Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience
Fab 5 Freddy|Lee Quiñones|william cordova
September 8 - October 14, 2022
Space, like language, is socially constructed; and like the syntax of language, the spatial arrangements of our buildings and communities reflect and reinforce the nature of gender, race, and class relations in society. The uses of both language and space contribute to the power of some groups over others and the maintenance of human inequality. - Leslie Kanes Weisman, Discrimination by Design
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience organized by cultural practitioner, william cordova, focuses on three distinct print projects by Fab Five Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), Lee Quiñones, and william cordova published by the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University. Fab Five Freddy and 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 the 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, Quiñones, and 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.
Urban spaces provide numerous ambiances to be felt with all the senses. Whether we think of a lively outdoor marketplace or an ordinary parking lot, an attractive historical center or an accessible subway station, the very way we relate to these places is based on the sensory experience they provide. - Jean-Paul Thibaud, Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiances
This exhibition represents the first in a series of artist-curated exhibitions to be held at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery from September 2022 - April 2023 celebrating the Neiman Center’s 25th anniversary.
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: Meditations on Resilience is open Monday - Friday from 9 am - 5 pm. Proof of vaccination and photo I.D. are required for all visitors. Please feel free to email us or call 212-854-7641.
