Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
q2K BHP
Black History Portal
THE BHP WIRE —
HIDDEN TRUTHS
What's New!
Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Rob Pruitt | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1964[1] |
| Education | Corcoran College of Art and Design Parsons School of Design |
| Known for | |
Rob Pruitt (born 1964) is an American post-conceptual artist. Working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture, he does not have a single style or medium.[2] He considers his work to be intensely personal and biographical.[3]
Pruitt has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally; in 2013 the Aspen Art Museum held his mid-career retrospective.[4]
Pruitt grew up in Rockville, Maryland.[3] He attended Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he became friendly with the admissions director, Tim Gunn. Pruitt transferred to Parsons School of Design when Gunn began teaching there. During college, Pruitt lived at the Chelsea Hotel and says he focused his energy on partying rather than studying.[5]
Pruitt began exhibiting in the early 1990s with his then collaborator, Jack Early. After a controversial exhibition, Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue, at Leo Castelli Gallery their partnership disintegrated and neither had major shows for several years.[6]
While galleries refused to represent his solo work, Pruitt contributed to a few group shows. Pieces from this time dealt with his exclusion from the art world; his first sculpture at Gavin Brown's enterprise was an Evian fountain, which, as Mia Fineman points out, is related to baptism and rebirth.[7]
In 1998 Pruitt caused another minor scandal with a piece called Cocaine Buffet which was shown at The Fifth International, Chivas Clem's artists-run space. The show was co-curated by Jennifer Bornstein. He installed a 16-foot mirror with a line of real cocaine running down the center, in which visitors were welcome to partake. Publicity stunt, peace offering, minimalist sculpture, or indictment of the greed and glamour of the art world, it changed the sensation associated with his name.[7]
The following year Pruitt held his first solo show, “101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself,” where he applied humor to the genre of language-based conceptual art. The recipe-style book was filled with instructions for making and decorating such as “Paint secret paintings on walls with glow in the dark paint” and “Draw yourself into your favorite comic strip.” Others were suggestions on how to interact with the world in a different way, like “Sit on the toilet backwards” and “Go on an animal photo safari in a city: dogs, cats, pigeons, rats, and squirrels.”[8]
The exhibition was thirty-five of these instructions realized, including an exercise bike facing a painting and a pile of pennies on the floor. During the time he was barred from the art world, Pruitt briefly worked for Martha Stewart Living, coming up with DIY craft ideas; a DIY sensibility runs throughout his work.[9]
In 2001 Pruitt showed the first of the glittery panda paintings that would become his trademark.[10] He explains his choice of subject matter thus: “I see it as a kind of corporate damage control -- like trying to market Perrier after they found benzene in it, or Firestone tires after they exploded. I was a reviled figure, but everybody loves a panda.” He remembers childhood visits to the giant pandas at the National Zoo.[5] Pruitt has made many versions his panda painting using different techniques and stylizations of the same subject matter.
Critic Michelle Grabner analyzes the panda project thus: “The paintings' clichéd imagery neutralizes their real endangered status making us less culpable in the creatures' pending extinction. And therein lies the beauty of the clichéd image." She goes on, "This appropriation of similes, once strictly the providence of kitsch, has nothing to do with blurring the distinctions between high and low. Instead, rainbows and butterflies have come to symbolize a magical new world where order is without hierarchies, edification is without snobbishness[…]Pruitt produces his art without the slightest glance of irony. He makes glamorous and admirable our drive for worldly success while commiserating with our search for inner virtue.”[11] Although the paintings are designed and tightly crafted, they are imperfect; the artist's hand is evident. His use of glitter has been compared to Andy Warhol's diamond dust, but Pruitt describes his own work as “basically blown up versions of dining table craft projects... I’ve really enjoyed letting the world know that not everything is so mystified or so regulated to expertise—that you can make something really beautiful with a little ingenuity and some supplies from Michael’s.”[9]
Pruitt collaborated with Jimmy Choo in 2012 to create a line of shoes and handbags featuring panda bears and animal prints.[12]
In 2013 Pruitt installed his "Last Panda" show at Gavin Brown's defunct bar, the Passerby. The space, which was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, provided an apocalyptic setting for his rainbow-colored work.[13]
Pruitt began his Flea Market happening for the 1999 Gavin Brown summer show. He invited artist friends to set up tables and sell whatever they wanted, be it their own artwork or junk from their apartment. The gallery space became a place to socialize with the artist, creating a feeling of community between makers and sellers. The Flea Market has since been repeated at art fairs and museums.
For the market's latest iteration, Pruitt is running an eBay store, which features a curated selection from his collection of secondhand objects.[14] He also regularly attends estate sales, where he continues to discover new items for his collection.[15]
The Guggenheim approached him in 2009 to reimagine their annual fund-raising event. Instead of the usual gala, Pruitt conceived a performance piece: a tongue-in-cheek, Oscars-style award show, with nominees for categories like Solo Gallery Show of the Year, Critic of the Year, and Best New Artist. Like much of Pruitt's work, the show falls somewhere between sincerity and parody.[16] Although it is not unheard of to give awards for fine art (in Britain, for example, the Tate awards the prestigious Turner Prize), Pruitt's Art Awards are not universally popular with critics. Artist of the Year Mary Heilmann describes them as “serious and deep and cheesy at the same time.”[7]
The 2013 rendition of the art awards appeared in Art in America and featured selfies of the nominees.[17]
2010 saw Pruitt's sprawling[18] solo show “Pattern and Degradation,” which was considered confirmation of his part of the art establishment.[3] The show was held at Gavin Brown and spilled over to the nearby gallery Maccarone Inc.
It featured brightly patterned paintings influenced by Amish quilt designs. Pruitt was inspired by the idea of rumspringa, a time when Amish youths leave their community to experience the broader world before returning to the church and responsibility. He describes an artist's life as a kind of perpetual rumspringa, less constrained as artists are from the traditional expectations of society.[19]
The show also included humanoid monsters made out of trash, collaged self-portraits, candy-filled stacks of painted tires, and photorealistic paintings of Cinnabon cinnamon rolls with geometrically piped paint for icing. Randy Kennedy describes a unifying theme to the multivalent show: “Everything in it seems to pivot on the idea of pattern and design as a valiant but usually doomed attempt to impose some order and beauty on a random, chaotic world.”[3]
Pruitt has made a variety of paintings with colored gradients. The “Faces” series are scrawled line drawings of features that are then transferred onto gradients and flocked. Reminiscent of emoji, each face has a distinct emotion or personality.[20]
These developed into a later series called “The Suicide Paintings,” window-like portals consisting of pure gradients juxtaposed by a differently colored frame. While the gradients are close to perfect, they are not digitally generated. These paintings were installed with chromed television sets and stacks of black and white cubes. They look like color studies, polluted vistas, and screen savers. Critic Florence Waters describes her experience with the work: "The absence of a story is made alarming by the scale and intensity of the encounter with colour on canvas."[21]
Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz collaborated on an installation piece called Peacock Hill. In 2003 they bought a ramshackle, eleven-bedroom Victorian mansion in Fleischmanns, New York, painted it black, and decorated it like a haunted house with faux taxidermy and gothic furniture. Outside they arranged a graveyard using plywood tombstones with sardonic inscriptions.[22] Ken Johnson compared it to the self-mocking art-as-life collaborations of Gilbert and George but overall described the project, as it was presented in a 2003 exhibit at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, as "self-congratulatory."[23]
Pruitt used tombstones again in a 2008 show where he created monuments for celebrities who had died the previous year. They were installed in a room whose walls were papered in a year's worth of iPhone photographs.[24]
In 2011 Pruitt created "The Andy Monument" for the Public Art Fund; it is a ten-foot-tall, chrome-finished statue of Andy Warhol. The sculpture resided outside the building that housed Warhol's Factory in the 1970s and early 1980s.[25]
In 2016, Pruitt collaborated with the retailer J. Crew to design a limited edition piece of clothing: a rash guard inspired by his color gradient work.[26] The Rob Pruitt™ for J. Crew Rash Guard retails for $125.00, with half of the proceeds donated to charity.[27]
A recent demonstration of his work was showcased as part of the Desert X exhibit in the Coachella Valley from February 25 - April 30, 2017.
Represented by Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Massimo De Carlo,[4][28] Pruitt shows regularly at art fairs. He is also known for throwing parties; on April 20, 2013 he turned MOCA's annual gala into a weed-themed bacchanalia, which raised over two million dollars.[29]
In June 2013 his work set a record price at a Christie's charity auction when a panda painting sold for $315,000, over twice its estimated value.[30]
Pruitt currently resides in New York City with his partner Jonathan Horowitz, who is also an artist.[5]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Rob Pruitt (born 1964) is an American post-conceptual artist. Working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture, he does not have a single style or medium. He considers his work to be intensely personal and biographical. Pruitt has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally; in 2013 the Aspen Art Museum held his mid-career retrospective.
Delusional Downtown Divas is a scripted comedy webseries by Lena Dunham. The show was originally commissioned by Index Magazine (founded by Isabel Halley's father, the artist Peter Halley) and was first shown at the Art Production Fund lab in January 2009. The show revolves around three young women who were raised amidst the New York City art world, and try to establish themselves in the art community with mixed success. The series heavily parodies the New York art world. Art industry insiders such as Yvonne Force Villareal, Nate Lowman, Rob Pruitt, and others have cameos. The show brought much attention to creator Lena Dunham. In 2010, it was announced that Dunham was creating a television show for HBO. The show, Girls, draws from Dunham's first show, Delusional Downtown Divas. Ten full episodes and a short title video are available on Vimeo, and an additional nine on YouTube.
Edward Scott Pruitt (born May 9, 1968) is an American attorney, lobbyist and Republican politician from the state of Oklahoma. He served as the 14th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from February 17, 2017, to July 9, 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, resigning while under at least 14 federal investigations. Pruitt denies the scientific consensus on climate change. Pruitt represented Tulsa and Wagoner counties in the Oklahoma Senate from 1998 until 2006. In 2010, Pruitt was elected Attorney General of Oklahoma. In that role, he opposed abortion, same-sex marriage, the Affordable Care Act, and environmental regulations as a self-described "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda." He sued the EPA at least 14 times in the role. Pruitt was elected as chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association in 2012 and was re-elected for a second term in February 2013. He received major corporate and employee campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, taking in at least $215,574 between 2010 and 2014 despite running unopposed in the latter year. Pruitt was nominated to lead the EPA by President Donald Trump after the 2016 election, and was confirmed by the United States Senate in February 2017 in a 52–46 vote. By July 2018, Pruitt was under at least 14 separate federal investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the EPA inspector general, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, and two House committees over his spending habits, conflicts of interest, extreme secrecy, and management practices. Pruitt made frequent use of first-class travel as well as frequent charter and military flights. He leased a condo in Washington, D.C., at a deeply discounted rate from a lobbyist whose clients were regulated by the EPA. Pruitt further caused ethics concerns by circumventing the White House and using a narrow provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to autonomously give raises to his two closest aides of approximately $28,000 and $57,000 each, which were substantially higher than salaries paid to those in similar positions in the Obama administration, and which allowed both to avoid signing conflicts of interest pledges. Some conservatives joined a growing chorus suggesting that Pruitt should resign. On July 5, 2018, Pruitt announced he would resign from office on July 9, leaving Andrew R. Wheeler as the acting head of the agency. In April 2022, Pruitt filed to run for the United States Senate to represent Oklahoma in that state's special election to replace Senator Jim Inhofe, who retired. He lost in the Republican primary, garnering 5% of the vote.
Jonas Mekas (; Lithuanian: [ˈjonɐs ˈmækɐs]; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian (fled the Soviet Regime) filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide. Mekas was active in New York City, where he co-founded Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers' Cooperative, and the journal Film Culture. He was also the first film critic for The Village Voice. In the 1960s, Mekas launched anti-censorship campaigns in defense of the LGBTQ-themed films of Jean Genet and Jack Smith, garnering support from cultural figures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag. Mekas mentored and supported many prominent artists and filmmakers, including Ken Jacobs, Peter Bogdanovich, Chantal Akerman, Richard Foreman, John Waters, Barbara Rubin, Yoko Ono, and Martin Scorsese. He helped launch the writing careers of the critics Andrew Sarris, Amy Taubin, and J. Hoberman. During World War II, Mekas edited and contributed to two far-right, collaborationist newspapers under the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, the significance of which has been debated by historians. His major films include The Brig (1964), Walden: Diaries Notes and Sketches (1968), and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972). His early poetry collection Idylls of Semeniskiai (1948) is a celebrated work in his native Lithuania. In 2024, the Centre Pompidou dedicated its annual Poetry Day to Mekas, following past editions honoring figures such as Patti Smith and John Giorno. The event, which included readings, screenings, and performances celebrating his literary and cinematic legacy, was held across multiple cities, including Paris, Lviv, Seoul, Los Angeles, Vilnius, and Tehran.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
