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New 'Rockin' Hollywood' Exhibit June 15 - September 6, 2007
The Sun Deck Gallery aboard the historic Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, is proud to present Rockin' Hollywood, a new exhibition featuring 80 images of classic rock and movie legends by photographer Michael Childers. The exhibit will open June 15 and run through September 6, 2007. An opening reception with Michael Childers is scheduled at the Gallery on Sunday afternoon, June 17, from 4:00 until 7:00 p.m., and the public is welcome to attend.
The exhibition is part of a year-long 40th anniversary celebration of the Queen Mary's 1967 arrival in Long Beach.
Childers, one of the entertainment industry's most renowned and highly respected portrait, fashion and fine art photographers, began his career in the sixties, and continues to influence the world of art photography today.
"Who better to feature in our gallery during this anniversary year than Michael Childers," said Queen Mary President and CEO Howard Bell. "He has been Rockin' Hollywood (thus the exhibit title) for years with powerful, insightful, insider photography of his friends, and his body of work reflects the same 40 years that the Queen Mary has been here in Long Beach," Bell continued. "Childers' images of art, film, TV and rock stars perfectly capture the popular culture of the era."
"My work has always been difficult to categorize," Michael Childers commented, "because I never stuck with one genre of photography. There are so many areas that I explore on film - movement with great ballet dancers, explosive moments from great theatre productions, portraiture, nudes, flowers and interiors among them."
Movies were the photographer's childhood passion and infused his dreams and fantasies. Early in his career he was invited to work for Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theatre in London, an experience that allowed him to work alongside and observe some of the greatest acting talent of the last century. Shortly after that, he documented the extraordinary explosion of artistic expression in fashion, music and film in New York City in the early 1970s as one of the founding photographers of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. Also in the '70s in Hollywood, he photographed a group of unique, young talents with very strong and different personalities, his friends then and now, who have become our current generation of film legends.
To quote artist David Hockney, "Michael Childers has created a living record of Hollywood people he actually knew and admired. An insider on the edge - a good position to be in."
The animated, screaming image that leaps from the Rockin' Hollywood exhibit graphics (Stephen Brogdon Design) is a recent gelatin silver print of Henry Rollins photographed in Hollywood in 2000.
The 80 photographs included in the Rockin' Hollywood exhibit cover a wide spectrum of Childers' portraiture from Mae West to Natalie Wood and Lily Tomlin, from Cat Stevens to Rod Stewart, Rock Hudson, Elton John, Andy Warhol, Ringo Starr, George Hurrell and David Hockney. A very special image of Sir Laurence Olivier aboard Natalie Wood's yacht shows the Queen Mary in the background. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a young man at Muscle Beach is also included alongside Al Pacino and Mel Gibson. Grace Jones, Cher, Demi Moore, Raquel Welch, Michelle Pfeiffer - the list goes on and on.
The Exhibit is being curated by Dr. Lou D'Elia of Pancho Barnes Enterprises who also produced the Sun Deck Gallery's first exhibit, "Lights! Camera! Glamour!" - featuring the pioneering work of Hollywood glamour idiom photographer, George Hurrell. Architect Michael Salazar of Pancho Barnes Enterprises designed the flexible, new exhibit space that will premiere with the Rockin' Hollywood show.
It is the mission of the new Sun Deck Gallery to present unique exhibitions of fine art photography and explore the Queen Mary's historic photo archive.
To learn more about Michael Childers and his work, go to www.michaelchildersphotography.com.
###
Michael Childers Biography
Born in North Carolina, Childers attended the UCLA Film School where he directed student films and began his photography career by studying with Robert Heineken and Edmund Teske. Childers created the mixed media work for the record-breaking run of the hit off-Broadway musical "Oh! Calcutta!" for Kenneth Tynan. It was Tynan who subsequently invited Michael to work for Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theater in London. He remains the only American photographer invited to photograph productions at the National Theater. He went on to become a founding photographer for Andy Warhol's Interview and After Dark magazines. For Dance magazine, he produced many covers including those featuring the Joffrey Ballet, The Royal Ballet and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company as well as co-authored a book, "The World of Bejart."
From his Melrose Avenue and Venice Beach studios, Childers photographed over 200 magazine covers including GQ, New York, TV Guide, Esquire, Los Angeles, Elle, Paris Match, Life, London Sunday Times Magazine, and both English and Italian Vogue. He created more than 150 album covers and film posters for major motion picture studios and worked as a special photographer on dozens of films including Grease, Marathon Man, The Year of Living Dangerously, Coal Miner's Daughter, Pennies from Heaven, The Terminator, Hammett, Torch Song Trilogy, Endless Love, The Champ and Oceans 12.
Michael has been involved in fund-raising events for AIDS service organizations, breast cancer, foundations for the performing arts, and film organizations since 1989. He founded Divine Design for Project Angel Food, the largest design event on the west coast, now in its twelfth year. In Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New York and palm Springs, events he has founded or helped produce have raised over twelve million dollars and been emceed by such superstars as Lily Tomlin, Bruce Vilanch, Carol Burnett, Lauren Bacall, Marsha Mason, Ali MacGraw and Bette Midler. In 2003 he co-produced The Palm Springs International Film Festival and in Los Angeles he also produced the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Artists) Britannia Awards with Russell Crowe, Peter Weir, Angela Landbury, Hugh Grant, Sandra Bullock, Alan Cummings, Robin Williams and Billy Connelly. Other performers that Michael has brought to the stage for various causes include Joanne Worley, Tim Curry, Lainie Kazan, Stephanie Powers, Michael York, Robin Williams, Billy Connelly, Sandra Bullock, Russell Crowe, Robert Wagner, Angela Lansbury, Lorna Luft, Michael Feinstein, Valarie Pettiford, Jake Heggie, Julie Migenes, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Boney James, Margaret Cho, Lynn Redgrave, Davis Gaines, Jason Grae, Carol Channing and Jennifer Holiday.
Michael's work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Marion Museum of Photographic Studies in Santa Fe, the University of California Riverside photographic collections, the Palm Springs Art Museum photographic collection, the Chiat Day Collection in Santa Monica, the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts in New York and the Laguna Art Museum. He also produced "An Evening with k. d. lang" held in Palm Springs in November 2006.
In 2003, the Palm Springs Art Museum presented a forty year retrospective of Michael's work titled Icons and Legends. The three-month show was visited by over 55,000 people, one of the largest audiences ever recorded by the museum. Michael received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Hollywood Photography at the Temecula Film Festival in September of 2004, and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Hollywood Photography from the Provincetown Film Festival that same year. At the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2006, La Dolce Vita, the photography of Michael Childers, was presented. The same year, the Palm Springs Art Museum presented a Celebration of Three Hollywood Photographers: George Hurrell, Sid Avery and Michael Childers and, in October 2006, the Tom of Finland Foundation inducted Michael into their Hal of Fame for his erotic photography.
In early 2007, during the Palm Springs Film Festival, the M Modern gallery presented BLOW UP, exhibiting the work of Michael Childers, William Claxton and Douglas Kirkland. An exhibit titled Rockin' Hollywood, featuring portraits of rock 'n roll icons and Hollywood legends, will open June 15, 2007, in the Sun Deck Gallery aboard the historic Queen Mary in Long Beach. For more information, go to Michael's website at www.michaelchildersphotography.com.
Michael Childers' work is exhibited at:
National Portrait Gallery, London
Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles
Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica
BGH Gallery, Santa Monica
Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles
Fahey-Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles
Trinity Gallery, Atlanta
Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Truro Arts Gallery, Massachusetts
Le Salon Prive, Santa Fe
Lew Allen Gallery, Santa Fe
Photo San Francisco - International Images
Imago Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach
The exhibition is part of a year-long 40th anniversary celebration of the Queen Mary's 1967 arrival in Long Beach.
Childers, one of the entertainment industry's most renowned and highly respected portrait, fashion and fine art photographers, began his career in the sixties, and continues to influence the world of art photography today.
"Who better to feature in our gallery during this anniversary year than Michael Childers," said Queen Mary President and CEO Howard Bell. "He has been Rockin' Hollywood (thus the exhibit title) for years with powerful, insightful, insider photography of his friends, and his body of work reflects the same 40 years that the Queen Mary has been here in Long Beach," Bell continued. "Childers' images of art, film, TV and rock stars perfectly capture the popular culture of the era."
"My work has always been difficult to categorize," Michael Childers commented, "because I never stuck with one genre of photography. There are so many areas that I explore on film - movement with great ballet dancers, explosive moments from great theatre productions, portraiture, nudes, flowers and interiors among them."
Movies were the photographer's childhood passion and infused his dreams and fantasies. Early in his career he was invited to work for Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theatre in London, an experience that allowed him to work alongside and observe some of the greatest acting talent of the last century. Shortly after that, he documented the extraordinary explosion of artistic expression in fashion, music and film in New York City in the early 1970s as one of the founding photographers of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. Also in the '70s in Hollywood, he photographed a group of unique, young talents with very strong and different personalities, his friends then and now, who have become our current generation of film legends.
To quote artist David Hockney, "Michael Childers has created a living record of Hollywood people he actually knew and admired. An insider on the edge - a good position to be in."
The animated, screaming image that leaps from the Rockin' Hollywood exhibit graphics (Stephen Brogdon Design) is a recent gelatin silver print of Henry Rollins photographed in Hollywood in 2000.
The 80 photographs included in the Rockin' Hollywood exhibit cover a wide spectrum of Childers' portraiture from Mae West to Natalie Wood and Lily Tomlin, from Cat Stevens to Rod Stewart, Rock Hudson, Elton John, Andy Warhol, Ringo Starr, George Hurrell and David Hockney. A very special image of Sir Laurence Olivier aboard Natalie Wood's yacht shows the Queen Mary in the background. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a young man at Muscle Beach is also included alongside Al Pacino and Mel Gibson. Grace Jones, Cher, Demi Moore, Raquel Welch, Michelle Pfeiffer - the list goes on and on.
The Exhibit is being curated by Dr. Lou D'Elia of Pancho Barnes Enterprises who also produced the Sun Deck Gallery's first exhibit, "Lights! Camera! Glamour!" - featuring the pioneering work of Hollywood glamour idiom photographer, George Hurrell. Architect Michael Salazar of Pancho Barnes Enterprises designed the flexible, new exhibit space that will premiere with the Rockin' Hollywood show.
It is the mission of the new Sun Deck Gallery to present unique exhibitions of fine art photography and explore the Queen Mary's historic photo archive.
To learn more about Michael Childers and his work, go to www.michaelchildersphotography.com.
###
Michael Childers Biography
Born in North Carolina, Childers attended the UCLA Film School where he directed student films and began his photography career by studying with Robert Heineken and Edmund Teske. Childers created the mixed media work for the record-breaking run of the hit off-Broadway musical "Oh! Calcutta!" for Kenneth Tynan. It was Tynan who subsequently invited Michael to work for Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theater in London. He remains the only American photographer invited to photograph productions at the National Theater. He went on to become a founding photographer for Andy Warhol's Interview and After Dark magazines. For Dance magazine, he produced many covers including those featuring the Joffrey Ballet, The Royal Ballet and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company as well as co-authored a book, "The World of Bejart."
From his Melrose Avenue and Venice Beach studios, Childers photographed over 200 magazine covers including GQ, New York, TV Guide, Esquire, Los Angeles, Elle, Paris Match, Life, London Sunday Times Magazine, and both English and Italian Vogue. He created more than 150 album covers and film posters for major motion picture studios and worked as a special photographer on dozens of films including Grease, Marathon Man, The Year of Living Dangerously, Coal Miner's Daughter, Pennies from Heaven, The Terminator, Hammett, Torch Song Trilogy, Endless Love, The Champ and Oceans 12.
Michael has been involved in fund-raising events for AIDS service organizations, breast cancer, foundations for the performing arts, and film organizations since 1989. He founded Divine Design for Project Angel Food, the largest design event on the west coast, now in its twelfth year. In Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New York and palm Springs, events he has founded or helped produce have raised over twelve million dollars and been emceed by such superstars as Lily Tomlin, Bruce Vilanch, Carol Burnett, Lauren Bacall, Marsha Mason, Ali MacGraw and Bette Midler. In 2003 he co-produced The Palm Springs International Film Festival and in Los Angeles he also produced the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Artists) Britannia Awards with Russell Crowe, Peter Weir, Angela Landbury, Hugh Grant, Sandra Bullock, Alan Cummings, Robin Williams and Billy Connelly. Other performers that Michael has brought to the stage for various causes include Joanne Worley, Tim Curry, Lainie Kazan, Stephanie Powers, Michael York, Robin Williams, Billy Connelly, Sandra Bullock, Russell Crowe, Robert Wagner, Angela Lansbury, Lorna Luft, Michael Feinstein, Valarie Pettiford, Jake Heggie, Julie Migenes, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Boney James, Margaret Cho, Lynn Redgrave, Davis Gaines, Jason Grae, Carol Channing and Jennifer Holiday.
Michael's work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Marion Museum of Photographic Studies in Santa Fe, the University of California Riverside photographic collections, the Palm Springs Art Museum photographic collection, the Chiat Day Collection in Santa Monica, the Lincoln Center Library of Performing Arts in New York and the Laguna Art Museum. He also produced "An Evening with k. d. lang" held in Palm Springs in November 2006.
In 2003, the Palm Springs Art Museum presented a forty year retrospective of Michael's work titled Icons and Legends. The three-month show was visited by over 55,000 people, one of the largest audiences ever recorded by the museum. Michael received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Hollywood Photography at the Temecula Film Festival in September of 2004, and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Hollywood Photography from the Provincetown Film Festival that same year. At the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2006, La Dolce Vita, the photography of Michael Childers, was presented. The same year, the Palm Springs Art Museum presented a Celebration of Three Hollywood Photographers: George Hurrell, Sid Avery and Michael Childers and, in October 2006, the Tom of Finland Foundation inducted Michael into their Hal of Fame for his erotic photography.
In early 2007, during the Palm Springs Film Festival, the M Modern gallery presented BLOW UP, exhibiting the work of Michael Childers, William Claxton and Douglas Kirkland. An exhibit titled Rockin' Hollywood, featuring portraits of rock 'n roll icons and Hollywood legends, will open June 15, 2007, in the Sun Deck Gallery aboard the historic Queen Mary in Long Beach. For more information, go to Michael's website at www.michaelchildersphotography.com.
Michael Childers' work is exhibited at:
National Portrait Gallery, London
Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles
Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica
BGH Gallery, Santa Monica
Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles
Fahey-Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles
Trinity Gallery, Atlanta
Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Truro Arts Gallery, Massachusetts
Le Salon Prive, Santa Fe
Lew Allen Gallery, Santa Fe
Photo San Francisco - International Images
Imago Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach
