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John Dunbar (born 1943 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-British artist, collector, and former gallerist, best known for his connections to the art and music scenes of the 1960s counterculture.
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John Dunbar (born 1943 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-British artist, collector, and former gallerist, best known for his connections to the art and music scenes of the 1960s counterculture.
Dunbar was born in Mexico City in 1943, [1] the son of the British filmmaker, Robert Dunbar. [2] He has three sisters, Marina Adams, an architect, and twins Margaret and Jennifer Dunbar. He spent his first four years in Moscow, where his father was a cultural attache, before the family returned to England.
Dunbar attended the University of Cambridge, where he met the singer Marianne Faithfull. They were married on 6 May 1965, with Peter Asher as the best man, [3] and spent their honeymoon in Paris, with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. [4] The couple lived in a flat at 29 Lennox Gardens, Knightsbridge, London. On 10 November 1965, she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. She then "...left her husband to live with Mick Jagger..." telling the New Musical Express that "my first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet." [3] Dunbar and Faithfull divorced in 1970.
In 1965, Dunbar co-founded the Indica Gallery with Barry Miles. The gallery became known for staging exhibitions by cutting-edge artists, including Boyle Family and Yoko Ono from the Fluxus movement. It was at Indica where he introduced Ono to John Lennon.Norman, Philip (2008). John Lennon: The Life . Ecco. p. 466. ISBN 978-0-06-075401-3. Indica folded in just two years, after which Dunbar became an artist and exhibited work alongside Peter Blake and Colin Self. From 1969 to 1971 Dunbar was exhibitions officer for the British Council, revitalizing their programme by promoting a new generation of artists such as Barry Flanagan, Colin Self, Bruce McLean and Clive Barker. [5] With Jill Matthews, Dunbar later fathered William Dunbar, [4] now a journalist based in Tbilisi, Georgia.
In January 2006, Dunbar participated in the International Symposium on LSD in Basel honouring LSD inventor Albert Hofmann on his 100th birthday. With John Hopkins and Barry Miles, Dunbar gave the seminar "LSD and its visual impact".[ citation needed ]. That same year, Dunbar took part in the re-staging of Indica by Riflemaker Gallery in Soho, London, hosting an in conversation with Yoko Ono and as guest speaker with a talk entitled INDICATIONS.... [6]
Since the 1960s, Dunbar has consistently maintained an eclectic practice encompassing drawing and collage, particularly in notebook context, sculpture and assemblage, photography and film. [5] As a visual artist, John's work has been featured in a 2008 solo exhibition [7] and 2014 retrospective [5] in London. More recently his film work has been included in group exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary [8] and The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, France. [9]
John Winston Ono Lennon was an English singer-songwriter, musician and political activist. He gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history.
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins is the first of three collaborative experimental albums released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Apple Records. It was the result of an all-night session of musical experimentation with Yoko in John's home studio at Kenwood, while his wife, Cynthia Lennon, was on holiday in Greece. Lennon and Ono's 1968 debut recording is known not only for its avant-garde content, but also for its cover, which shows the couple naked. This made the album controversial to both the public and the parent record company EMI, which refused to distribute it. In an attempt to avoid controversy, the LP record was sold in a brown paper bag, and distributed by Track and Tetragrammaton in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively. Two Virgins, while failing to chart in the UK, reached number 124 in the US. The album was followed six months later by Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions.
Kenwood is a house on the St George's Hill estate, Weybridge, Surrey, England. Originally called the Brown House, it was designed by architect T. A. Allen, and built in 1913 by Love & Sons, a local building firm. The estate was constructed around the Weybridge Golf Club, which was designed in 1912 by Harry Colt.
Indica Gallery was a counterculture art gallery in Mason's Yard, St James's, London from 1965 to 1967, in the basement of the Indica Bookshop. John Dunbar, Peter Asher, and Barry Miles owned it, and Paul McCartney supported it and hosted a show of Yoko Ono's work in November 1966, at which Ono met John Lennon.
Iain Stewart Macmillan was the Scottish photographer famous for taking the cover photograph for the Beatles' album Abbey Road in 1969. He grew up in Scotland, then moved to London to become a professional photographer. He used a photo of Yoko Ono in a book that he published in 1966, and Ono invited him to photograph her exhibit at Indica Gallery. She introduced him to John Lennon, and Lennon invited him to photograph the cover for Abbey Road. He worked with Lennon and Ono for several years, staying for a while at their home in New York.
The Destruction in Art Symposium was a gathering of a diverse group of international artists, poets, and scientists to London from 9–12 September, 1966. Included in this number were representatives of Fluxus and other counter-cultural artistic undergrounds who were there to speak out on the theme of destruction in art.
Aspen was a multimedia magazine published on an irregular schedule by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. The magazine was based in New York City. Described by its publisher as "the first three-dimensional magazine," each issue came in a customized box or folder filled with materials in a variety of formats, including booklets, "flexidisc" phonograph recordings, posters, postcards and reels of super-8 movie film. Many of the leading figures in contemporary North American and British art and cultural criticism were editors, designers or contributors to Aspen. The magazine has remained of interest to students of the artistic ferment of the late 1960s; extensive documentation of Aspen's contents is available online at UbuWeb.
The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream was a concert held in the Great Hall of the Alexandra Palace, London, on 29 April 1967. The fund-raising concert for the counterculture paper International Times was organised by Barry Miles, John "Hoppy" Hopkins, David Howson, Mike McInnerney and Jack Henry Moore. It was part-documented by Peter Whitehead in a film called Tonite Let's All Make Love in London.
Imagine: John Lennon is a 1988 documentary film about English musician John Lennon. It was released on 7 October 1988, two days before Lennon's 48th birthday.
Joe Jones (1934–1993) was an American avant-garde musician associated with Fluxus, especially known for his creation of rhythmic minimal music machines.
Riflemaker is a contemporary art business and exhibition space in London specialising in exhibiting and representing emerging artists. The building is a historic gunmaker's workshop off Regent Street. Built in 1712, it is one of the oldest public buildings in the West End of London. Riflemaker is also a publisher of artists books and host of a variety of events including poetry, music, film events, talks, discussions and performances in the space.
Samuel Adams Green was an American art curator and director, most associated with his promotion of American pop art, particularly the early works of his friend Andy Warhol.
Juan Fontanive is a contemporary artist based in New York City.
Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
Apple is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. The work is classified as Temporary art.
Half-A-Room is a 1967 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono.
Self-Portrait was a 1969 film made by the artist Yoko Ono. Premiering at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on 10 September 1969, the 42-minute film consisted of a single shot of her husband John Lennon's semi-erect penis.
Tot Taylor is an English, Cambridge-born, London-based songwriter, composer, record producer, author and art curator. He was a songwriter, singer, performer and band member throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties as well as composer of film soundtracks and theatre scores including stage-productions for the UK's National Theatre. In 2003 he founded the Riflemaker Gallery in London with the curator Virginia Damtsa, which featured feminist, audio and performative art for galleries and museums.
Mason's Yard is a square in London SW1, England.
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