Scott Covert

Last updated
Scott Covert
Born1954 (age 6970)
NationalityAmerican
Known for Rubbings, painting
Movement East Village

Scott Covert (born 1954) [1] is an American artist who, in the 1970s and 1980s, became a fixture of the East Village arts scene and cofounded Playhouse 57 with theater artist Andy Rees at the nightclub Club 57. [1]

In 1979, Covert had his first solo show, curated by Keith Haring, at Club 57, he has since exhibited at galleries around the world. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

According to an interview with the BBC, Covert made his first grave rubbing The Dead Supreme, in 1985. He was influenced by founding Supremes member Florence Ballard, who died in 1976 aged only 32. "I was always a Supremes person," he explained. [9]

The Daily Telegraph wrote about Covert's work saying "Scott Covert has spent almost 40 years at the graves of celebrities, from actors to serial killers, the Shah of Iran in Cairo and Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise. Using oil wax crayons, he makes detailed rubbings, then adorns them with colours and marks; sometimes a mass of inscriptions is built up into a grander, collaged form. He refers to the names, or the works, as “characters”. Unlike people, they cannot die." [10]

In a 2020 Hauser & Wirth related article, Covert said "I was in a fake post-punk band, Youth Against Death, along with Frank Holliday, Nancy Ferrara, Natalya Maystrenko and Kathy Dumas on camera—we did flyers and interviews, never picked up an instrument. [11]

Covert appeared in the 2021 documentary Make Me Famous . [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jamie Cullum</span> English jazz-pop singer, songwriter and radio presenter (born 1979)

Jamie Cullum is an English jazz-pop singer, pianist, songwriter and radio presenter. Although primarily a vocalist and pianist, he also accompanies himself on other instruments, including guitar and drums. He has recorded nine studio albums, three compilation albums, one live album and twenty-four singles. Since April 2010, he has presented a weekly Tuesday evening jazz show on BBC Radio 2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Bourgeois</span> French-American artist (1911–2010)

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the abstract expressionists and her work has a lot in common with Surrealism and feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rufus Sewell</span> British actor (born 1967)

Rufus Frederik Sewell is a British actor. In film, he has appeared in Carrington (1995), Hamlet (1996), Dangerous Beauty (1998), Dark City (1998), A Knight's Tale (2001), The Legend of Zorro (2005), The Illusionist (2006), Amazing Grace (2006), The Holiday (2006), The Tourist (2010), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), Judy (2019), The Father (2020), and Old (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell Watson</span> English tenor

Russell Watson is an English tenor who has released singles and albums of both operatic-style and pop songs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Biggins</span> British actor

Christopher Biggins is an English actor and television presenter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tombstone tourist</span> Person who visits grave sites

Tombstone tourist describes an individual who has a passion for and enjoyment of cemeteries, epitaphs, gravestone rubbing, photography, art, and history of (famous) deaths. The term has been most notably used by author and biographer Scott Stanton as the title of his former website and book The Tombstone Tourist: Musicians (2003), about the lives and gravesites of famous musicians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hauser & Wirth</span> Swiss contemporary and modern art gallery

Hauser & Wirth is a Swiss contemporary and modern art gallery.

Anj Smith is a British artist. She was born in Kent and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and at Goldsmiths College in London. Her intricately rendered paintings explore issues surrounding gender, ecology, anxiety, and eroticism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subodh Gupta</span> Indian artist (born 1964)

Subodh Gupta is an Indian contemporary artist based in New Delhi. His work encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, photography, performance and video.

Iwan Wirth is a Swiss art dealer and the president and co-founder of Hauser & Wirth, a contemporary art gallery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luchita Hurtado</span> Venezuelan-American artist (1920–2020)

Luchita Hurtado was a Venezuelan-born American painter based in Santa Monica, California, and Arroyo Seco, New Mexico. Born in Venezuela, she moved to the United States as a child. Although she became involved with art after concentrating on the subject in high school and created art over eight decades, she only received broad recognition for her art towards the end of her life. Her work has strong environmental and feminist themes that bridges many genres, bearing influence from different art movements and cultures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phyllida Barlow</span> British artist (1944–2023)

Dame Phyllida Barlow was a British visual artist. She studied at Chelsea College of Art (1960–1963) and the Slade School of Art (1963–1966). She joined the staff of the Slade in the late 1960s and taught there for more than forty years. She retired from academia in 2009 and in turn became an emerita professor of fine art. She had an important influence on younger generations of artists; at the Slade her students included Rachel Whiteread and Ángela de la Cruz. In 2017 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Catherine Anne Goodman is an English artist, and co-founder with King Charles III of the Royal Drawing School.

Winfred Rembert was an African-American artist who used hand-tools and shoe dye on leather canvases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Leigh</span> American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

Charles Gaines is an American visual artist, whose work interrogates the discourse of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. Taking the form of drawings, photographic series and video installations, the work consistently involves the use of systems, predominantly in the form of the grid, often in combination with photography. His work is rooted in conceptual art – in dialogue with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Mel Bochner – and Gaines is committed to its tenets of engaging cognition and language. As one of the only African-American conceptual artists working in the 1970s, a time when political expressionism was a prevailing concern among African-American artists, Gaines was an outlier in his pursuit of abstraction and non-didactic approach to race and politics. There is a strong musical thread running through much of Gaines' work, evident in his repeated use of musical scores as well in his engagement with the idea of indeterminacy, as similar to John Cage and Sol LeWitt. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Taylor (artist)</span> American painter

Henry Taylor is an American artist and painter who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his acrylic paintings, mixed media sculptures, and installations.

Christina Quarles is a queer, mixed contemporary American artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness. She is considered at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists and her works shatter the societal manners of physical classification.

Greg Jenner is a British author and public historian with a particular interest in communicating history through pop culture and humour.

Flora Yukhnovich is a British painter. Yukhnovich is known for her contemporary interpretation of the Rococo painting style. The artist discussed her interest in the concept of taste and how personal objects and patterns can reveal aspects of one's interior self in a 2020 interview with DATEAGLE ART. She also mentioned the idea that people may try to cultivate certain tastes in order to fit in or impress others, and that some tastes may be hidden due to shame. The artist finds the Rococo movement particularly interesting in this regard.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Graham, Jay (February 4, 2022). "If There's a Rip in It: A Conversation with Scott Covert". The Paris Review .
  2. Moorhead, Joanna (February 13, 2023). "Daylight rubbery: the cemetery stalker who turns celebrity gravestones into art". The Guardian .
  3. Thomason, John (December 9, 2022). "Artist Immortalizes the Dead in Beautiful NSU Art Museum Show". Bocamag.com.
  4. News Reporter (January 29, 2023). "Exhibition: New-Jersey-based experimental artist Scott Covert presents C'est la vie". South London Press .
  5. "Scott Covert". The New Yorker .
  6. "Scott Covert: I Had a Wonderful Life". NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. 2022.
  7. Clavarino, Elena (January 21, 2023). "Beyond the Grave". Air Mail .
  8. Rigamonti di Cutó, Angeria (February 22, 2023). "Scott Covert – interview: 'For me, each brushstroke is a lifetime'". Studio International.
  9. Jana, Rosalind (April 16, 2023). "Scott Covert: Why one artist has made it his life's mission to hunt down dead celebrities". BBC.
  10. Revely-Calder, Cal (January 24, 2023). "Scott Covert: the artist who communes with the celebrity dead". The Daily Telegraph .
  11. Covert, Scott (February 24, 2020). "Graveside with Scott Covert: Painter of the dead". Hauser & Wirth.
  12. "Make Me Famous". New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival. 2022. Archived from the original on December 3, 2022.