EK.  Later chapters are Stephen Sprouse Eric Goode, DAZE,.. and many others.....in fact several hundred others Polaroids all from that magical Tin Room... Like many my age a memoir is in the works and I am focusing just on this Tinroom… a very special moment in contemporary art history. On a side note I am courting a home for these Polaroids. The winds are blowing to the Library of Congress and History Colorado.

#thatwhichisfundamental #juliuseastman #patrickfoxgallery #patrickfox  #roberthawkins #renericard #taylormead #EditDeAk   #CookieMuller  #NanGolden  #56bleecker