Untitled (Hot + Heavy + Juicy + Sweet) 1969 ink on lined paper 11 x 8 inches, Martin Wong
Martin Wong’s (1946-1999) ability to produce portraits at art fairs for $7.50 a pop earned him the title of “Human Instamatic,” and he worked with an intensity and proliferation that made his brief life truly spectacular. With the first museum retrospective of his work now on view at the Bronx Museum of Art, Wong has taken center stage and capturing popular imagination. At Art Basel, P.P.O.W. (Booth A06) will present Martin Wong‘s poetry scrolls created in San Francisco between 1967 and 1973.
Wong had a gift for synthesis and a genuine love for the world of art, brilliantly bridging a wide array of different worlds through his work. Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of P.P.O.W., has been representing Wong’s work for over thirty years. She observes, “Martin was well known locally and to some extent internationally while he was alive. There has been increased interest over the past five years in his work. I think this speaks to a time when artists were less pressured by the market. The art world has always been crazy, but now it’s global, it’s big business. Martin was working at a time when artists could afford to the rents and move to the Lower East Side. There’s romance and innocence; this was pre-AIDS.”
Crystal Dagger c. 1978 ink and acrylic on paper bag 34 ” x 9 7/8 inches, Martin Wong
Born in Portland and raised in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, Wong studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. The works on view at P.P.O.W. are from those early years when Wong first entered the Bay Area art scene, doing stints as set designer for performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light.
In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived. Through his visual diary he built a landscape of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations and hand signals. His narratives were populated by the neighborhood’s denizens including firemen, the incarcerated, graffiti artists, and families, including his friend and poet, Miguel Piñero. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness in 1999.
Das Puke Book, Chapter 11: Scarry Night ink on vellum 39 7/8 x 10 7/8 inches, Martin Wong
The poetry scrolls that will be on display, many for the first time, are inspired by Islamic calligraphy, and reveal a love for handstyle that would prefigure his involvement in the New York graffiti world. A connoisseur of graffiti art, his collection grew to be perhaps the largest in the world. Five years before he died, he donated it to the Museum of the City of New York, and on the 20th anniversary of the donation, the Museum presented “City as Canvas”, a beautifully curated exhibition drawn exclusively from his collection. In many ways, Wong has become a folk hero of the East Village art scene, forever a man taken too soon but leaving a wealth of work whose legacy is just beginning to find its way.
Olsoff observes, “Martin was very inclusive. He was a gay guy who worked with graffiti artists, a very masculine heterosexual world. He was Chinese and worked with the Latino community. He carried the work of great artists on his shoulders. He was an individual. He was eccentric. We don’t see that anymore. He had a very authentic voice; as a culture we are getting further and further from that. People are now attuned to the issues he was addressing back then. When artists are so far ahead of their time, it can take several decades to be validated. I’ve learned artists really do say it first. They are showing people what could be.”
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
