“Vogue Take Ovah - the Old Way and New Way Experience”.

 

For All Queens! takes you on a journey from eighties New York to modern-day Brussels. Keith Haring loved to party, and Afro-American culture and dance were his lifeblood. Club culture was a lifestyle to him. The House Ball culture embodied an almost spiritual experience. For All Queens! is deeply connected to this underground ballroom community: a culture with such themes as race, gender and sexual orientation at its heart. The ‘(new way) vogue’ is just one of the forms of expression that have arisen from it. Recent Netflix series such as Pose and Paris is Burning offer a fresh look at this phenomenon. This special evening will also pay homage to the club culture and the LGBTQI+ icons that inspired Haring then and continue to fascinate us today, thirty years after the death of this iconic American artist. You won’t want to miss this club vibe at BOZAR!

 

The voguing performance is followed by a Q&A with Julia Gruen (executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation and the artist’s former Studio Manager), Zelda Fitzgerald (For All Queens! and creator of Vogue Take Ovah), Kevin Aviance (American drag queen, musician, fashion designer and vogue and ballroom legend).

 

With this project, I worked on ten videos for the Vogue Take Ovah show presented at BOZAR Brussels as a part of the exhibition Keith Haring: 30 Years Already. I assisted Zelda Fitzgerald (For All Queens!) in making editorial decisions that shaped the way video complemented and contextualised the narrative of the show. This meant, first and foremost, learning about 1980's New York City, Ballroom culture and the stories that surround Keith Haring's work both then and now in 2020.

The videos I worked on depicted i.a. the South American/Caribbean molas that Haring's early work derives from, photography that show the poverty, inequality and protests that characterised the streets of 1980's NYC; and for example the CBS Evening News 'profile first broadcast' on Haring that opens with: "People who commit graffiti often share two things in common anonymity and a lack of talent but now Charles Osgood reports one subway artist is making a name for himself somewhere besides the police block". ––

 

 

 

Links:

BOZAR - Keith Haring: 30 Years Already

Gutierrez, M. (2018, November 7). Does Abstraction Belong to White People?

Pater, R. (2016). The Politics of Design

De la Puente, G. Muhammad, Z. (2019, July 16). Keith Haring at Liverpool