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Antonio Lopez - NYC, When It Took My Breath Away
It was as if I took a breath for the for the first time in years. I went to the El Barrio Museum to see the Antonio Lopez exhibit and I knew it would be beautiful, I did not expect it to reduce me to tears. His illustrations are beyond comprehension, yes …but they brought back into crystal clear focus a time in my life when I was happiest. I first arrived in NY to go to design school before some genius decided to clean it up/ruin it and karma smiled down on me and placed my dormitory in the same building as Antonio’s studio….31 Union Square West. At the time I knew it was a special place but I really had no fucking clue just how special it was.
New York was filthy, loud, raw, fresh, young and stupid and so was I. So were my roommates and my classmates. We didn’t know right from wrong when it came to our own personal safety, we did things that in retrospect could have ended our lives, but we would have died with a big ass smile on our faces.
Antonio Lopez was the fashion illustrator that all fashion illustrators wanted to be and he was a gentle soul who died like so many of my talented beautiful friends, from AIDS before we all truly benefitted from their talent and their vision. I know this only because he opened his studio up to those of us who lived in the building and he shared his touch, his knowledge and his craft to us. I don’t remember much about him other than he was kind of shy and he could draw like a brother from another planet. His friends were Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Karl Lagerfeld, Bill Cunningham and I could go on… but you get it…and on any given night or day they paid him a visit. If by chance we spotted any of the afore mentioned stars shining bright in the elevator on their way up to his penthouse we were duty bound to sound the alarm by yelling as loud as we could…”MIIIICCCCCKKKK JAAAGGGGGERRRRRR’s in the building”, we would then push the elevator buttons for each floor so that it had to stop and our dorm mates could shamelessly gawk at Grace or Andy or Pat Cleveland while they were trapped in the elevator….shit it was crazy, and I was only 17. The chances were good either they were high or we were.
Antonio’s women were not the thin waifs we envision when we think fashion, they are all flesh, like Serena and Venus, with ass and tits and muscle and power, and very, very feminine. His men are manly and vulnerable, their faces alone are works of art unto themselves. He illustrated race and sexuality so beautifully it defies any description I am capable of. On one wall of the exhibit hung a few dozen albums from his collection of r & b, soul, pop…I burst into tears when I saw it, I have been struggling with focusing on my own illustrations and came to the conclusion that I must have music ( I am writing this while I listen to President Obama’s Summer Playlist) in order to function…The perfect song plays during the exhibit, “White Lines”, I need say no more, just go, go see it before its gone, you will never experience what I did back in the day but you will come close, very, very close.