LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies | Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience | New York | Sept 8 – Oct 14
September 8 – October 14, 2022
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies
In-Person Viewing:
2960 Broadway, 310 Dodge Hall / MC 1806, New York, NY 10027
Opening Reception September 8, 5 – 7 pm
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience organized by cultural practitioner, william cordova, focuses on three distinct print projects by Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), Lee Quiñones, and william cordova published by the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University. Fab Five Freddy and Lee Quinoñes are known for pioneering aerosol art (graffiti) in the late 1970s and were key protagonists in Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1983), the cult classic film that introduced graffiti art and early Hip Hop to the world.
In the 1980s, Lee Quiñones achieved global art world success, appeared in films and lectured at major universities. He continues to experiment and explore new avenues of mark making and printing. Fab Five Freddy, in addition to making art, producing music and acting, became the legendary first host of Yo! MTV Raps (1988). The program was one of the most popular shows on MTV and helped radically alter the music industry. The late culture critic, journalist and author, Greg Tate, has stated, “william cordova who comes to us by the way of the Incas, Jimi Hendrix and Miami Bass and, for oppositional sake, MTV and Yale, too, now operates in this Harlem game as cultural manufacturer of multiple self-possessed signposts, less ethnographic or geographic than steatopygic.”
All three artists, Fab Five Freddy, Lee Quiñones, and william cordova, are interested in synthesizing cultural matter by intersecting a milieu of unconventional printing approaches that reflect their own non-linear historical narratives. Creating and improvising spatiotemporal themes, geography, music, cinema.
This exhibition represents the first in a of series of artist-curated exhibitions to be held at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery from September 2022 to April 2023 celebrating the Neiman Center’s 25th anniversary.
