Lola Flash

Last updated
Lola Flash
Born1959 (age 64–65)
Montclair, New Jersey U.S.
Education Maryland Institute College of Art
London College of Printing
Known forPhotography
Portraiture
Website lolaflash.com

Lola Flash [1] (born 1959) [2] is an American photographer whose work has often focused on social, LGBT and feminist issues. [2] [3] An active participant in ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster. [1] [4]

Contents

Flash's art, which is rooted in community advocacy, is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. [5] [6]

Early life and education

Flash born and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, is the daughter of two school teachers. [1] [7] She is of African American and Native American backgrounds and is the fourth generation on her mother's side to grow up in Montclair. [1] [3] Her great-grandfather, Charles H. Bullock, as well as her great-grandmother, taught at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. [8] Bullock also founded the first black YMCA in Montclair, as well as others in Brooklyn, Virginia, and Kentucky. [1] Her given name is in honor of her paternal great-grandmother. [1]

Flash began taking pictures as a young girl, eventually doing student portraits for the high-school yearbook, as well as taking other pictures. [1]

Flash graduated from Montclair High School. [1] After graduating, she went to college to study science and photography hoping to be a science photographer, but decided to transfer schools to focus on art. [9] In 1981, she received a B.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art, where she studied with Leslie King-Hammond. [1] [10] [11] Flash later received an M.A. from London College of Printing. [7]

Career

After attending the Maryland Institute College of Art, Flash used negatives and inverted color schemes in her photography. Unlike most photojournalists, she used slide film and developed her photographs on negative paper. This altered the colors in the photos, meant to show the viewer that they had been taught to view the world in a specific way. [5] Her early work had a focus on social and political issues that included works related to the AIDS epidemic. Starting in the summer of 1987, Flash was very active in ACT UP in New York City. In 1989, Flash and Julie Tolentino appeared with several other couples in Gran Fury's ""Kissing Doesn't Kill" PSA poster. This poster, which appeared on billboards, buses, and subway platforms in many cities, used the style of Benetton's United Colors campaign to call out bigotry and complacency regarding HIV/AIDS. [5]

In the 1990s, Flash moved to London and got her MFA from the London College of Printing. [1] While there, she covered events for a gay publication. She also started exploring different themes through traditional portraiture. [12] Flash remained in London for eight years, working for alternative lifestyle publications. [13]

Flash was part of the Art Positive artist collective. [1]

Flash's next work was two photography series at Alice Yard in Woodbrook, Port of Spain: Scents of Autumn, The Quartet series. [14] [15] During this time Flash also appeared in the Gran Fury collective's "Kissing Doesn't Kill" campaign, posters of which featured images of LGBT people kissing in an effort to destigmatize and educate about AIDS. The posters appeared on billboards and on the sides of buses. [16]

Flash's newer work has focused on issues such as how skin color impacts black identity and gender fluidity. She has frequently photographed members of the LGBT community, including a pride exhibit called LEGENDS that portrays members of the New York City LGBT community. [7]

In a recent project "SALT," Lola Flash focuses on women over the age of seventy who remain active in their field. Her subjects, who are portrayed in classical portrait-style photographs, are often unheralded women who range from artists and activists to real estate agents, singers and designers; however, some notable women, like Agnes Gund, were incorporated into the series. [17] [18] [19] [20]

Flash's photography is featured in the 2009 book Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present. [21]

Flash's 2018 solo show, Lola Flash: 1986 – Present, is a 30-year retrospective, spanning three decades of influential works curated for exhibition at Pen + Brush in New York City. [22] The show documents the beginnings of her work with her series about the AIDS crisis in New York City and extends through to the "critically lauded "SALT" and "[sur]passing" series." [23]

In 2019, under the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Artist in Residence Program, Flash noted "I've been a committed artist for 40 years, now having finally gained a seat at the table." [24]

In Flash's current Afrofuturist series, "Syzygy, the vision," Flash transforms herself into an avatar "subjected to the horrors of racism, sexism and homophobia," and "experiencing moments of joy, envisioning a future where there is equity for all." [5] [25] Flash is a member of the Kamoige Collective and is on the board of Queer|Art.

Equipment and methodology

Flash began taking photographs using a Minox and then in high school she began shooting with a 35mm Yashica. [26] [27]

Flash initially became known for using the cross-color technique of photography, which inverts colors. [4]

Flash currently uses a Toyo-view camera using the 4×5 film format. [26]

Personal life

Flash lives and works in New York City. In addition to photography, Flash teaches visual arts and English Language Arts at a high school in Brooklyn. [28]

Awards and honors

Exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Collections

Flash's work is held in the following permanent collection:

Filmography

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nan Goldin</span> American photographer and activist

Nancy Goldin is an American photographer and activist. Her work often explores LGBT subcultures, moments of intimacy, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). The monograph documents the post-Stonewall, gay subculture and includes Goldin's family and friends. She is a founding member of the advocacy group P.A.I.N.. She lives and works in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lola Álvarez Bravo</span> Mexican photographer (1903–1993)

Lola Álvarez Bravo was the first Mexican female photographer and a key figure in the post-revolution Mexican renaissance. Known for her high level of skill in composition, her works were seen by her peers as fine art. She was recognized in 1964 with the Premio José Clemente Orozco, by the State of Jalisco, for her contributions to photography and her efforts to preserve the culture of Mexico. Her works are included in the permanent collections of international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorna Simpson</span> American photographer and multimedia artist

Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisette Model</span> American photographer

Lisette Model was an Austrian-born American photographer primarily known for the frank humanism of her street photography.

Mickey Smith is an American photographer, conceptual artist, and jewellery designer working in Auckland, New Zealand. Her works have exhibited throughout the United States, in Europe, China, Oceania, and Russia. She has received a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Photography as well as grants from Forecast Public Art, CEC ArtsLink, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Wilda Gerideau-Squires is an African-American fine art photographer noted for her distinctive style of photography which includes abstract images created through the interplay of fabric and light, as well as her poignant photographs of women. In 2008, Women In Photography International named Gerideau-Squires among the world's most Distinguished Women Photographers. Her photographs are included in the Peter E. Palmquist Collection at Yale University's Beinecke Library, the State House Office Building in Boston and private collections in the United States and Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Willis (artist)</span> African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography

Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.

Arnold H. Skolnick was an American graphic artist and book publisher. His best-known work is the original 1969 poster for the Woodstock Art and Music Fair.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women photographers</span> Women working as photographers

The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.

Nina Kuo is a Chinese American painter, photographer, sculptor, author, video artist and activist who lives and works in New York City. Her work examines the role of women, feminism and identity in Asian-American art. Kuo has worked in partnership with the artist Lorin Roser.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Gatewood</span> American photographer and videographer (1942–2016)

Charles Robert Gatewood was an American photographer, writer, videographer, artist and educator, who lived and worked in San Francisco, California.

Kathy Grove is an American conceptual feminist photographer. As a professional photo retoucher for fashion magazines, Grove became familiar with airbrushing and photo manipulation techniques in that industry. Her work uses those skills to remove subjects from iconic works, or to alter their appearance. Grove wrote that this practice is intended to "portray women as they have been regarded throughout history, invisible and inaudible."[2] Her photo series, The Other Series, includes reproductions of canonical paintings in Western art with the feminine subjects removed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jurek Wajdowicz</span> Polish-American artist

Jurek Wajdowicz is a Polish-born American artist, graphic designer, fine art contemporary photographer and art director. He lives and works in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kameelah Janan Rasheed</span> American writer, educator and artist

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."

Marilyn Nance, also known as Soulsista, is an American multimedia artist known for work focusing on exploring human connections, African-American spirituality, and the use of technology in storytelling.

Endia Beal is an African-American visual artist, curator, and educator. She is known for her work in creating visual narratives through photography and video testimonies focused on women of color working in corporate environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellen Carey</span> American artist and photographer

Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography exploring non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure, and paper. Her work has ranged from painted and multiple-exposure, Polaroid 20 x 24, Neo-Geo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract photograms and minimal Polaroid images from the 1990s onward, which critics often compare to color-field painting. Carey's sixty one-person exhibitions have been presented at museums, such as the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography (ICP) and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, alternative spaces such as Hallwalls and Real Art Ways, and many commercial galleries. Her work is in numerous museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, she was named one of the Royal Photographic Society (London) "Hundred Heroines", recognizing leading women photographers worldwide. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes her photography as "inventive, physically involving, process-oriented work" and her recent photograms as "performative sculptures enacted in the gestational space of the darkroom" whose pure hues, shadows and color shifts deliver "optical buzz and conceptual bang". New York Times critic William Zimmer wrote that her work "aspires to be nothing less than a reinvention, or at least a reconsideration, of the roots or the essence of photography." In addition to her art career, Carey has also been a longtime educator at the Hartford Art School and a writer and researcher on the history of photography.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a Sierra Leonean-American multi-disciplinary photographer and visual artist promoting African culture and heritage, a co-founder and author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora – a journal and book representing female photographers of African descent. Her works have been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide. She uses multiple mediums to create works with themes about identity, utopia, decolonization, and stories of the past, present and future. She is a Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Chanell Stone is an American photographer. She is Black and known for her "Natura Negra" series. Stone lives and works in Oakland, California.

Queer art, also known as LGBT+ art or queer aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and various non-heterosexual, non-cisgender imagery and issues. While by definition there can be no singular "queer art", contemporary artists who identify their practices as queer often call upon "utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships and relationships." Queer art is also occasionally very much about sex and the embracing of unauthorised desires.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Flash, Lola; Shulman, Sarah (interviewer); Wentzy, James (interviewer) (July 8, 2008). "Interview 091: Lola Flash" (Oral history transcript). Act Up Oral History Project, A Program of The New York Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival. Harvard University.{{cite news}}: |first2= has generic name (help)
  2. 1 2 Cooper, Emmanuel (2006). "13.11: Lola Flash, AIDS Quilt – The First Year". The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. pp.  317–318. ISBN   978-0-415-11100-3. OCLC   976447467.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Lola Flash". Light Work. August 2008.
  4. 1 2 Manatakis, Lexi (January 25, 2018). "Lola Flash's photography immortalises queer, black New Yorkers". Dazed .
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Photographer Lola Flash is honored for creating images that challenge invisibility". NPR.org. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  6. ↑ La Gorce, Tammy. "How Lola Flash, Photographer, Spends her Sundays." New York Times. June 25, 2021.
  7. 1 2 3 Macey, Juliet (May 23, 2016). "Lights, Camera, Flash!". GO Magazine.
  8. ↑ "Soundboard: Lola Flash" (Audio interview). WTJU . 2013.
  9. ↑ "Envisioning the Future, with Lola Flash – The Answer is No Podcast". theanswerisnoshow.com. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  10. ↑ "Lola Flash: (sur)passing". Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. June 2013.
  11. ↑ Flash, Lola. "LinkedIn Page".
  12. ↑ Gonzalez, David. "Beauty, Pride and Power in Photos by Lola Flash." The New York Times. March 8, 2018.
  13. ↑ Digital, Mark Lyndersay, Lyndersay. "The Lola Flash portrait | Notes about Photography". Lyndersay Digital. Retrieved 2022-03-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  14. ↑ Zimmerman, Bonnie; Haggerty, George, eds. (2000). Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures. New York: Garland. pp. 60–61. ISBN   978-0-815-33354-8. OCLC   848396108.
  15. ↑ Lyndersay, Mark (August 7, 2015). "The Lola Flash portrait". Trinidad and Tobago Guardian .
  16. ↑ Kalin, Tom (March 28, 2011). "MoMA: Nightclubbing". Museum of Modern Art .
  17. ↑ Frank, Priscilla (May 4, 2015). "Photography Series Spotlighting Iconic Women Over 70 Proves The Best Is Yet To Come". Huffington Post .
  18. ↑ "Photographer Lola Flash Focuses On Women Over 70". CulturePop. 2015.
  19. ↑ "Performance and tour with Sur Rodney (Sur) with Art+ Positive members Lola Flash and Hunter Reynolds. Art AIDS America exhibition tour with Lola Flash". The Bronx Museum of the Arts . October 8, 2016.
  20. 1 2 "Lola Flash 2011". Art Matters Foundation. 2011.
  21. ↑ Willis, Deborah (2009). Posing Beauty: African American Images, from the 1890s to the Present. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN   978-0-393-06696-8. OCLC   310224903.
  22. ↑ "Lola Flash". PEN + BRUSH. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  23. ↑ "Lola Flash: 1986–Present". Pen + Brush. 2018.
  24. ↑ Turek, Anezka (May 2019). "60 Seconds with Lola Flash". Gender Watch: 10 – via ProQuest.
  25. ↑ "syzygy, the vision". Lola FLASH. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  26. 1 2 Mestrich, Qiana (January 22, 2009). "Photographer Interview: Lola Flash". Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History.
  27. ↑ Osuji, Nono (2000). "This Woman's Work: Lola FLASH, a profile of her photography" (Video). This Woman's Work.
  28. ↑ Twersky, Carolyn (January 25, 2018). "A Photographer Who Has Spent Decades Capturing Queer Culture". The Cut .
  29. ↑ Laughlin, Nicholas (July 23, 2015). "Alice Yard: A conversation with Lola Flash". Alice Yard.
  30. ↑ "Woodstock AIR Program". Artist in Residence: Woodstock. Retrieved March 4, 2020.
  31. ↑ NJ.com, Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for (2022-02-23). "Black girls in focus, from 9 to 93, at Newark art exhibition". nj. Retrieved 2022-03-11.
  32. ↑ "Stay Afloat, Use a Rubber". Victoria and Albert Museum . 1993.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.