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John Dunbar (born 1943 in Mexico City) is a 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 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.[ citation needed ] 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]
A selection of his artwork, exhibitions and curatorial can be found on his official website http://www.johndunbar.net.
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking.
Barry Miles is an English author known for his participation in and writing on the subjects of the 1960s London underground and counterculture. He is the author of numerous books and his work has also regularly appeared in leftist newspapers such as The Guardian. In the 1960s, he was co-owner of the Indica Gallery and helped start the independent newspaper International Times.
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 Artist Placement Group (APG) was conceived by Barbara Steveni in London in 1965, and established in 1966 as an artist-run organisation seeking to refocus art outside the gallery, predominantly through attaching an artist in a business or governmental context for a period of time. Then the participating artists would try to create and organize exhibitions of work related to those new experiences.
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.
EZTV is a production company and exhibition venue founded in Los Angeles in 1979 by film scholar, writer and video producer John Dorr, along with several filmmakers, actors, writers, musicians and artists.
Pallant House Gallery is an art gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, England. It houses one of the best collections of 20th-century British art in the world.
Spice Chess is an artist's multiple by the Japanese artist Takako Saito, while she was resident in the United States. Originally manufactured winter 1964–65, and offered for sale March 1965, the work is one of a famous series of disrupted chess sets referred to as Fluxchess or Flux Chess, made for George Maciunas' Fluxshop at his Canal Street loft, SoHo, New York City and later through his Fluxus Mail-Order Warehouse.
"Takako Saito engaged with Duchamp's practice but also with masculinist cold war metaphors by taking up chess as a subject of [her] art. Saito's fluxchess works... question the primacy of vision to chess, along with notions of perception and in aesthetic experience more generally.... Her "Smell Chess," "Sound Chess" and "Weight Chess" reworked the game of chess so that players would be forced to hone non-visual perception, such as the olfactory sense, tactility, and aurality, in order to follow chess rules." Claudia Mesch
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.
Juan Fontanive is a contemporary artist based in New York City.
Errol Lloyd is a Jamaican-born artist, writer, art critic, editor and arts administrator. Since the 1960s he has been based in London, to which he originally travelled to study law. Now well known as a book illustrator, he was runner-up for the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1973 for his work on My Brother Sean by Petronella Breinburg.
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.
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 street in London SW1, England.
Guy Anthony Baliol Brett (1942–2021) was an English art critic, writer and curator. He was noted for a personal vision, particularly of cultural production of an experimental character. He is known for the promotion of Latin American artists, and for drawing attention to kinetic art during the 1960s in Europe and Latin America.
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