Arts

Loisiada Exposes Underbelly of 1980s Lower East Side

Themes of revolution, upheaval, race and sexuality jump out from the graffiti art that makes up the “Loisaida: New York’s Lower East Side in the ’80s” exhibition in the Addison Gallery of American Art. Collected by John P. Axelrod ’64. The vividly-colored multimedia pieces portray a time of diversion from cultural norms in the Lower East Side of New York.

The name “Loisaida” comes from the colloquial Puerto Rican-American pronunciation of the name of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The exhibition blends many different forms of artistic expression, including painting, collage, photography, poetry, film and performance art, all of which work together to challenge societally accepted norms and push the boundaries of what it means to be human.

“These young, disaffected artists, dubbed ‘radical bohemians’ by one critic, gathered in loose association with each other, brought together by a shared anxiety about the decay that surrounded them — the structural and societal decay of their urban environment, as well as the physical decay and ultimate death of colleagues, friends and lovers due to the AIDS epidemic — but thriving creatively in the dark, tough life of the Lower East Side,” said Kelley Tialiou, Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Assistant at the Addison.

One of the artists featured in the exhibition is David Wojnarowicz, a prominent artist and AIDS activist in New York City, who created a piece called “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” in 1986. The work depicts an array of images that float above the sleeping silhouette of a man who is juxtaposed above a map. At the top, there are rows of dollar bills that lie beneath an image of a complicated machine, which is being run by a faceless man. A hand reaches in to light a fire beneath this man. On the left side of the piece, rows of flags representing many different countries are laid out in the same fashion as the dollar bills at the top of the page. The main focus of the piece is an angry man whose gun is pointing at the viewer. Laden with gritty visualizations of years of struggle, this piece depicts how the past continues to fuel actions in the present.
Wojnarowicz added an element of social justice through his “Sex Series,” which showed vivid backgrounds of forests, nature or cities with small, circular pictures of different sex positions. All six pieces were black and white, and were created to help Wojnarowicz come to terms with his AIDS infection.

“One important issue concerning many Loisaida artists was the politics of homosexuality and AIDS, and how conservative society perceived the correlation between the two.… Wojnarowicz, in particular, was a remarkably strong and outspoken advocate for the treatment of AIDS during the last few years of his life, and his ‘Sex Series,’ on view in the exhibition, is directly related to the loss he experienced from the death of friend, mentor and one-time lover, Peter Hujar,” said Tialiou.

Another piece in the Loisaida exhibit was “Untitled (Marlboro Man),” which was created in 1984 by Richard Hambleton, an artist from Vancouver who currently lives in the Lower East Side. Like the two Wojnarowicz pieces, “Marlboro Man” used juxtaposition to create a social commentary. This painting depicts the silhouette of a cowboy riding a large horse. The quick, fleeting strokes of black paint used to create the image creates an effect of immediacy, as if the cowboy is going to continue riding right off the page. He is painted on top of a large advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes, with the words “Marlboro Country” peaking through a thick layer of faded pink paint. Through the juxtaposition of the cowboy with an advertisement, Hambleton creates a commentary on the way a classic American pastime has been exploited by commercialization.
The exhibition was connected to the graffiti art of Chris “Daze” Ellis, the Addison’s current Artist in Residence.

“Both Loisaida and graffiti have been lauded as quintessentially American genres of visual expression in their inspiration from and responses to the gritty life on the streets of New York City. Each pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable – Loisaida with its unflinching focus on death, gay sex, drugs and marginalization from mainstream society; graffiti with its clandestine and confrontational appropriation of public and private property as a platform for its art,” said Tialiou.