CAM's Art of the Bike exhibition offers fun, eye-opening ride through history
From a foldable bike used by World War II paratroopers to the souped-up Schwinn made famous in "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," a new exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum showcases 25 bicycles that span the vehicle's evolution from the 1860s through today.
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Boston Globe
15 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Beuford Smith, photographer who chronicled Black life, dies at 89
He was also a founding editor of 'The Black Photographers Annual,' a four-volume anthology that was published irregularly between 1973 and 1980 as a showcase for Black photographers. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'We had abstract, glamour, civil rights, everything in it,' Mr. Smith told The New York Times' Lens blog in 2017. 'We did not want to ghettoize, that Black photographers just photographed jazz musicians or poverty scenes.' Advertisement On April 5, 1968, the day after King was killed in Memphis, Smith brought his camera to Harlem. One photo he took that day was of a Black man enveloped in darkness, weeping as a white delivery man was being beaten on 125th Street. In an interview with the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2022, Mr. Smith said that the anguished man in Harlem was saying, 'Please don't attack him, leave him alone.' Advertisement Mr. Smith's picture of the crying man -- which he called one of his favorites -- was part of a series taken that day. Among the others were images of a white police officer grabbing a Black man's shoulder as he pushes him forward during the violence that erupted after the assassination; an officer, in silhouette, watching a fire burn on the street; a branch of the Black-owned Freedom National Bank, with a portrait of King resting on a funeral wreath behind the front window; and a Black man, shown from behind, holding a bag of groceries and leaning on a mailbox, possibly staggered by the news. Mr. Smith's "The Day After MLK was Assassinated, NYC, 1968." Keith de Lellis Gallery Most of Mr. Smith's photos were in black and white. But not all of them were mournful. 'Two Bass Hit,' taken in 1972, shows two bass players, standing next to each other, in silhouette, performing at a jazz club, with parachutes hanging from the ceiling. (His photos of musicians often depicted them in shadows or, as in this one, blurred by movement.) 'I couldn't have staged this any better than this, a profile of a Black musician,' Mr. Smith told the Cincinnati Art Museum. Other notable images from the 1960s and '70s include a little girl, her face in shadows, posing defiantly against a wall; a little boy holding an umbrella that has lost its canopy and that is only a handle, shaft and ribs; and an eager-looking man clutching a small bouquet of roses, perhaps looking to present it to his lover. 'His work is eloquent and moving and captured Black people with great intimacy,' Kinshasha Holman Conwill, a former deputy director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African History and Culture, said in an interview. 'There's something about a photographer who has that kind of rapport with and love for Black people.' Advertisement Reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Smith's photos at the Studio Museum in Harlem for the Times in 1972, A.D. Coleman said the photos showed an 'adherence to a head‐on, gimmick-free, documentary style, a concentration on urban Black life as the central theme and a consistent confrontation of human emotion.' Beuford Smith was born April 12, 1936, in Cincinnati, the only child of Theodore Smith, a porter, and Beulah (Conner) Smith, who took care of the home. A self-taught photographer, he was inspired to pursue his craft seriously in New York City when he saw the pictures taken by pioneering Black photographer Roy DeCarava in 'The Sweet Flypaper of Life,' a book about life in Harlem with fictional text by poet Langston Hughes. Mr. Smith, taken by Anthony Barboza. Keith de Lellis Gallery After Mr. Smith met DeCarava in 1965, DeCarava invited him to his loft to look at his portfolio. He later introduced Mr. Smith to Kamoinge, where he was the first director. Mr. Smith held jobs at small printing companies until he started working as a freelance photographer in about 1966. He also worked for photo agencies and, in 1977, started his own, Cesaire Photo Agency. His clients included AT&T, Emory University, Merrill Lynch, and General Electric. His photos appeared over the years in Camera, Candid Photography and other publications, and in books including 'The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family' (2004), whose cover used his photo of the man holding roses. Mr. Smith remembered an instance in which he believed racism had played a role in the rejection of his photographs by mainstream magazines. He had tried to persuade Life, Look, and other publications to buy the pictures he took after King's death, particularly the one of the crying man. Advertisement 'They said, 'Oh no, if that had been in color we would get it, we would buy it,'' he told the Cincinnati Art Museum. 'But if it had been color they would have said, 'Oh, if it was black and white we would buy it.' But if a white photographer had taken it, it would have been there.' Mr. Smith and his Kamoinge colleagues -- among them Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, Ming Smith, Adger Cowans, and Daniel Dawson -- were celebrated in the traveling exhibition 'Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop,' which originated at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2020. 'They were showing what could be done as individuals, but also as a collectivity,' John Edwin Mason, a historian at the University of Virginia, told the Times at the time. 'They came of age in the age of Black nationalism, Black self-assertion and self-determination.' Mr. Smith's photographs are in the collections of several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In addition to his wife, he leaves a son, Cesaire, from a previous relationship, as well as two grandsons and one great-granddaughter. Mr. Smith's "Milt Jackson, c. 1960s." Keith de Lellis Gallery When the Keith de Lellis Gallery in Manhattan mounted the exhibition 'Black Lives: Photographs of Beuford Smith' in 2017, art critic John Yau, writing in the online arts magazine Hyperallergic, praised the composition of the photos, including one of a boy crouching on a sidewalk in Manhattan, wrapped in fabric that reveals only his eyes and the top of his head. A few feet away, in the street, a doll, which is missing its arms and a leg, lies amid pieces of refuse. Advertisement 'It is almost as if the doll is on the orchestra pit with her head turned toward us, while the boy is onstage, about to deliver his soliloquy,' Yau wrote. 'What will he say?' Mr. Smith's "Man Behind Wall, MoMA, 1965." Keith de Lellis Gallery This article originally appeared in
17 hours ago
From the Greek mountains to Manhattan: folk music icon Petroloukas Chalkias honored after death
ATHENS, Greece -- ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece is honoring the late clarinetist Petroloukas Chalkias, whose hypnotic, note-bending performances over the course of more than 70 years made him a hero of mountain folk music. Chalkias, who died at 90 over the weekend, lay in state Wednesday at the Athens Cathedral — a rare honor typically reserved for prime ministers and religious leaders. As pallbearers emerged through the doors in a chapel next to the cathedral, carrying the coffin, silence descended. Mourners then clapped and shouted 'immortal' as musicians played folk tunes. It was a solemn prelude to his funeral which will take place in the rugged highlands of Epirus, in northwest Greece, where he first took up the clarinet as a boy of 11. Greek President Constantine Tassoulas earlier this week described Chalkias as a 'legendary figure.' Epirus' folk music, slowly unfolding and often centered around the clarinet, is steeped in improvisation, with its wanderings inviting comparisons to rural blues and jazz. It's one of the reasons that, while not so distinguished as a recording artist, Chalkias' live performances made him a household name for Greeks young and old alike. His style evolved after settling in New York as a young man, joining a wave of musicians who emigrated along with other Greeks to escape the hardship of postwar poverty. Chalkias found an unlikely second stage: dimly-lit clubs filled with Greek emigres and curious outsiders. Among those drawn to his performances were jazz legends Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong. Musicians paying their respects on Wednesday praised Chalkias for his generosity with his time in helping fellow artists. 'I was a young woman when I started out and I was incredibly lucky to have him support me,' folk singer Giota Griva said. 'His influence was immense. He was an artist who will never leave us.' Born Petros Loukas Chalkias, the musician was the son and grandson of clarinet players. He was raised with the region's rich tradition of live music — an essential part of village festivals, celebrations, and mourning rituals. Discouraged at first by a family wary of the musician's path, the young Chalkias fashioned his own makeshift clarinet from a hollow reed, carving its finger holes. By his early teens, his playing — raw and instinctive, but undeniably gifted — was good enough to earn him a spot on national radio. Chalkias spent nearly 20 years in the US and raised a family there, but said he always intended to return to Greece. He did so in 1979, performing live across the country and reconnecting with Delvinaki, the red-roofed mountain village of his birth near Greece's border with Albania. Delvinaki bore deep scars from the devastations of World War II and the civil war that followed. Chalkias, like many of his generation, grew up with interrupted schooling and little formal training. His music was learned by ear and memory, and never performed using sheet music. 'In the hearts of all Greeks, he stands as the foremost ambassador of our folk song tradition,' President Tassoulas, also from Epirus, said in a statement. 'Though Petros Loukas Chalkias has departed this life, his voice has not fallen silent –- nor will it ever.' Chalkias died in Athens. His family did not announce the cause of his death. His funeral will be held at the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Delvinaki on Thursday. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
New York Times
18 hours ago
- New York Times
He Locked Away His Wartime Memories Until His Granddaughter Opened the Pages
To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather's scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died. With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life. Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley's sternly worded 'Special Orders for German American Relations,' the album includes Herbert J. Clark's photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau. His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose 'Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath' (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 'The Scrapbook,' however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather's attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn't seen, until after his funeral. 'I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,' she said. Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
