JUST A BROOKLYN KID: REIMAGINING MAPPLETHORPE
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 2014.
RUE, 6 YEARS OLD.
A few years back, at my friend McKendree Key’s house, I saw a striking photograph of her as a girl taken almost thirty years ago. I was surprised when she told me the photographer was Robert Mapplethorpe. When I think of his work, images of stylized, male nudes and the rock chic of Patti Smith come to mind, not kids. McKendree’s daughter Rue is now the same age McKendree was when she sat for the portrait, and visitors often think the Mapplethorpe picture hanging on the wall is Rue. That gave me the idea to photograph Rue in the same manner. I hoped to capture the spirit of the original and pay homage to the Mapplethorpe style, but inject my own sense of what it means to be a modern Brooklyn child. The result is a series of photographs called Just a Brooklyn Kid: Reimagining Mapplethorpe. The title was inspired by Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, in which she recounts the life she shared with Mapplethorpe. The two lived on Hall Street when Mapplethorpe was a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn—the same neighborhood McKendree, Rue, my nine-year-old daughter and I call home today. Below is a brief interview with McKendree, now an artist herself, about her memories of being photographed by Mapplethorpe. Erin Patrice O’Brien: Tell me about the portrait and how it came to be. How old were you? McKendree Key: I was 5 or 6, I think. My mother had received a monetary gift from my grandmother that requested my mother to have portraits painted of my sister and me, as my grandmother had once done for her three children. My mother asked if she could get photographs taken instead; my grandmother agreed. My mother then asked [the artist] Brice Marden, a friend and neighbor, who she should hire to photograph us. Marden suggested a young, up-and-coming photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe. (Mapplethorpe had also photographed Marden’s daughters as children). It was only later that Mapplethorpe became well known. My mother was a progressive landscape architect living in the village in the 80’s, and she was smart enough and forward thinking enough to not be put off by the large format black and white photos of male genitalia she saw when she visited his studio to ask about portraits of her two young daughters. The shoot took place at our house on Jane Street in Greenwich Village. I remember dressing up in our best dresses and seeing Mapplethorpe coming up the stoop. He was very young and skinny and very skittish. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or just didn’t spend a lot of time with families, but I remember being intimidated. (During that time there was a lot of talk about child pornography and his work was sometimes used as an example in the center of the controversy.) My portrait hung on the wall in our family home while I was growing up and my sister’s portrait ended up in the Whitney Museum collection. EPOB: How is Rue like you at that age? MK: She has my smile and chin. Our hair is identical. EPOB: What kind of art do you do? MK: I make installations and videos, and event-based work where I set up scenarios that test our expectations of how we designate space and the structures we create to contain it. All my work stems from architecture. I’m interested in how and why we create the spaces we live in and function in. A lot of my work is about meshing public and private spaces. (www.mckendreekey.com)
EVERYONE WHO COMES INTO OUR HOUSE THINKS THE PICTURE IS ME
INFO@ERINPATRICE.COM TEL: 917.805.6579 327 B GRAND AVENUE BROOKLYN NY 11238 WWW.ERINPATRICEOBRIEN.COM ART DIRECTION & GRAPHIC DESIGN WWW.RAULHOTT.COM