A downtown artist/collector who cast a long shadow

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Michael Walker

Oren Jacoby with one of the “Shadowman” paintings by Richard Hambleton, the subject of Mr. Jacoby’s new documentary. CreditRichard Hambleton/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times

NEW YORK---When the filmmaker Oren Jacoby approached the Conceptual artist Richard Hambleton in 2009 about a documentary that, seven tumultuous years later, would become “Shadowman,” he took to Mr. Hambleton’s studio a “small, kind of semipro video camera” to be as “inconspicuous as possible,” he recalled recently. That turned out to be a good call. Mr. Hambleton, the Canadian-born artist who died on Oct. 29 at 65, and whose eerie black silhouettes slathered on buildings across downtown Manhattan defined the 1980s New York art scene as much as the work of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, was by then living a near-hermetic life, fending off patrons trying to fund a comeback. [More]