Sunday, November 8, 2015

Intimate Snapshots of Madonna, Warhol and More

The New York Times

Intimate Snapshots of Madonna, Warhol and More


Here, Paige Powell, former Interview magazine associate publisher and ex-girlfriend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, shares photos from her personal archive. “Fresh 14 was a short-lived club with great energy and a horrible sound system, which might account for the expression on Madonna’s face,” Powell says of this photo. “Unfortunately, two kids shot each other there and it closed. When I was in New York recently, I noticed that space is now a Forever 21.”
Paige Powell
        
       
“Keith was totally adoring of Andy, and he came to visit us sometimes — I have a video of him painting a life-size papier-mâché elephant in Andy’s studio in ‘The Ride’ installation. He’s lying on his back to paint the underbelly and doesn’t spill a single drop of paint. It’s pretty incredible.  And we would visit him in his studio or there at the Pop Shop — it wasn’t a place where tourists went, not like it became in the ’90s. At first it was a art space, a hangout, a performance space — very cool stuff happened there.”
Paige Powell
   
       
“I was going up to the South Bronx to hang out at Stefan Eins’s art/science space, Fashion Moda. A1 and Rammellzee had art there, along with the Mitchell Crew, a group of artists from the Mitchell Project. I wanted to bring these kids downtown because they were so fresh and people were afraid to go that far uptown. But Andy was concerned about me bringing them over to his studio — he was afraid they would write on his paintings. Jean-Michel made what I regard as his master work inspired by this scene — a painting called ‘The Mitchell Crew’ that has never been shown since I sold it to the Neumanns in 1983.” 


Powell with Basquiat’s “The Mitchell Crew.”
                   
Paige Powell


“Jean-Michel made this painting for a trade that Bruno set up,” Powell says, referring to the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger. “I remember it was still wet when it arrived at the studio. Andy didn’t think much of it until they became friends.”
Paige Powell

“I hosted an art exhibition of Jean-Michel’s works in the apartment I rented from the Gordis family on East 81st Street in April 1983. Can you believe that not all of the paintings sold out on the night of this show? Today any of them would be worth millions. You can see Jean-Michel’s ‘River Nile’ triptych on the wall. I don’t know who the other people are — we would just invite club kids to come hang out with us. I’m hoping that once these photos get out there, people will identify themselves or people they recognize.”
Paige Powell

“There were no rules on how I dressed — I would wear a kimono to brunch, sometimes I was preppy, sometimes very Portland — in rain boots. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been like this, and my mother never tried to stop me,” says Powell, pictured here with two of Basquiat’s works. “Richard Gere bought one of his paintings from this series at the Terminal Art show for $5,000. It was called ‘Famous.’ I heard a rumor later that he burned it.”
Paige Powell

“This was an amazing trip we took to Hana, Maui, where we stayed with Jean-Michel’s father, stepmother and sister in these charming plantation-style wooden houses that were owned by some collectors from Texas. Jean-Michel was so happy there. He also made these paintings I helped him apply watercolor to, and then we would throw them in the dryer. I’ve never seen any of them displayed — I wonder what happened to them?” 
Paige Powell

“Susan Hannaford-Rose was the manager at Beulah Land, an art bar on Avenue A and 10th Street. They served food and drink, had performances and had a gallery — it was a great hangout, though it only lasted a couple of years. Susan knew I was doing photography, so she asked me to do something with my friends Benjamin Liu (also known as ‘Ming Vase’) and Jennifer Chaitman. I wanted my installation to look chaotic, like my life in NYC. I pulled 600 to 800 photos, laid them out on the floor and wrote captions, like Instagram today: ‘Big melons.’ ‘Fridge at studio.’ People started ripping the photos off the wall, so I had to replace them. Sometimes they would leave a note for me and post it in its place — it became like a bulletin board. I still don’t have one, but it was like a real-life Facebook page.”
Paige Powell


“Texarkana on West 10th Street was one of our homes away from home, and Andy took people out to dinner there. Tim and Joey worked at Fiorucci, and Andy loved to shop there because of the fun atmosphere and all the cute kids. Andy really loved Tim. Unfortunately he’s gone now, but Andy did a drawing of his shoe on a napkin at the table that night — like the old illustrations he did in his early career. That’s what Tim is holding up.”
Paige Powell


“Eric Goode asked Andy to be a part of the ‘Invisible Sculpture’ series, so Andy just stood there in the window alone for 30 minutes while people looked at him behind the glass, or stood around talking and ignoring him.  I think he came up with that himself. The windows were pretty cool performance spaces — once there were these girls living in the windows, just doing everyday stuff as if we weren’t all nightclubbing around them.”





“Nippon restaurant was another regular hangout — not the formal dining room on 52nd Street but the country-style location on 59th Street. It was a soothing place — we went there when we wanted that Zen feeling, and then we’d go to the movies afterwards. Andy admired Grace — she took really good care of herself, didn’t do drugs and was such a hard worker.  Does she seem wild? Andy felt really safe around her.”



“Anita was gorgeous and loyal and a real NYC artist — now an endangered species,” Powell says of Anita Sarko, the Mudd Club DJ pictured here. “We received her RSVP to attend the pre-opening event of ‘The Ride’ in Portland two days before she died. A devastating loss for us all. There is another photo of her in the ‘Beulah Land’ installation.”
Paige Powell



“I don’t think Andy was particularly close to Sting or Dylan, we just sat together that night — I think it was an after-party for Sting’s concert?  All I remember is that it was a jovial group — relaxed and lots of fun. Everyone got along great.”
Paige Powell





“I took this at Mr. Chow’s original restaurant before Tina took Andy and I to her apartment next door to see her new Balenciaga pieces,” Powell says of Tina Chow, pictured here. “She was just an otherworldly, beautiful creature; she had a natural serenity about her and whatever she wore looked incredible. After Andy died, I ran into her and we exchanged contact info, but a few months later I heard she was ill. Back then, whenever one heard that someone had AIDS, one hoped they would get better. I sent her a ‘Get well’ note. Sadly, I heard she passed away shortly afterwards.”
Paige Powell



“This was a promotional shoot for Tama Janowitz’s book ‘A Cannibal in Manhattan.’ David LaChapelle did the photography. I called Gerard Basquiat to ask him if he wanted to play the cannibal, and he did. We had so much fun. Jean-Michel got mad at me when he found out.”
Paige Powell




T Magazine | Art Matters

Never-Before-Seen Photos of Madonna, Warhol, Basquiat and More

By CATHAY CHE
Inside


    Slide Show|16 Photos

    Intimate Snapshots of Madonna, Warhol and More

    Intimate Snapshots of Madonna, Warhol and More

    Paige Powell

    Some It-girls of the ’80s may regret that their youthful glory predated social media, but Interview magazine’s former associate publisher Paige Powell doesn’t have to. Powell arrived in New York in 1980 from the Pacific Northwest, looking like a granola version of Edie Sedgwick and armed with the work ethic of Mary Tyler Moore. She was soon swept up in Interview’s bid to be a more serious publication — “At first it was more for friends, like, Fran Lebowitz drove the delivery truck to drop off issues at different newsstands,” she remembers — and Andy Warhol’s select social whirlwind of downtown clubbing, midtown shopping and uptown lunches. “Andy always said, ‘Work is fun and fun is work,’” Powell says. “It was just the way I thought New York City was, all the time, for everyone — exuberant.”
    Powell often carried the latest camera or camcorder from Japan with her and used them often to capture intimate snapshots of her coterie: including Warhol, Madonna, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was her boyfriend from 1982 through 1984. For nearly 40 years, she’s been sitting on (“literally; they were stashed in boxes under the bed,” she says) a treasure trove that’s remained largely unexamined. Powell returned to Portland in the ’90s to focus on animal rights advocacy work, and it’s there that her images will be showcased for the first time, in two interactive multimedia installations, “The Ride” and “Beulah Land,” opening this week at the Portland Art Museum. Still in possession of plenty of influential friends, Powell asked David LaChapelle to mix a musical soundtrack for the show and Kenny Scharf to create a signature “Cosmic Cavern” to accompany it. “Half of the photos in the new installation will be from the ’80s, and half will be photos moving forward to the present,” Powell says, noting that the installation is meant to be “interactive,” just like the one she created at the art bar also called Beulah Land in the ‘80s (see slide 7) — visitors can add notes to the walls. “So we’re having a cocktail party for the guards at PAM, to prepare them,” she notes, “because we don’t want them to be alarmed.”
    “Paige Powell: The Ride” and “Beulah Land” are on view Nov. 5 – Feb. 21 at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave., Portland, portlandartmuseum.org.
    A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2015, on page ST3 of the New York edition with the headline: Madonna, Warhol, Basquiat and More. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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