Martin Wong

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Martin Wong
Born(1946-07-11)July 11, 1946
ceramics

Martin Wong (

painter of the late 20th century.[1] His work has been described as a meticulous blend of social realism and visionary art styles. Wong's paintings often explored multiple ethnic and racial identities, exhibited cross-cultural elements, demonstrated multilingualism, and celebrated his queer sexuality.[2]

Biography

Early years

Martin Wong was born in

Humboldt State University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in Ceramics in 1968. Through college and for another 10 years, Wong traveled between Eureka and San Francisco practicing his artistic craft. During this time, Wong had an apartment in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and was active in the Bay Area art scene, including stints as a set designer for the performance art group The Angels of Light, an offshoot of The Cockettes. While involved with The Angels of Light, Wong participated in the emerging hippie movement and engaged in the period's climate of sexual freedom and experimentation with psychedelic drugs.[2]
By the late 70s, Wong made the decision to move to New York to pursue his career as an artist. According to Wong, his move to New York was precipitated by a friendly challenge:

I made ceramics and did drawings at arts fairs. I was known as the 'Human Instamatic.' It was US$7.50 for a portrait. My record was 27 fairs in one day. Friends said to me, 'If you're so good, why don't you go to New York?'[5]

Career

Attorney Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero) (1982-1984) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022

In 1978 Wong moved to Manhattan, settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Largely self-taught, Wong's paintings ranged from gritty renderings of the decaying Lower East Side to playful depictions of New York's and San Francisco's Chinatowns, to Traffic Signs for the Hearing Impaired. In self-describing the subject matter of some of his paintings, Wong said: "Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live and the people are the people I know and see all the time."[6]

Wong is perhaps best known for his collaborations with

Nuyorican arts movement
.

Wong's Artist Statement for Semaphore Gallery, 1984.

Wong held a solo exhibition titled Chinatown Paintings at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993 that showcased his own memories, experiences and interpretations of the "mythical quality of Chinatown."[3] Wong exemplified "a tourist idea, an outsider's view" of Chinatown that was prevalent for those distant from the reality of the city.[9]

For a time in the 1980s, he made ends meet by buying underpriced antiquities at

Futura 2000, Lady Pink, and Lee Quiñones.[10]

Personal life

Wong was openly gay.

partner, died a decade earlier in 1988 from cirrhosis.[12]

Wong's aunt, Eleanor "Nora" Wong, was an active participant in the San Francisco Chinese nightclub scene in the 1940s. She most notably had a host of duties, including principal singer, at Forbidden City.[13]

Legacy

Wong was acknowledged in a New York Times obituary as an artist "whose meticulous visionary realism is among the lasting legacies of New York's East Village art scene of the 1980s".[11] Critical esteem has sustained since his death, and Wong's works can be found in collections worldwide, including the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Syracuse University Art Collection and in the cities of New York and San Francisco. The Martin Wong Papers reside at the Fales Library, New York University, and include among other things sketchbooks, correspondence, biographical documents, videocassette recordings, photographs, graffiti-related materials, and parts of Wong's personal library. The catalog of a joint exhibition of Wong's work at the

New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Illinois State University
Galleries was published by Rizzoli in 1998 in Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong.

Two of Martin Wong's paintings are in the collection of the

Whitney Museum in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art has three of Wong's works in its permanent collection.[14] One of his paintings is in the collection of the state of California and displayed permanently at the California State Building in San Francisco. The Society of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago
acquired the painting "Sweet Oblivion" in May 2012.

Founded by his mother in 2001, the Martin Wong Foundation was created to help fund art programs and young artists through collegiate art scholarships, art publications and active art education programs. Since 2003, the scholarships have continued to be offered at Humboldt State University, Wong's alma mater, San Francisco State University, New York University, and Arizona State University.[15]

The exhibition Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez Rubio, is being presented at the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid from November 2022 to January 2023. After Museo CA2M, the exhibition will travel to

Camden Art Centre in London from 7 July to 17 September 2023; and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from November 2023 to February 2024.[16]

See also

References

  1. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d e Mann, Richard G (July 4, 2007). "Wong, Martin" (PDF). glbtq.com. Retrieved October 15, 2007.
  3. ^ a b "Martin Wong". SFGate. August 22, 1999. Retrieved May 3, 2016.
  4. ^ "Guide to the Martin Wong Papers ca. 1982-1999 MSS 102". dlib.nyu.edu. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved May 3, 2016.
  5. ^ a b "The Bricklayer's Art", by Guy Trebay, May 26, 1998, The Village Voice
  6. ISBN 0520203631
    .
  7. ^ "Barry Blinderman: The Downtown Art Scene - NYC,1981". NYC,1981. February 16, 2015. Archived from the original on July 4, 2017. Retrieved May 6, 2016.
  8. ^ Mallory Curley, A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia (Randy Press, 2010)
  9. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved May 6, 2016.
  10. ^ Anonymous (August 12, 2013). "City as Canvas". www.mcny.org. Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  11. ^ a b Roberta Smith (August 18, 1999). "Martin Wong Is Dead at 53". The New York Times. Retrieved October 26, 2008.
  12. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  13. JSTOR 10.1525/gfc.2004.4.4.94
    .
  14. ^ "Martin Wong | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  15. ^ "Martin Wong Foundation". www.martinwong.org. Retrieved May 4, 2016.
  16. ^ "Museo CA2M: Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief". Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. December 21, 2021. Retrieved December 21, 2022.

External links

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