In Mavericks of Style, Uri McMillan tells the story of New York City’s downtown art and fashion scene of the 1970s through the lives and careers of experimental Black and Brown artists. McMillan focuses on model and musician Grace Jones, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, fashion designer Stephen Burrows, and their orbit of friends, showing how they restlessly moved across genres and disciplines, transgressing boundaries between the commercial and the avant-garde. Bypassing the exclusive art world and cultivating uniquely personal styles, these artists thrived on friendship and collaboration in their experimental use of bold color, gold lamÉ, and Instamatic photography. McMillan transports readers to the spaces Jones, Lopez, and Burrows frequented and worked, from hair salons, nondescript artist studios, and buzzy boutiques to funky discos and high fashion runways. By foregrounding their impact on the decade’s aesthetics, McMillan complicates and expands the understanding of these artists, offering a new vision of New York’s art world in sultry, bombastic color.
Cast of Characters ix Introduction. Insurgent Aesthetics 1 1. Mundane Made Spectacular: Antonio Lopez 23 2. Neophyte to Muse: Grace Jones 75 3. Color That Moves: Stephen Burrows 121 Afterword. Style Is a Feeling 165 Acknowledgments 179 Notes 183 Bibliography 209 Index
Uri McMillan is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance.
“In Mavericks of Style, Uri McMillan takes us on a dazzling journey through the world of Grace Jones and her circle - Antonio Lopez, Juan Ramos, Pat Cleveland, Stephen Burrows and many more. Part archive raid, part love letter to insurgent glamour, McMillan recenters these style revolutionaries whose sharp elbows and sharper aesthetics reshaped fashion, performance, and art as we know it. Mavericks of Style is as seductive and vital as its subjects: a kaleidoscopic archive of those who turned the disco floor, the fashion runway, and their own bodies into living, breathing works of art.” - Tavia Nyong’o, author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World
“Uri McMillan offers a vibrant analysis of how artistic production and collaboration among Black and Latinx women and LGBTQ artists resulted in a transformative cultural moment in 1970s New York that spanned fashion, photography, art, and performance. Readers learn how dance, color, racialized sexuality, and subculture fed the elite industries of fashion while also creating alternative spaces for Black and Latinx woman and queer self-fashioning. Bringing the milieu of nightlife, leisure, and corporate spaces to life, McMillan makes a major contribution to cultural studies.” - Jillian Hernandez, author of Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment
