Hip hop legend Heavy D (Dwight Arrington Myers) was one of the genre’s most iconic MCs, a man who helped introduce hip hop to the mainstream by collaborating with popular R&B artists like Al B. Sure on many of his albums. Now, TMZ reports that the 44-year-old musician is dead after being found unconscious at his Beverly Hills home. He died at the hospital a short time later. The older cousin of beatsmith legend Pete Rock, Myers put down the mic in his later years and became an executive who helped open doors for a lot of upcoming acts. Despite his crossover appeal, D was one of the rare acts who never lost cred with the rap community — a difficult balancing act to pull off in his day, but he did it. He recently had a cameo in Brett Ratner’s Tower Heist as a guard and performed at BET’s hip hop awards last month — his first performance in 15 years. Some reports indicate the musician died after falling down the stairs — which would be eerie considering his dancer Trouble T Roy died young after falling from the stage at a show. Commence turning on In Living Color (he performed the theme song) or “Now That We Found Love.”
At the age of 98, Louise Bourgeois, the influential American-based sculptor, died yesterday at the Beth Israel hospital in Manhattan after suffering a heart attack over the weekend. Born in Paris on Christmas Day, 1911, Bourgeois lived through the great art movements of the 20th century — cubism, symbolism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and so on — and was a bridge to the past for contemporary artists who looked up to her. Her influence is so wide spread that art critic, Robert Hughes, has called her “the mother of American feminist identity art.” We curated some of Bourgeois’s pieces from over the past half-century — click past the jump to see them all.
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Architect of the old-school pin-up paradigm Peter Gowland died earlier this month atage 93, according to this weekend’s obit in the New York Times. In his lengthy career, in which Gowland shot over 1,000 magazine covers and made pin-ups out of celebrities from Raquel Welch to Ann-Margret, the photographer “took the cheese out of cheesecake,” lending a wholesome, sunny vibe to the barely-clothed female figures ogled the nation over. He was also inventive, devising foot supports for tired models and most notably, his own model of cameras, including the 4″ x 5″ format twin-lens Gowlandflex camera, later purchased by everyone from Annie Leibowitz to the F.B.I. Preview some of Gowland’s work and get pin-up tips from the master, after the jump.
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Rock-and-roll photographer Jim Marshall died on Tuesday at the age of 74. If you’re not familiar with the man himself, you’ve certainly seen his work: he was an official photographer of the Woodstock Festival, the only photographer allowed backstage at the Beatles’ final concert in 1966, and he shot more than 500 album covers. Marshall was known to gain intimate access to the musicians, sometimes even going so far as to live with them, in order to create truly vulnerable portraits. He continued to work after the days of psychedelics and electric guitars, and more recently worked with the likes of John Mayer and Ben Harper. Marshall was scheduled to promote his new book Match Prints this week, written with fellow photographer Timothy White.
Just as the music lives on, we know that Marshall’s photographs will prevail as iconic cultural images. A roundup of some of our favorite shots after the jump.
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Artist Jeanne-Claude (née Denat de Guillebo) died in New York Wednesday evening of complications from a brain aneurysm. Along with her husband and artistic partner Christo, whom she met in 1958, she undertook an international series of large-scale outdoor installations, modifying landscapes with industrial strength cloth ballooned, wrapped, and tied. In a tale that legends are made of, the pair were born on the same date, the 13th of June in 1935, and allegedly in the same hour. Of note is the fact that all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects are self-financed — meaning a pretty significant initial outlay for, say, 1.076 million square feet of aluminum-coated fabric to cover the entire façade of the Reichstag in Berlin. In honor of Jeanne-Claude’s legacy in the realm of environmental art, we’ve compiled a visual primer of the duo’s oeuvre after the jump. Read More »
Roy DeCarava, a key figure in postwar photography, died Tuesday at his home in New York City. DeCarava (pronounced dee-cuh-RAH-vah) turned his lens on the neighborhood of Harlem during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, depicting the everyday African American experience from an insider’s perspective. His work, painterly studies of shadow and darkness, transcended racial boundaries, juxtaposing stark black-and-white tonality with highly impressionistic composition. Click through to view some of DeCarava’s most iconic images and hear what the media and art establishment have to say about his legacy. Read More »
In a sobering follow-up to last week’s announcement that GAP founder and CEO Donald Fisher would donate his entire contemporary art collection to San Francisco’s modern art museum, Fisher died yesterday at age 81 after a protracted battle with cancer. Creating what SF Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker deems “in the league of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Tate Modern in London,” the Donald and Doris Fisher Collection will contribute over 1,100 pieces from masters of 20th and 2st century painting and sculpture. Read More »
Charles Gwathmey, architect of the Modernist school and founding partner of Gwathmey & Siegel & Associates, died Monday evening at age 71. Gwathmey cut a dashing figure in the modern architecture scene, designing a range of occasionally controversial public edifices and lauded residences for the likes of Faye Dunaway, Steven Spielberg, and Jerry Seinfeld. His style, geometric and sculptural but never spartan, has heavily influenced today’s generation of architects who reject the extraneous without falling back on minimalism. Read More »
Architectural photographer and tastemaker Julius Shulman made the modern domesticity of Los Angeles into a consumable art form.
Shulman, who died this month at 98, shot glossy, stylized images of California cool, which in turn promoted the architecture of Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and their brethren. His iconic photographs symbolized the polished freedom of LA living, evoked by shots like that of models lounging in Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22.
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