Carlo McCormick | |
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| Born | 1960 (age 63–64) |
| Occupation(s) | Critic and curator |
| Employer | Paper |
| Notable work | Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art |
| Spouse | Tessa Hughes-Freeland |
Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator living in New York City. [1] He is the author of numerous books, [2] monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists. [3]
McCormick was Senior Editor of Paper . [4]
He lectures and teaches extensively at universities and colleges around the United States on popular culture and art. His writing has appeared in Effects : Magazine for New Art Theory, Aperture, Art in America, Art News, Artforum, [5] Camera Austria, High Times, Spin, Tokion, Vice and other magazines.
He appears in an on-camera interview in the 2017 documentary film Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat by Sara Driver that contains extensive coverage of Colab, The Real Estate Show , The Times Square Show and ABC No Rio.
McCormick was guest curator of the exhibition The Downtown Show: the New York Art Scene from 1974 to 1984 (in consultation with Lynn Gumpert, and Marvin J. Taylor) that was held at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library from January 10 until April 1, 2006. [6] The exhibition examined the rich cross-section of artists and activities that coexisted and often overlapped in Lower Manhattan between 1974 and 1984. Emerging out of the deflated optimism of the Summer of Love (and energized by the enactment of the loft laws that made it legal for artists to live in downtown New York's industrial spaces) the Downtown no wave scene attracted painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, performance art, filmmakers, and writers who could afford the then-low rent lofts and Lower East Side tenement apartments.
The Downtown Show: the New York Art Scene from 1974 to 1984 show traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (May 20 to September 3, 2006) and the Austin Museum of Art, in Austin, Texas (November 18, 2006, to January 28, 2007). It was chosen as first place winner by the International Association of Art Critics/USA (AICA USA) for best thematic show in New York City in 2005-2006.
In 1985, McCormick curated the Tellus #8 USA/Germany issue of Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine . [7] McCormick has also curated art shows for the Bronx Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art and the Woodstock Center for Photography, and collaborated with The Museum of Sex on their exhibition Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985, featuring visuals chronicling the emergence of punk subculture and punk music. [8] [9]
No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene that emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock's recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.
DNA was an American no wave band formed in 1977 by guitarist Arto Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield, and later joined by drummer Ikue Mori and bassist Tim Wright. They were associated with the late 1970s New York no wave scene, and were featured on the 1978 compilation No New York.
Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music, which developed in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s.
Ludlow Street runs between Houston and Division streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Vehicular traffic runs south on this one-way street.
Tom Otterness is an American sculptor who is one of America's most prolific public artists. Otterness's works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums around the world, notably in New York City's Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City and Life Underground in the 14th Street – Eighth Avenue New York Subway station. He contributed a balloon to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 1994 he was elected as a member of the National Academy Museum.
Colab is the commonly used abbreviation of the New York City artists' group Collaborative Projects, which was formed after a series of open meetings between artists of various disciplines.
Theoretical Girls were a New York-based no wave band formed by Glenn Branca and conceptual artist and composer Jeff Lohn that existed from 1977 to 1981. Theoretical Girls played only about 20 shows.
Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine utilized the audio cassette medium to distribute no wave downtown music and audio art and was in activity for the ten years of 1983–1993.
Noise Fest was an influential festival of no wave noise music performances curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at the New York City art space White Columns in June 1981. Sonic Youth made their first live appearances at this show.
Ground Zero Gallery was an art gallery formed in the East Village of Manhattan in New York City in mid-1983 as a vehicle for the partnership of artist James Romberger and his co-founder Marguerite Van Cook. In 1984, the gallery found its first physical home on East 11th Street and showed the work of many East Village artists who went on to gain national recognition. It was an early proponent of installation art. Ground Zero was the production name for many projects in various media undertaken by the team of Van Cook and Romberger prior to the September 11 attacks.
Marguerite Van Cook is an English artist, writer, musician/singer and filmmaker. She was born in Portsmouth, England and now resides in New York City on the Lower East Side, in the East Village. She attended Portsmouth College of Art and Design, Northumbria University Graphic and Fine Arts programs, BMCC, and Columbia University for English (BA) and Modern European Studies (MA). She holds a PH.D in French on eighteenth century political economics in the work of women writers from CUNY Graduate Center. She has also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and currently at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York.
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism. He is best known for creating big modernist monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, torn or twisted off their stretchers. He died in a motorcycle traffic accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Barbara Ess was an American pinhole camera photographer, No Wave musician and Just Another Asshole editor. She taught photography at Bard College since 1997; who in 2024, along with the Schwartz family, has established an annual award to assist Bard College photography students in need called The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography.
Pat Place is an American artist, photographer, and musician noted for her work as a founding member and guitarist of no wave bands James Chance and the Contortions and Bush Tetras.
Alan W. Moore is an art historian and activist whose work addresses cultural economies and groups and the politics of collectivity. After a stint as an art critic, Moore made video art and installation art from the mid-1970s on and performed in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech series. He has published several books and runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied autonomous social centers. His partial autobiography was published in 2022 in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest as Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld. Moore lives in Madrid.
Mitch Corber is a New York City neo-Beat poet, an eccentric performance artist, and no wave videographer known for his rapid whimsically comical montage and collage style. He has been associated with Collaborative Projects, Inc., participated in Public Arts International/Free Speech and The Times Square Show, and is creator-director of cable TV long-running weekly series Poetry Thin Air in New York City and its on-line poetry/video archive. He has worked closely with ABC No Rio, Colab TV and the MWF Video Club and his audio art have been published on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine three times. He is a recipient of a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship grant (1987) in the field of emerging artforms.
The Real Estate Show was a squatted exhibition by New York artists' group Colab, on the subject of landlord speculation in real estate held on New Year's Day in a vacant city-owned building at 123 Delancey Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City.
Robert Hawkins is an American artist born in Sunnyvale, California, USA and presently lives in London, UK., Hawkins' is best known for his "ferocious" style of realism. His first drawing in a publication appeared in the kid's section of the San Francisco Chronicle at the age of 5.
Tessa Hughes-Freeland is a British-born experimental film maker, writer living in New York City. Her films have screened internationally in North America, Europe and Australia and in prominent museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. She has collaborated on live multi-media projects with musicians like John Zorn and J. G. Thirlwell. She and Ela Troyano co-founded the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984 and served as its co-directors until 1990. Hughes-Freeland later served as President of the Board of Directors of the Film-Makers Co-Operative in New York City from 1998-2001. She has published articles in numerous books, including “Naked Lens: Beat Cinema” and “No Focus: Punk Film,” and in periodicals including PAPER Magazine, Filmmaker magazine, GQ, the East Village Eye, and Film Threat.
The Times Square Show was an influential collaborative, self-curated, and self-generated art exhibition held by New York artists' group Colab in Times Square in a shuttered massage parlor at 201 W. 41st and 7th Avenue during the entire month of June in 1980. The Times Square Show was largely inspired by the more radical Colab show The Real Estate Show, but unlike it, was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in what was then a Times Square full of porno theaters, peep shows, and red light establishments. In addition to experimental painting and sculpture, the exhibition incorporated music, fashion, and an ambitious program of performance and video. For many artists the exhibition served as a forum for the exchange of ideas, a testing-ground for social-directed figurative work in progress, and a catalyst for exploring new political-artistic directions.
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