Author | Graydon Gund
On a recent Friday night I had the pleasure of attending Awakening, an event hosted by RAW:natural born artists that took place at The Cutting Room on 36th Street in Manhattan. Having been to the venue previously I went in expecting a few people sitting around and watching bland music acts, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. On entering, I was barraged with lights, thumping music, and more different kinds of art and creativity than I could process.
I soon realized that one of the best things about Raw is its unapologetic diversity. There were people of every skin color and gender identity mingling with each other, but I never felt like the awkward white guy. A woman near the front showed me what she called memory sculptures, which were pieces of plaster suspended in large beakers of water with gently undulating lights. She described these as being dead beings composed of the teeth, skin, and ooze of memory and pain personified. This booth was right next to someone selling their leather wallets, which was right next to someone selling her husbands’ screen prints. Between customers they would all mingle and chat, getting to know each others work.
The main event, which started small and escalated quickly, was a fashion show. I’m not the type of guy who obsesses over clothes and spends my time following what is and isn’t “in” at any given second, but this was an undeniable spectacle. It began with Ralphy Vies showing a collection of t-shirts that resembled a great deal of the art on display in the space. Brightly colored screen prints elevating the clothing staple to higher style. These were followed by dresses, which my Project-Runway-trained brain told me were of a piece with each other, though these did nothing to prepare me for what came next. Rightly saved for last, Michael Charles’ collection, which was inspired by drag queens, blew my expectations out of the water. The show, which featured a mix of drag queens that, hesitant though I am to use this phrase, really worked it. They wound their way through a good amount of Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP, with all attendant dancing lip-synching and camera mugging. Just as I wondered to myself if the show could get any gayer a man in a brightly colored bondage mask and little else walked out. Not only was this drag, fashion, and nearly naked men, but they were all interfacing with each other, each elevating the others, which is really what Raw arts is all about.
As the show ended and the fawning photographers dispersed I wandered into the remainder of the exhibition, a vast art and fresco filled space. One of the first things I saw was someone selling prints of photos by the final designer of the night featuring some of the models I had seen in the show. In that moment the spirit of the event seemed to crystallize – that it’s not at all about the one, but about inter-disciplinary collaborations that are of this time and place. Many paintings took recognizable characters and symbols and created something else with them, elevating television and cartoon characters into high art. Though the art world can sometimes seem closed off and inaccessible as The Cloisters, Raw does a fantastic job of democratizing and bringing everything together to everyone.
Please note that the next showcase is April 25th at The Cutting Room and Raw is still accepting submissions on rawartists.org
