In “Was It a Dream,” photographer Ayala Gazit goes to Australia to find out about her half-brother, who committed suicide in 1996 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
SVA Gallery
209 East 23rd St. between Second & Third Aves.
Through December 18
Admission: free
212-592-2010
www.schoolofvisualarts.edu
www.ayalagazit.com
Born in Haifa in 1984, Ayala Gazit was twelve years old when her father told her that she had a half-brother named James in Australia from a brief relationship he had with an Englishwoman named Linda in London. Gazit wrote James a letter introducing herself, but they never met, as he committed suicide later that year. After being awarded the Tierney Grant in Photography as a senior at SVA, Gazit used the prize, which gives promising graduating photography students one year to create an exhibition, to go to Australia and find out about the half-brother she never knew. She met with James’s mother and siblings, went through the family album, and scouted out the neighborhood where James lived. What she discovered, in words and pictures, is on view through the weekend in the somber yet powerful “Was It a Dream,” at the SVA Gallery on East 23rd St. Gazit, who was an intelligence photographer in the Israeli military for two years, groups together portraits of members of both families along with haunting individual shots of landscapes where James lived and played. To further the idea of home, one corner includes two chairs and a table on which sits an ashtray with a partially smoked cigarette in it, as if something has been left unfinished. There are few smiles in Gazit’s photographs, mostly serious looks contemplating a life cut short and what might have been. The pictures are supplemented with Linda’s letter to Ayala’s father telling him about the suicide, Ayala’s letter to James, and a slideshow of older family photographs.
Director Tamra Davis (GUNCRAZY) transports viewers back to the 1980s New York art scene in the intimate documentary JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD, which is having a special return engagement at Film Forum by popular demand. In 1986, just as the career of street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was exploding, Davis filmed him being interviewed by designer Becky Johnson, a revealing portrait that she put away in a drawer for more than twenty years. Davis finally brings out that footage, making it the centerpiece of this new examination of the ambitious, influential artist and musician who experienced massive success before falling hard and fast and dying of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven in 1988. Davis, a friend of Basquiat’s, conducts new interviews with many of the people from his inner circle, including art dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, and Bruno Bischofberger; Basquiat’s girlfriends Suzanne Mallouk and Kelle Inman; close Basquiat friends Diego Cortez and Fab 5 Freddy; NEW YORK BEAT cable TV host Glenn O’Brien; and fellow artist Julian Schnabel, who directed Basquiat in DOWNTOWN 81. Davis has also dug up amazing footage from the 1980s of Basquiat that shows him to be a unique, driven figure who used whatever he could — from broken windowframes and doors he’d find on the street to immense canvases — to spread his art and world view, which began with drawings in which he identified himself as Samo, criticizing contemporary art as “the same old shit.” Ultimately, though, it was his relationship with Andy Warhol that was the beginning of the end. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD is a dazzling document of a fascinating time and a cautionary tale of success that comes too fast, too soon.
