The 5th drop of Supreme‘s Fall/Winter 2020 is characterized by a collaboration that deserves attention, as does the one with Yohji Yamamoto that we have talked about here.
The skate brand founded by James Jebbia has created a hoodie, a T-shirt and a longsleeve in different colors marked by three shots of the American photographer and artist Joel-Peter Witkin: “Mother and Child”, “Harvest” and “Sanitarium”, the latter inspired the collection and the show of Spring 2001 by Alexander McQueen.
The painter Jerome’s twin brother, Joel-Peter Witkin was born in Brooklyn in 1939 to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. The parents divorced when the twins were still young because of insurmountable religious differences that they never managed to overcome.
After attending the Santa Cecilia grammar school in Brooklyn and Grover Cleveland High School, he enlisted in the United States Army in 1961 to be sent to Vietnam as a war photographer.
He never went to Vietnam and never became a war photographer, but he spent all his time in the army in Texas, at Fort Hoos where he was mainly involved in public relations and confidential photography.
In 1967 he became the official photographer of City Walls Inc, a non-profit organization founded by muralist Jason Crum to beautify the neglected sites of New York City.
He studied sculpture graduating in 1974 at the Cooper Union in New York, was granted a scholarship at Columbia University but decided to attend the Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
A disturbing aesthetics, a frantic search for an erotic beauty hidden behind the macabre and deformities, a sensitivity and a vision that spring from a precise episode of her life. As a child he witnessed a car accident right in front of his house: “It happened on a Sunday when my mother was escorting my twin brother and me down the steps of the tenement where we lived. We were going to church. While walking down the hallway to the entrance of the building, we heard an incredible crash mixed with screaming and cries for help. The accident involved three cars, all with families in them. Somehow, in the confusion, I was no longer holding my mother’s hand. At the place where I stood at the curb, I could see something rolling from one of the overturned cars. It stopped at the curb where I stood. It was the head of a little girl. I bent down to touch the face, to speak to it – but before I could touch it someone carried me away”.
Photographer also known for the variety of techniques used such as drilling and scratching negatives and during the printing phase. His works reflect the difficulties of his life and his desire to overturn the concepts of beauty and grace seen through the filter of the madness of life itself.
The Supreme x Joel-Peter Witkin collection is already available in the Supreme webshop.
