- Don Leicht
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Don Leicht 
Birth name Don Leicht Born 1946 New York City, United States Field Art, Painting, Sculpture, Writing Training School of Visual Arts Lehman College Don Leicht (born in 1946) is a visual artist who has worked as a painter and sculptor in the Bronx, New York City for over thirty years. Leicht has had one person exhibitions in New York, Sweden and Germany and is an early figure in the New York City downtown scene in the 1970s, and in the subsequent Street Art and Graffiti movements. Leicht and long time collaborator John Fekner participated in recent street art exhibitions such as Wooster Collective's 11 Spring Street Project in 2006. Known as the original Invader (artist), Leicht continues to work both indoors and outdoors. Working with John Fekner, their latest outdoor project "The Stanley Cup is Missing" is currently part of the annual BLK River street art festival in Vienna, Austria.
In 1982, art writer Glenn O'Brien in a review in Artforum magazine states, "Leicht’s piece consists of a sequence of creatures that exist only on a video screen- Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and other Atari-type stable mates. Leicht has cut the forms of these leisure demons from heavy aluminum plate and enameled them with their normal, unnatural colors. But each creature has also been abraded, scratches in the enamel showing the metal underneath. One geometric thing – an abstracted dog? an “Imperial Walker”? – has been scratched with a message like a toilet-stall graffito or the “Pray” scratched on the metal of New York City phone booths.[1]
In August 1980, Don Leicht and John Fekner collaborated on a project located at the site of the People’s Convention held at Charlotte Street in the South Bronx. The People's Convention was a direct response to the National Convention of the Democratic Party being held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Fekner’s stencilled messages included Decay, Broken Promises, Falsas Promesas, Last Hope, Broken Treaties and Save Our School were succinct and dramatic in size and Leicht’s Birdfeeders were small-scaled and intimate painted sculptures for the children of the neighborhood. Their work transversely complemented each other with two different and distinct approaches that identified and drew attention to the existing conditions of the immediate Black and Latino communities, as well the concerns of Native American Indians. Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan stood amidst the rubble and ruins on August 5, 1980 promising to rebuild the area, as did his predecessor President Jimmy Carter in October 1977. The area has seen improvements through the rebuilding initiatives of Mayor Ed Koch, Ed Logue’s SBDO Charlotte Street Gardens, and the ongoing efforts of MBD Community Housing Corporation, SoBro and other newer partnerships and financial institutions.
John Fekner and Don Leicht, Your Space Has Been Invaded. Our Children are Fighting a Terrible War. Whole Families are being led to the Battlescreen. Spray paint and automotive paint on cut aluminum relief metal, 4' x 4', 1982
Don Leicht, Fat Tuesday, acrylic on canvas, 2004
Don Leicht, Dog Days, aluminum paint on metal mounted on wood, 1981
John Fekner & Don Leicht, Intruders, spray paint and oil on canvas, 2006Contents
Fashion Moda
Don Leicht collaborated with John Fekner, Broken Promises, Charlotte Street, South Bronx, NY, 1980
Fashion Moda, South Bronx, NY, photo by John Fekner, 1981Fashion Moda is most often associated with graffiti art and its acceptance into the art world through such figures as Fekner, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, and Keith Haring.[2] In 1981, Leicht participated in Fashion Moda's annual South Bronx exhibition. Fashion Moda, a storefront for experimental art and cultural exchange, and an outpost for showcasing graffiti, breakdancing and rapping. Leicht went to Charlotte Street with Fekner and stenciled six spray painted messages including Decay, Broken Promises, Falsas Promesas, Last Hope, Broken Treaties and Save Our School.
Collaborations
Leicht began collaborating with Queens artist John Fekner at P.S. 1 where they shared a studio in 1976. In 1982, they began a series of work and installations using steel, cut metal, aluminum and automotive paints based on Nishikado's Space Invaders arcade game with the statement: "Your Space Has Been Invaded-Our Children are Fighting a Terrible War. Whole families are being sent to Battlescreen." Their Beauty's Only Street Deep was installed at the Wooster Collective's 11 Spring Street street art 2006 exhibition in NYC. Leicht work with Fekner in 1978 he curated the Detective Show at the same outdoor location in Queens which included the words street museum on the invitational card.[3]
Reviews
O’Brien, Glenn, Artforum magazine, 1983
Review of From the Monkey to the Monitor, Fashion Moda, South, Bronx
The Wooster Collective said, "For us, John Fekner's pioneering stencil work is as important to the history of the urban art movement as the work of artists like Haring, Basquiat. It was artists like Fekner, Leicht, Hambleton and others who truly held down the scene back in the early 80's."[4]
Selected bibliography
- Fekner, John (1979). Stencil Projects 1978-1979, Lund & New York. Lund, Sweden, Edition Sellem, 1979 ISBN 91-85260-14-2.
- Fekner, John (1983). Beauty's Only Screen Deep. NY, NY: Wedge Press, Inc. #10.
- Fekner, John (1985). Cassette Gazette. Tokyo, Japan: B-Sellers, ISBN 4-938198-14-2.
- Gumpert, Lynn, Curator, New Work New York at the New Museum, Exhibition catalog essay, January 30-March 25, 1982. p. 12-15
- Howze, Russell, Stencil Nation: Graffiti, Community, and Art, Manic D Press, San Francisco, CA, 2008, ISBN 978-1-933149-22-6
- Kahane, Lisa, Do Not Give Way to Evil, Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987, powerHouse books, a Miss Rosen edition, Brooklyn, NY, 2008, ISBN 978-1-57687-432-5
- Lippard, Lucy, Get The Message-A Decade Of Social Change, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 1985 ISBN # 0525242562
Gallery
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John Fekner & Don Leicht
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John Fekner and Don Leicht
Notes
- ^ O’Brien, Glenn, Artforum magazine, 1983 “From the Monkey to the Monitor,” Fashion Moda
- ^ Fashion Moda: A Bronx Experience, by Professor Sally Webster, 1996, http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/gallery/talkback/fmwebster.html
- ^ Lewisohn Cedar, Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution, Tate Museum, London, England 2008 ISBN 978-1-85437-767-8 pgs.23, 90
- ^ "Catching Up With John Fekner and Don Leicht", woostercollective.com, 22 January 2007. Retrieved 1 January 2008.
External links
Categories:- American contemporary artists
- Public art
- American sculptors
- American graffiti artists
- 1946 births
- Living people
- American artists
- Culture jamming
- American painters
- People from the Bronx
- Artists from New York City
- Lehman College alumni
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