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Martin WongMartin Wong Eureka California 1978 (1970s Martin Wong mixed media)1978
1978
About the Item
Martin Wong (untitled) Cowboy Sacred Heart 1978:
Martin Wong constructed this endearing mail art piece for his close friend John Rotter in 1978. This rare high collectible Wong mixed media piece serves as an important testament to Wong’s much overlooked Eureka, California years.
Ink on found printed card, with graphite on paper and collaged found elements in plastic sleeve.
10 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches (26 x 17.1 cm).
Minor wear commensurate with age & medium. Fair to good overall vintage condition.
Signed Martin and inscribed extensively on reverse.
Private collection, Eureka, CA.
Wong’s text reads:
‘Hello John:
Will write you soon & send pics. Am in the middle of a whole bunch of NY. City jazz paintings right now. We can do the whole trip with the Romano Gabriel slides when I come back for visit in December. Also if you have time maybe you can do photos of lunch box collection and we can split. $$$ on article abt. it. Everything's fine. I swim a lot everyday and drink carrot juice. Miss
everyone and look forward to seeing you all again soon. Vatcher's back in town. We went out one nite with his & Mike More's girl friends and saw a lot of great jazz. Hope you're doing fine. More later.
Love Martin.’
Martin Wong & Eureka, CA: see, Artforum ‘Humboldt Fog’ (Adler):
“Many people associate Wong with his time in New York City, where he romanticized a similar desolation in the crumbling brick tenements of the Lower East Side. But from 1973 until 1978, he savored a more provincial air of neglect in the Old Town commercial district of Eureka. It epitomized for him a national condition of erosion—a condition to which paintings like his self-portrait were ultimately consigned.
Wong was part of a wave of artists and hippies who moved northward from the San Francisco Bay Area after California’s countercultural explosion... Some were galvanized by the back-to-the-land movement and carved out communes in the countryside. Others settled near the college town of Arcata, home of Wong’s alma mater, Humboldt State College. But Wong made the less popular decision to live in Eureka among a motley cast of artists, fishermen, potters, and loggers.
The city became what John Rotter, Wong’s friend and collaborator, called a ‘sea of disenfranchised people.’
Wong’s Eureka years inaugurated a form of social semirealism that would continue for much of his career. But his engagement with the city ran deeper… His most definitive ode to Eureka is found in a self-published book of drawings from 1976, simply titled Eureka, which catalogues the places where residents gathered in previous eras.”
More on Martin Wong:
Martin Wong’s haunting paintings combine the leftist politics of social realism with a cosmic, transcendent symbology; brick walls and constellations are frequent motifs. A fixture of New York’s East Village art scene in the 1980s, the largely self-taught artist often focused on the city’s blighted downtown landscape. He imbued row houses and ruins with a sense of magic as he considered the intersections of race, sexuality, and history in his urban environment. Wong exhibited extensively in New York before his death in 1999, and his work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Bass, among other institutions. Wong’s paintings have sold for six-figure prices on the secondary market.
Related Categories
Martin Wong. East village artists. Graffiti. Lower East Side. David Wojnarowicz. Gay artists. Graffiti. Lower East Side.
- Creator:Martin Wong (1946 - 1999, American)
- Creation Year:1978
- Dimensions:Height: 10.25 in (26.04 cm)Width: 6.75 in (17.15 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:NEW YORK, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU354313522892
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