A U T U M N 2 0 1 6
THE ARCHI VE 58 Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
CONTENTS THE ARCHIVE ISSUE 58 AUTUMN 2016
3 CUT UPS: QUEER COLLAGE PRACTICES
CURATED BY DAVID EVANS FRANTZ, LUCAS HILDERBRAND, AND KAYLEIGH PERKOV
7 CONTINUING OUR DIVERSITY TRAJECTORY
MERYL A. ALLISON, INTERIM DIRECTOR
8 THE COLLECTION
BRANDEN WALLACE, REGISTRAR
10 THE GEORGE DUDLEY ARCHIVE
WAYNE SNELLEN
12 BERNARD PERLIN: QUIET, ARTICULATE HERO
BOOK REVIEW BY JEFF WEINSTEIN
14 RIGHT TIME FOR RIGHT SIDE
BOOK REVIEW BY MARTIN POUSSON
15 IN MEMORIAM: CHARLES GATEWOOD, 1942-2016
HUGH RYAN
16 GALLERIES OF INTEREST 17 SPECIAL EVENTS AT LESLIE-LOHMAN MUSEUM
JERRY KAJPUST, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR EXTERNAL RELATIONS
18 NEWS FROM PRINCE STREET PROJECT SPACE
ROB HUGH ROSEN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR EXHIBITIONS
20 EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING AT THE MUSUEM
EM MILLER, EDUCATION COORDINATOR
22 WINDOWS GALLERY: COBI MOULES SELF PORTRAITS
2009–2015
About the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is the first and only dedicated LGBTQ art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ art and foster the artists who create it. Accredited by the New York State Board of Regents, the Museum has over 30,000 objects in its collections, spanning more than three centuries of queer art. The Museum hosts 6-8 major exhibitions annually, artist talks, film screenings, panel discussions, readings, and other events. In addition, the Museum publishes The Archive, a quarterly educational art publication, and maintains a substantial research library. The Museum is the premier resource for anyone interested in the rich legacy of the LGBTQ community and its influence on and confrontation with the mainstream art world. There is no other organization in the world like it. The Leslie-Lohman Museum was created as a non-profit entity by the New York State Board of Regents in 2011. It is exempt from taxation under section 501(c)3 of the IRS code. In 2015, it was merged with the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation which was created in 1987. That Foundation was created by Charles W. Leslie and Fritz Lohman, who have supported LGBTQ artists for over 30 years. The Leslie-Lohman Museum embraces the rich creative history of the LGBTQ art community by informing, inspiring, educating, entertaining, and challenging all who enter its doors..
Founders Charles W. Leslie J. Frederic Lohman (1922–2009)
Board of Directors Jonathan David Katz, President Deborah Bright, Vice-President Cynthia Powell, Vice-President
Meryl A. Allison, Treasurer James M. Saslow, Secretary Daniel S. Berger Steven J. Goldstein
Hunter O’Hanian Robert W Richards Andr´e St. Clair Margaret Vendryes
Peter Weiermair Jeff Weinstein
Co-Founder & Director Emeritus Charles W. Leslie
Staff Meryl A. Allison, Interim Museum Director Rob Hugh Rosen, Deputy Director for Exhibitions Jerry Kajpust, Deputy Director for External Relations Branden Wallace, Registrar Kris Grey, Exhibitions, Visitor Experience, and Education Manager Em Miller, Education Coordinator Cupid Ojala, PSPS Coordinator Mon Iker, Operations Manager Riya Lerner, Membership and Outreach Coordinator Garrett Guilbeau, Bookkeeper Noam Parness, Exhibitions and Administrative Assistant Daniel Sander, Exhibitions and Administrative Assistant Johanna Galvis, Exhibitions and Administrative Assistant Harvey Redding, Leslie-Lohman Studio Kim Hanson, Special Installations Chris Bogia, Collections Assistant Peter M. Schepper, Framer
Volunteer Staff Karen Ahn, Events Cryder Bankes, Library Alexandria Deters, Museum Fellow Steven Goldstein, Collections, Administration Daniel Kitchen, Museum Advocate
Chuck Nitzberg, Events Cynthia Powell, Marketing, Development James Powell, Special Projects James Schlecter, Events Jason D. Smith, Events
The Archive The Archive is an educational journal published by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art to educate the general public about the Museum, its activities, and gay art. John Burton Harter (1940-2002), Conversation, II, 1993, Oil on board, 48 x 36 in. The John Burton Harter Charitable Trust. Artist note: As some of my homoerotic works began to be seen within a small circle of the gay community, I began to get volunteers who wanted to pose for my work. The resulting variety gave me the raw material to construct more complex interactive assemblages of figures.
This issue of The Archive is made possible by a generous donation from the
John Burton Harter Charitable Trust
Tom Saettel, Editor Joseph Cavalieri, Production and Design
©2016 The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. No part of this journal may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Copyrights for all art reproduced in this publication belong to the artists unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
The Archive is available free in the Museum, and is mailed free of charge to LL Museum members.
The Leslie-Lohman Museum 26 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013-2227 (212) 431-2609 info@leslielohman.org, leslielohman.org Gallery Hours: Tues.–Wed. 12-6pm, Thur. 12-8, Fri–Sun 12-6, Closed Mon. Closed on major holidays and between exhibitions.
FRONT COVER: Suzanne Wright, Eight Shuttles, 2016, Photo collage, 32 x 40 in. Courtesy the artist.
EXHIBITION ISSUE 58
Cut Ups: Queer Collage Practices October 14 — December 18, 2016, Leslie-Lohman Museum Curated by David Evans Frantz, Lucas Hilderbrand, and Kayleigh Perkov Organized by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries and the ONE Archives Foundation
Collage perverts the social, political, and cultural specificity of images, promiscuously excerpting and recontextualizing them without regard. It thrives on forms of visual play and private pleasure, encouraging slippage across time, space, gender, and object choice. The subtle choices of composition, layering, and scale inflect the physical activity of collage as deeply personal, and often loaded with desire and reverence. Cut Ups: Queer Collage Practices brings together works by an intergenerational group of fourteen queer and feminist artists who each explore collage with diverse, erotically inclined tactics. The works in this exhibition draw from print culture and pornography dating from the era of gay and women’s liberation to the present. While collage has typically been understood through the lens of modernism and the historical avant-garde or through postmodernism
and pastiche, Cut Ups does not call on these frameworks. Rather, this exhibition presents collages—whether discovered in the archives or coming out of contemporary art practices— that demonstrate pornographic inspirations and world-making ambitions. Cut Ups places special focus on two anonymous collections, the Graphic Albums Collection from ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and the West End Avenue Collection from the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Both collections are expansive, perhaps obsessive, projects assembled over numerous years or decades and have never before been publicly exhibited. Held in fourteen volumes consisting of approximately 700 handmade collages, the Graphic Albums Collection combines gay male pornography with pages from interior design and visual arts magazines, often integrating the male figure(s) to scale with seamless effects. The West End
(left) Graphic Albums Collection, Source material c. 1976-83, Presumably assembled c. 1980s, Three-ring photo albums with mixed media collages in magnetic pages. Courtesy ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. (right) West End Avenue Collection, Unbound stacks of photocopy collages, c. 1970-90, Each page 11 x 8.5 in. Leslie-Lohman Museum. Anonymous gift.
Avenue Collection is a vast archive of photocopied collages of BDSM imagery, many including Nazi fetishism, donated with the original cut up figures the anonymous artist used to make the montages. The history of gay male print culture in the U.S. is in large part a history of images of male bodies that figured as the material
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for imaginative reworking in audiences’ sexual fantasies. Such publications were foundational to the formation of gay culture and politics even prior to the proliferation of public venues and institutions. Liberation-era gay porn magazines often integrated lifestyle articles and arts coverage alongside nude pictorials, reflecting that readers’ sex lives were not separated from their broader lives or identities as gay men. Cut Ups includes many works from the liberation era that utilized pornography in their collage practices, such as the rarely seen collages by erotic artist Olaf Odegaard and psychic Ingo Swann. Collages by Steve Blevins drew from gay male print media of the day and were also reproduced in such magazines, often as illustrations for erotic fiction. Many of the creative practices presented in Cut Ups are rooted in craft and a tactile love of materiality. The process of collage involves touching, cutting, affixing, and smoothing out— all forms of handling. Many artists in the 1970s labored to overturn the dismissal of effeminate and decorative craft-based practices. Miriam
(top left) Olaf Odegaard, Title unknown (White Restroom ), c. 1985, Mixed media collage, 17 x 15 in. Courtesy ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. (top right) Kate Huh and LJ Roberts, The West End Archive Never-ending, Scroll #1. 2015-16, Three embroidered panels, 20 x 38 in. Courtesy the artists. (right center) Ingo Swann, Choices, c. 1991-94, Mixed media on board, 12 x 17.75 in. Leslie-Lohman Museum. Gift of the Estate of Ingo Swann. (right) Steve Blevins, Collage illustration for “Muscle Meat,” Playguy, 7, no. 7 (1983), pp. 32-33, Magazine spread, 10.75 x 15.75 in. Courtesy ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
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Schapiro and Melissa Meyer coined the term “femmage” in the feminist art journal Heresies to reclaim the activity of reworking scraps and this practice’s historical connection to the realm of traditionally female and domestic labor. Contemporary queer artists in this exhibition continue to revisit and reinvent craft practices and domestic fantasies. Jade Yumang screenprints pages from vintage porn magazines onto fancifully decorative bundles of soft sculpture phalluses. In a newly commissioned work responding to the archive of West End, Kate Huh utilizes fragments from the collection to produce collages that are embroidered by LJ Roberts. Through Roberts’ hand the minute figurative details and various textures of black, white, and grey found in West End’s Xeroxes are tenderly registered in thread.
While Cut Ups is undoubtedly a celebration of the numerous uses of gay male pornography, the inclusion of historical and contemporary feminist collage practices seeks to address gay male phallocentrism with a feminist critique and lesbian power. The exhibition includes a site-specific installation by feminist pioneer Mary Beth Edelson, part of an ongoing series of collage projects initiated years after her renowned collage posters of the 1970s, and a series of mixed-media collages by veteran feminist artist Anita Steckel that places the artist within drawings by Tom of Finland, exploring the possibility of alternate forms of cross-gender desire and visual pleasure. Many of the artists in Cut Ups utilize collage for deconstruction or intervention within the circulation of images. Enrique Castrejon
(above left) Jade Yumang, From the series “Thumb Through”, Page 1 (Cover), 2015, Scanned gay erotic page printed with archival ink on cotton, polyurethane foam, and striped rib knit (for bomber jackets), 27 x 28 x 8 in. Courtesy the artist. (above right) Mary Beth Edelson, Nancy Spero Reclining, 1972-76, Paper collage mounted on cloth. Courtesy of the artist.
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meticulously cuts out and measures the figures from the gay porn magazine Black Inches. Jonathan Molina-Garcia combines images of his own body with those of older HIV+ men as part of a larger series on gay male intergenerational knowledge. Suzanne Wright (see cover) merges the female body with monumental and utopian architecture. Glenn Ligon plays with the vernacular form of the photo album, combining fetishistic photographs of black men with family photographs. The eclectic producers presented in Cut Ups all utilize the erotic image to innovative and wildly explicit ends. Cut Ups was originally presented by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries and the ONE Archives Foundation as Cock, Paper, Scissors and is co-curated by David Evans Frantz, Curator at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries; Lucas Hilderbrand, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of Visual Studies at the University of California in Irvine; and Kayleigh Perkov, Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the City of West Hollywood through its Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission and the ONE Archives Foundation. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by the exhibition’s curators, three original interviews with artists, and reprints of historical texts. The catalogue, published by ONE Archives with the Leslie-Lohman Museum, is designed by Kimberly Varella of Content Object. Generous support for the catalogue was provided by
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(top left) Anita Steckel, Anita of New York Meets Tom of Finland, 2004-05, Mixed media on book pages, 19.6 x 13.5 in. Courtesy the Estate of Anita Steckel and the Suzanne Geiss Company, New York.
the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the USC Libraries. n ...............................................................................................................
(top right) Jonathan Molina-Garcia, From the series “El Pequen˜o”, A Sea of Power Tops, Ad Infinitum, 2012, Black and white photograph of collage maquette, 6 x 9 in. Courtesy the artist.
Lucas Hilderbrand is associate professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.
(above left) Enrique Castrejon, From the series “Black Inches, Boyz in the Mood Linear Dissection Series from Episode 1: Elmo is surprised to see people on the Subway at 2AM...by Ed Cervone”, Anonymous Male Passenger Fragmented and Measured in Inches, 2016, Collage, glue, pigment ink, and graphite on paper, 14 x 11 in. Courtesy the artist.
Kayleigh Perkov is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in American visual culture viewed through the lens of craft and the decorative arts.
(above right) Glenn Ligon, Feast of Scraps, 1994-98, Photographs and text, 11.5 x 10 in. Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London.
David Evans Frantz is curator at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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Continuing Our Diversity Trajectory Meryl A. Allison, Interim Director
We’re at a positive inflection point in the development of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Just over five years ago, the Museum (then the Foundation) received a provisional charter from the New York State Board of Regents. Just over a year later, Hunter O’Hanian came on board as the Museum’s director. Last month, we received our absolute charter. Regrettably, Hunter resigned last month as the Museum’s director, although he remains with us as our newest board member. As we enter the next phase of our development, it seems an appropriate time to reflect upon some of the important changes we have effected. A core tenet of our strategic plan is to diversity the Museum’s audience, staff, and board. In this article I’d like to share how we have progressed in this area since 2011. First, and perhaps most important, our audience. While we do not have historical data, Charles Leslie describes the audience in 2011 as “still mostly men and that with some rationality, women artists regarded Leslie-Lohman as a kind of boys’ club.” We know that in some circles we continue to have a reputation (underserved) as a museum catering to gay, white, men. However, a recent survey of our visitors in the first six months of 2016 revealed a very different composition.
We’ve also seen a dramatic change in the composition of our staff. In 2011, of our small staff of five, to the best of our knowledge four (80%) identified as gay, white, and male. Today our staff is so diverse that it is difficult to describe it with conventional categories. Kris Grey and I asked the staff how they would characterize themselves, what are their identifiers. This word cloud captures the essence of the staff’s responses.
Finally, what about our Board of Trustees? When we applied for the charter in 2011, our board of five included four gay/queer, white, men (80%) and one woman (20%). Today we identify as:
AGE
Under 20 14.7%
Preferred Not to Answer 1.8%
Over 60 9.2%
RACE/ORIGIN
Hispanic 9.1% Asian 10.6% Black 6.8%
Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander 0.4% American Indian 0.2% Preferred Not to Answer 2.9%
41–60 20.6%
21–40 53.7%
White 60.7%
Other 9.3%
We were pleasantly surprised to see the number of visitors under 40 years old (approx. 70%). We are clearly attractive across generations—which bodes well for preserving our mission. About 50% of our visitors identify as nonmale and 39% consider themselves non-white.
In addition to the facts this analysis provided about the Museum’s diversity, it provided some other insights. Clearly we are more diverse than we were in 2011, but it’s not clear how we should describe these changes. Some of the metrics we use are irrelevant or inappropriate. For example, categorizations of race seem artificial and arbitrary. When we ask about race do we really mean ethnicity or geographic origin? Can we—or should we—even try to define discrete categories? As an organization, we are committed to continuing our diversity trajectory. We may not have the precise language or metrics to capture that diversity going forward, but I trust we’ll know it when we see it. n
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Expansion with Growth Branden Wallace, Registrar
A word of advice: when you say you’re going to do something, be certain you do it. The intent of “doing” really is the easy part. It is the act of committing an idea to action that often excites others into action. There has been a joyful response to the announcement of the Hunter O’Hanian Diversity Acquisition Fund (HOHDAF). Several artists have stepped forward to donate their works. It’s a pleasure to display a few of the donations on these pages. After the announcement of HOHDAF in The Archive Issue 57, a great swelling of donations came in to the Museum’s collection, including work from Tracy Nunez, Christina Schleshinger, Gwen Shockey, Alexis Heller, Ayakamay, and many others. Prior to the inauguration of the HOHDAF, the Museum purchased work by these trans and lesbian
(Clockwise from top left) Ianna Book, Post Surgery: #3 from the series “Trans and the notion of Risk”, 2016, Archival digital print, 24 x 36 in. Gift of the artist. Tracy Nunez, Subway, 2016, Collage with photography and paper, 16.25 x 11.875 in. Gift of the artist. Tracy Nunez, Naked from the “Reveal Series”, 2016, Collage with photography and paper, 16.25 x 11.875 in. Gift of the artist. Ianna Book: Nude in the Street: #6 from the series “Trans and the notion of Risk”, 2016, Archival digital print, 24 x 36 in. Gift of the artist.
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(Clockwise from top left) Christina Schlesinger, Tomboy on Blue Flannel Shirt with Collar, 1994, Mixed media on canvas, 20 x 16 in. Gift of the artist. Ann P Meredith, AIDS Foundation Women's Support Group, San Francisco, CA, June, 1987, Archival digital print, 14.5 x 22 in. © AnnPMeredith.com UNTIL THAT LAST BREATH! The Global Face of Women with HIV/AIDS 1987-1997. Museum purchase. Ann P Meredith, Paulette at Home, the Tenderloin, San Francisco, May, 1998, Archival digital print, 14.5 x 22 in. © AnnPMeredith.com UNTIL THAT LAST BREATH! The Global Face of Women with HIV/AIDS 1987-1997. Museum purchase. Gwen Shockey, Interior Castle (for Jill Posener), 2014, Mixed media on paper, 17 x 21.5 in. Gift of the artist.
artists: Zackary Drucker, Nicole Eisenman, Gail Thacker, and Chitra Ganesh. Personally, the most exciting acquisition for the Museum was not of artwork but one of books and resource material supporting the art of the collection. The HOHDAF was used to acquire 54 publications and additional ephemera and articles from Joan E. Biren’s (JEB) personal archive. JEB has always been a champion of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Museum has always supported her work as well. This wonderful relationship continues as JEB is excited by the call to action of gender balancing our collection. This purchase was also significant because the books are rare and mostly out of print. Many are signed art books by amazing artists no longer with us, such as Ruth Bernhardt, Berenice Abbott, and Tee Corinne. There are touching inscriptions to JEB as well such as this note from Zanele Muholi:
Joan E. Biren, Thank you so much for paving the way for many of us. Your
photos have been the most important source of inspiration and reference to my work. I am truly grateful and honored to have you around as a friend and colleague. —With love and respect, Zanele Muholi, May 2015, Washington, DC The need for preserving and illuminating the lineage of the queer art community is a major motivation for my work at the Museum. It is why I am excited to work hard to steward the collection. None of us lives in a vacuum. We are not alone. We are a community together. Our community’s diversity is what makes the creativity it produces great. n ...............................................................................................................
Branden Wallace joined the LLM staff in 2011 as a volunteer. In 2012 he accepted the part time position of Collections Manager becoming fulltime in 2013. He was promoted to Registrar for the Collections Department in July, 2016. branden@leslielohman.org
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The George Dudley Archive — Preserving Our Past, Elucidating Our Future Wayne Snellen, Deputy Director of Collections Emeritus
A little-known treasure of the
DIGGING DEEP INTO THE ARCHIVE
Leslie-Lohman Museum is its George Dudley Archive consisting of files and papers on LGBTQ artists and the Leslie-Lohman Museum exhibition history. George Dudley (1951–1993) was the first director of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation (LLGAF) as it was known then. Early on, Dudley recognized that in addition to preserving LGBTQ art, it was necessary to preserve information about these artists. The George Dudley Archive was established at the inception of LLGAF and was named in memoriam after Dudley’s untimely death at age 41 from HIV/AIDS. Dudley enthusiastically developed an acquisition program of artist documentation and this work continues unabated as the museum’s volunteers, interns, and collection staff scour the internet and auction houses for information about little-known artists. Research into an LGBTQ artist can be a daunting task; ask any of the researchers who frequent the museum’s George Dudley Archive. Indeed, frequently, if little is known about an artist it can be difficult to place an artist in context.1 George emphasized that even obscure straight artists are often “stored” in general art archives where they can be “rediscovered” by art historians, scholars, and students of the present and future.... But gay artists who work with openly gay imagery are almost always marginalized and excluded from mainstream institutions....For every Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Hockney, and Haring, there are hundreds of wonderful gay artists whose work—because of its content, not its quality—fade into obscurity. 2
Occasionally, LLM is the fortunate recipient of large donations of documentation in the form of letters, dissertations, flyers, posters, brochures, etc. For example, we were recently given the work of author, educator, and professor Judith Stein. In the 1970s-80s, Stein wrote her doctoral dissertation on the female Greek poet Sappho (b. c.615 BCE) entitled The Iconography of Sappho, 1775-1875. Stein donated not only a copy of her dissertation, but all the papers and images from her research. When artist James Fetterman (b. 1950) donated a number of his own drawings to the Museum, he also gave a file of correspondence containing notes from Paul Cadmus (1904–1999) and his companion, Jon Anderson, relating their admiration of Fetterman’s work. The notes are signed “Paul and Jon.” Unfortunately, even after a search by both Anderson and Fetterman, the letters written by Fetterman to Cadmus are missing. We are hoping they will surface eventually when the Paul Cadmus archives are completed by Jon Anderson and his collaborators. LLM is fortunate to have in the collection the largest cache of art by Neel Bate (1916–1989, aka Blade). In the Archive also rests a trove of letters between Bate and Tom of Finland (1920–1991, aka Touko Laaksonen) who admired each other’s work. Unfortunately, Bate did not have a dedicated partner like Durk Dehner, who promoted and kept Tom’s legacy alive for an admiring audience and eventually influencing a gay explosion of BDSM art and even influencing fashion. However, Bate was at the forefront of the underground art market from the 1940s to 70s—often with fourth-generation photo prints from the original
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The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
(top) View of the archive storage at 26 Wooster St. Boxes are labeled for location and are referenced in the database. (above) Various exhibition postcards and an invoice authenticating the original value, dating, and provenance of five Robert Bliss paintings.
photo documentation by George Platt Lynes. In the 1940s all of Bate’s artwork was confiscated by the police, never to be seen again. And in 1957 Bate was robbed at gunpoint in his home/ studio by a disgruntled admirer who said he was going to look at the work—some of it dating as far back as 1950—and then burn it. It has never resurfaced. Consequently, Bate’s early work is almost nonexistent. Recently, seventeen negatives labeled Under the Bridge were donated to the Collection. This photographic record is of the images for a much sought-after edition of illustrated stories by Bate. Hopefully, we can match the Bridge negatives with the correct text
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in the Archive and reprint it. Ted Titolo (b. 1928, aka The.) donated his entire life’s work to the Museum. Titolo and his good friend, Frank Webber (1929–1990, aka Bastille), traveled to Europe. The two artists also frequently hung out with Bette Midler. All this is documented in the Archive. James Campbell donated to the Archive a trove of newspaper clippings, prints, and postcards of the Cockettes of San Francisco in the 1970s. Robert Gallagher has left the Museum a stack of ephemera of David Hurles (b. 1944, aka Old Reliable) and REX (b. early 1940s), which includes the original “boards” of Speeding, the Old Reliable Photos of David Hurles, with text and design by REX (Green Candy Press, 2005). Larry Wald donated an archive on Robert Bliss (1925–1981) with many photographs of painting and documentation.
Marion Pinto (1935–2010) left an archive of information about herself and her art upon her death. It contains details of her artist residency and exhibition in Japan. All of these examples are important for a deeper understanding of the LGBTQ artist’s significance and place in the timeline of art history. n 1 “The George Dudley Archive: Artist’s Forum,” The Archive (1998), issue #5, Danny O’Connell. Available online at: leslielohman.org/the-archive/no5/neelbate-5.html 2 “The George Dudley Archive at LLGAF,” The Archive (2002), issue #9, Charles Leslie. Available online at: leslielohman.org/no9/george_dudley_archive-9.html
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Wayne Snellen is an artist who began as a volunteer at LLGAF in 1992. He became the director in 1995, serving until 2006. Recently retired, he was the Deputy Director of Collections at LLM from 2007-2016.
(Clockwise from top left) The “boards” for REX’s Speeding, which designers used for laying out a book before the computer era. Card and its envelope sent by Paul Cadmus to James Fetterman. Cadmus was an important influence on Fetterman’s work. Both artists are represented in the LLM collection. An article in a Japanese paper of Marion Pinto in her loft at 100 Wooster St. in New York City’s SoHo. LLM has several portfolios of clippings Pinto kept of her exhibitions and travels. A sample of one of the many typewritten manuscripts Neel Bate wrote which he also illustrated.
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BOOKS ISSUE 58
Bernard Perlin: Quiet, Articulate Hero Review of One-Man Show: The Life and Art of Bernard Perlin by Michael Schreiber, Bruno Gmünder, 2016 Jeff Weinstein
Have you heard of Bernard Perlin? Probably not, though his paintings, watercolors, prints, and posters have been shown, published, and seen since the 1930s. Nonetheless, Perlin is a kind of artist hero for the present moment, and for two reasons. First, encircled by the temptations of the 1950s art world and upset at the closing of the Manhattan gallery where he showed, the obviously talented Perlin chose at a pivotal point in his career to get “the hell away from it.” That decision—leaving New York for Ridgefield, Connecticut and continuing to work there—allowed him to create and paint until he died, although at the time he didn’t think that such a move was a bold thing to do. Yet Perlin seemed to know instinctively that some artists lose their mojo by chasing after the spotlight. Artists can do without galleries? Yes, that’s a current truism in the digital age, but Perlin understood it early on. The other reason he’s my kind of hero is more personal, and I learned why from One-Man Show: The Life and Art of Bernard
PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French), Bernard Perlin, Paul Cadmus, and Margaret French, Fire Island, 1939, Silver gelatin print, 4.5 x 6.75 in. Private collection.
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The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
Perlin by Michael Schreiber, a richly illustrated series of interviews with the artist just a few years before he died at the age of 95, in 2014. It’s difficult, almost impossible, to understand now how brave and even creative it was to be the openly erotic gay man as described by Bernard Perlin in his feelings and connections with men in the world of the arts, in New York, Italy, and elsewhere. According to his own, occasionally blush-inducing, stories, he was as out as one could be, when “acting out” could get you thrown in jail. In fact, Perlin had been arrested for "cocksucking" in Key West, Florida; in Norfolk, Virginia; and in Paris, France. His behavior, his man-loving identity, was inherently risky. Do artists thrive on risk? “Oh, I still thought it all an adventure,” he says, when describing being locked in a “large cage” in Paris after being caught in 1951 in a gendarme sting. Even during those closeted days, queer limits were pushed, and this handsome, randy artist pushed them as far as he could. Bernard Perlin was born in 1918 in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. After his family moved to Newark, New Jersey, this bright, skinny youngster, aware early of his attraction to men, first studied at the New York School of Design. As a teen, he happened to sketch gay artists Paul Cadmus and Jared French in a crowd because they were “odd looking people.” Because of the drawing, he met them soon after, and Perlin’s social, sexual, and artistic life took off. The book throws Perlin’s persuasive, crystal-clear memories of what he painted and who he seduced in front of the Pollock/de Kooning/Cedar Bar narrative we’re used to. It’s an important and corrective gay scrim to postwar U.S. art history. A lot of the text is name-dropping gay gossip, which makes for riveting reading—and surprising, too, that his chattery, priapic past sounds not so different from our present. Where else can we learn about the ordinary intimacies of arts luminaries such as Lincoln Kirstein or the extraordinary photographer George Platt Lynes, who took to our artist without hesitation and had no trouble capturing his angular, hungry beauty? Perlin had no truck with the abstract avant-garde. “It would be very pleasant and very easy to be a nonobjective painter,” he
BOOKS ISSUE 58
(top left) George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, 1949, Silver gelatin print, 9 x 7.25 in. Private collection. © Estate of George Platt Lynes. (top right) Bernard Perlin, Avenge December 7, 1942, 1942, Poster, offset, printed by U.S. Government Printing Office, issued by the U.S. Office of War Information, Title 15, 40 x 28.5 in. Multiple collections. (above) Bernard Perlin, The Bartender, 1958. Oil on canvas, 34 x 46 in. Private collection.
said in 1957, when his kind of representational work was anathema to critics and the market. He loved limning the male body, and had developed a socio-political as well as sexual sense of how it should be displayed: his World War II posters grab your eyes, illustration in the most effective sense. He painted women and salad vegetables too, but men were always uppermost. Perlin is best known for his oils on canvas in a style sometimes called “magic” or symbolic realism, and I’d like to look at a 1957 work called The Bar, in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (A detail is used on the book cover). In many ways it’s a staid 20th-century American scene painting: five sullen male figures, drinks in hand, blurred in a ruddy haze. But we’re in a pre-Stonewall gay bar, of course, which makes its furtive, ghostly aspect especially apt. When The Bar was first shown, critic Emily Genauer smartly wrote that “the faces are masks shaped into the symbols of non-communication,” but she did not know or acknowledge just where those faces were. Gay bars were almost entirely invisible then to culture high and low, providing only sordid shock value in films like 1964’s The Best Man. Here we have a Hopperesque look at gay urban nightlife, depressing perhaps, but as a painting, singularly brave. Quiet heroes like Bernard Perlin painted what no one else would. n ...............................................................................................................
Jeff Weinstein is an arts, food, and LGBT columnist and editor, formerly at the Village Voice, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Bloomberg News. He is a member of the Leslie-Lohman Museum board of directors.
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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BOOKS ISSUE 58
Right Time for Right Side The Right Side of History: 100 Years of LGBTQI Activism Edited by Adrian Brooks, Cleis Press, 2015 Martin Pousson
If you trouble over the phrases, “post-gay,” “the end of gay” or “virtually normal,” then close the laptop, light the lamp, and crack open The Right Side of History. Rather than a passing phase, a temporary trend, or a crumbling construction, queerness emerges in this vital new chronicle as a historical fact, one that can’t be wished away by blowhards from any direction. Conservatives call for assimilation and view queer identity as a costume ready to be dropped in the nearest profit margin. Centrists hold up a sign after the latest LGBTQI milestone. “Enough,” the sign says. “Far enough, long enough. Now stop.” Moderates caution once X law passes or X vote is won: time to call off the fight. As if identity were only an act and not a right. From the middle of the room, the loudest voices warn: If you really want to join the party, drop the charade, drop the act, learn to be normal, like us. While these charges may seem extreme, sometimes extreme distortion reveals reality better than a straight mirror. Imagine such charges levied against another identity group: drop your race, your ethnicity, your tribal culture as soon as your rights are ratified. Deny your history, your heritage, and hollow out the hallmarks of your identity. Of course, calls like these have been made in the past and in the present, so it’s high time to question the assumption that all any minority wants is to disappear into the majority. Once an identity group is enfranchised, should it sacrifice its old identity for a new one? Should it live without a past? Should it move forward without ever looking back? In answer, Adrian Brooks, editor of The Right Side of History, might steal a thread from George Santayana to stitch a new maxim: only the dead know the end of gay, only the dead are post-anything. Delivering an eye-catching menu of spirits to revive historical memory, Brooks’s chronicle smartly eschews a totalizing schema. The book rejects the mothballed encyclopedia, serving notice early and often that the fragmented history of LGBTQI activism should be presented as it is: in fragments. With this rejection of false completion and false wholeness, Brooks expands rather than contracts inclusivity. Although he authors some of the liveliest entries, such as a chapter on Harvey Milk and an interview with Josephine Baker’s son, he also includes a wide
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array of other contributors, 24 in total, from Miss Major Griffin-Gracy’s street-level account of the Stonewall riots to Merle Woo’s courtroom battle with the University of California. Not every war is won, not everybody gets better. In its moving accounts, The Right Side of History manages to serve up progressive values without a sugar pill of phony platitudes. After the recent (but still limited) triumphs for marriage-equality advocates, all LGBTQI activists should reach for this chronicle as a reminder of the fickle hand of history, which does not always turn thumbs up or point ever forward. In a tight episodic series of 30 chapters, the relative freedom of early 20th-century San Francisco is followed by bloody crackdowns on striking queer longshoremen. The artistic license granted to a bisexual dancer is later denied to a homosexual poet. The sexual liberation of the post-Stonewall 1970s is trailed by the backlash of anti-gay crusades then the plague of HIV/AIDS. The collective power of ACT UP, Queer Nation, the Names Project, and the new BAAQUP1 don’t end hatred and bias altogether, as bullies and bashers continue to kill queers, directly or indirectly. Yet along the way, crucial intersections are illuminated in this chronicle: gender, race, class, and religion. Trans, Intersex, Muslim, and African-American authors write their accounts into this fragmented history too, creating not an artificially clear window but a radiantly colored mosaic. A torch is passed from Henry Gerber to Harry Hay to Bayard Rustin to Harvey Milk to Barney Frank. The chapters are pithy, short in length of pages but long in depth of perspective. Some are written as scattered first-person impressions, others as researched third-person studies, and still others as novelistic stories, driven by revealing symbols, relevant settings, and a racing plot. While the pre-Stonewall chapters of Part I situate along a chronological line and look directly at the past, the post-Stonewall chapters of Part II slide along the ruler of time as they offer a view of the present and a peer into the future, with agendas unmet and rights not yet realized. Since every mosaic needs a frame, Brooks draws an elegant line of hope from the nearly nude body of modern dance legend Isadora Duncan, a bisexual “freedom fighter” at the dawn of the 20th century, all the way to wetsuit-clad Diana
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
Nyad, a lesbian swimmer throwing her own body proudly and powerfully into history at the dawn of the 21st century. In between their bookended stories, a concise and cogent challenge to “postgay” thinking develops: queerness is eternal and without end. Also: the acquisition of rights cannot be won at the cost of identity, whether individual or collective. If she had the chance to open The Right Side of History, Josephine Baker would smile down at her “rainbow children,” given voice in this new book not as one but as many, not as finally ended but as always continuing. n 1
Bay Area Art Queers Unleashing Power
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Martin Pousson is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his novel-in-stories, Black Sheep Boy (Rare Bird Books, May 2016). He also was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. He lives in downtown Los Angeles and teaches Creative Writing and Queer Studies at California State University in Northridge.
IN MEMORIAM ISSUE 58
Charles Gatewood, 1942-2016 Hugh Ryan
In the recent Leslie-Lohman Museum exhibition, The 1970s: The Blossoming of a Queer Enlightenment, there were many sexual photos that captured the freewheeling erotic energy of the disco decade—but Charles Gatewood’s photo Mardi Gras New Orleans (1978) is unique. It is the only one to give equal weight to the figure (two men in fetish gear having sex in the middle of a Mardi Gras parade) and the ground (a pair of joyful, semi-engaged spectators). Whereas the exhibition’s other sexual photos crop tightly on those engaged in the act itself, Gatewood’s expansive framing makes clear that his interest is in the larger experience, the dialogue between sex, spectator, and the world. Until his suicide this past April at the age of 73, Gatewood was known for his voyeuristic eye that delved deeper and deeper into the worlds of fetish, kink, and body modification (and, in particular, the West Coast neo-hippie “modern primitive” movement). For the past few decades, his photos have tended towards staged portraits, mostly of young, conventionally attractive women engaged in a wide variety of kink, from bloodletting to food play. Through his art, and his twelve-year stint as a photographer for Skin and Ink magazine, Gatewood helped normalize the outr´e scenes that interested him, bringing tattoos, piercings, and fetish gear into the lives of a more mainstream America. Sadly, the effect this had on his art was deleterious; just as his subject matter has been (to a degree) normalized, so too have his photos. His later
portfolios seem like a string of interchangeable images, their fascinating and unique subjects rendered banal by his endless repetitive focus on the images he loved most, and a market supporting these photographs. Gatewood’s early work, however, contains enormous power, and it echoes our modern moment in eerie ways. Take Sidetripping, his first monograph, filled with images of (in Gatewood’s words) “naked beer hippies, sadistic cops, hollow-eyed strippers, preening transvestites, punks, drunks, weenie-waggers, militant Jesus freaks, and dope-crazed protestors.” Gatewood refers to them as “weird-as-fuck-the-dream-is-over pictures”; eschatological images that take as a given the notion that our world is going to hell in a handbasket, so why not dance among the flames? He poignantly illustrated a time, much like our own, when the world felt like a powder keg set to explode, and state violence seemed always near at hand. At his best, Gatewood was able to capture that energy in static images that were at various times profound, disturbing, beautiful, and frightening. In the text for Sidetripping, the great Beat poet William Burroughs wrote perhaps the perfect summation of Gatewood’s America, and the photographic lengths it drove him to: What is happening in America today is something that has never happened before in recorded history: Total confrontation. America is no time and no place, a vacuum where any time and any place can suddenly erupt. The lies
(from left to right) Charles Gatewood, Mardi Gras New Orleans, 1976, C-print on paper, 10 x 8 in. ©Charles Gatewood Archive, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection. Founders’ gift. Charles Gatewood, Annie Sprinkle and Fakir Musawfar, NYC, 1980, Gelatin silver print, 15.75 x 12 in. ©Charles Gatewood Archive, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Courtesy Robert Tat Gallery. Charles Gatewood, Untitled (Naked Boy with Police, Mardi Gras), 1973, Gelatin silver print, 10.5 x 7.5 in. ©Charles Gatewood Archive, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Courtesy Robert Tat Gallery.
are obvious. The machinery is laid bare. All Americans are being shoved by the deadweight of a broken control machine right in front of each other’s faces. Like it or not they cannot choose but see and hear each other. Look at an ugly diseased white face. Look at the smoking mirror. Death rains back a hail of crystal skills: DEATH DEATH DEATH Go out and get the pictures. Get all the pictures...bestial...stupid...exotic... beautiful...fearful...fragmentary... unreal... These words ring as true now as they did in the 1970s—and so do the photos they accompanied. Charles Gatewood got the pictures, and we today are lucky that he left them for us. n ........................................................................................................................
Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator with a focus on queer art, literature, and history. He is the founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, sits on the Board of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and is the NYPL’s 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar. hughryan.org / @Hugh_Ryan
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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GALLERIES ISSUE 58
Galleries of Interest See PSPS Exhibitions on Page 18.
NEW YORK CITY
BROOKLYN QUEENS BRONX
Better Being Restaurant, 537 9th Av., NYC, betterbeing.net thru Nov 16 Joseph Cavalieri: Hot Glass in Hell’s Kitchen
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY broklynmuseum.org Nov 4-Apr 2, 2017 Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
BGSQD The Center, 208 W 13 St NYC bgsqd.com
Figureworks 168 N. 6th St., Brooklyn, NY, figureworks.com thru Oct 30 Making Music: Group Show
ClampArt, 521-531 W. 25 St., NYC, clampart.com Daniel Cooney Fine Art, 508-526 W. 26 St. danielcooneyfineart.com Nov Dec Richard Haines
The Bronx Museum, 1040 Grand Concourse Bronx, NY, bronxmuseum.org, thru Oct 23 Art AIDS America; thru Feb 19, 2017 Robert Raphael: Symposium
Galerie Lelong 528 W 26 St. Oct 21-Dec 3 Carolee Schneemann: Futher Evidence Also see PPOW
NORTHEAST
Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square E nyu.edu/ greyart thru Dec 10 A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s–1980s Italian American Museum 155 Mulberry St. italianamericanmuseum.org thru Oct 10 Joseph Cavalieri: Big Glass in Little Italy
Firehouse Gallery, 8 Walnut Street, Bordentown, NJ, firehousegallery.com Work by Eric Gibbons Gallery Kayafas 450 Harrison Ave. Boston, MA gallerykayafas.com Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME meca.edu Oct 6-21 In This Realm: 5 Artists Exploring Gender, Identity and Transformation, Allyson Mitchell, Cobi Moules and 4 others Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA bcaonline. Oct 14-Dec 19 Fertile Solitude Rice/Polak Gallery, 430 Commercial St., Provincetown, MA ricepolakgallery.com thru Jan 1 Group Exhibition The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., Pittsburgh, PA, warhol.org Oct 21-Jan 22, 2017 Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body; Nov 2-Jan 15, 2017 Adam Milner: Remains
La MaMa La Galleria, 47 Great Jones St. lamama.org/lagalleria Nov 18-Dec 10 Everyday, co-presened with Visual AIDS P•P•O•W, 535 West 22nd St., NYC, ppowgallery.com thru Oct 15 Brian Dettmer; Oct 21-Dec 3 Carolee Schneemann: Futher Evidence Also see Galerie Lelong Team Gallery 83 Grand St. NYC teamgal.com Oct 13-Nov 13 Sam McKinniss: Egyptian Violet The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., NYC, metmuseum.org Oct 7-Jan 16, 2017 Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio Oct 19-Feb 20, 2017 Max Bemann in New York The Breuer, 945 Madison Ave., NYC, metmuseum.org thru Nov 27 Diane Arbus: In the Beginning Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St. NYCwhitney.org thru Feb 2017 Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney Collection
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MIDWEST Axis Glass, 610 W Town St., Columbus, OH Nov 11-Dec. 17 Off Axis: Glass by Joseph Cavalieri
Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art 7 N. Main St., Lambertville, NJ, wesseloconnor.com
Leather Archives & Museum, 6418 N. Greenview Ave. Chicago, IL leatherarchives.org
WEST
SOUTH
Center for Sex and Culture 2261 Market St., San Francisco, CA sexandculture.org Nov 3-29 Slut Kerchief Project by Geana Sieburger, photos by Rosey Lakos
Stonewall Museum, 2157 Wilton Dr., Wilton Manors, FL stonewallnationalmuseum.org thru Nov 6 Robert Kalman, I Am Here: The Lesbian Portraits; Nov 10-Dec 11 First Comes Love: Photography by B. Proud; Dec 15-Jan 22, 2017 Retreat: Gay Destinations of the Northeast Where We’ve Found Solace
Contemporary Art Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose Blvd, Houston TX, camh.org thru Nov 27 Right Here, Right Now: Houston Vol. 2
Magnus Hirschfeld in 1926. See Through Knowledge to Justice, GLBT Historical Society, SF.
Charlotte Moorman performing Jim McWilliams’s Ice Music for Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1976. Unidentified photographer, Courtesy Kaldor Public Art Projects. See Feast of Astonishments, Grey Art Gallery, NYC.
GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., San Francisco, CA, glbthistory.org/museum thru Oct 16 Stroke: From Under the Mattress to the Museum Walls; thru Nov 23 Through Knowledge to Justice: The Sexual World of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935); Ongoing Queer Culture ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, 909 W. Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, one.usc.edu thru Dec 22 Memoirs of a Watermelon Woman: Legacy of Cheryl Dunye; thru Dec 22 A Subtle Likeness ONE Archives Gallery & Museum, Plummer Park, Long Hall, 1200 North Vista St. W. Hollywood, CA one.usc.edu thru Dec 11 THINGS: Queer Legacy of Graphic Art and Play Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA regenprojects.com Nov 4-Dec 23 Wolfgang Tillmans Robert Tat Gallery, 49 Geary St, San Francisco roberttat.com Root Division, 1131 Mission St. SF, rootdivision.org Nov 9-Nov 26 Pulling Threads, craft, domesticity, female body, motherhood Team Gallery 306 Windward Ave., Venice CA teamgal.com thru Oct 23 Carina Brandes: Remote Control Tom of Finland Foundation 1421 Laveta Terrace, Los Angeles, CA, tomoffinlandfoundation.org
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
EUPOPE
Berlin Schwules Museum, Lutzowstrasse 73, Berlin, schwulesmuseum.de thru Oct 17 Peter Kothe: An East West German Life, Stage design; thru Nov 20 Am I Dandy? Instructions on How to Lead an Extravagant Life; Oct 28-Jan 30, 2017 So, It’s a Girl: Homage to Erika and Klaus Mann
Groningen, NL Galerie MooiMan, Noorderstationsstraat 40, 9717KP Groningen, NL, mooi-man.nl
Paris Balice Hertling, 47 Rue Ramoaneau, Paris balicehertling. com thru Oct 8 Puppies Puppies II: C´edric Rivrain, Marie Angeletti, Will Benedict Galerie au Bonheur du Jour, 1 rue Chabanais, Paris, aubonheurdujour.net Ongoing Photos, Drawings, Publications Mus´ee d‛Orsay, 62 Rue de Lille musee-orsay.fr Nov 15-Mar 5, 2017 Fr´ed´eric Bazille
Stuttgart Galerie Bovistra Ludwigstrasse 66 bovistra.com n
EVENTS ISSUE 58
Events Programming at Leslie-Lohman Museum Jerry Kajpust, Deputy Director for External Relations and Kris Grey, Exhibitions, Visitor Experience, and Education Manager
June was an emotional month, especially following the tragic shootings in Orlando on June 12. We remember all those affected by that incident with the words, “More Love, Less Hate.” For us, we started the month on June 9 with our 4th annual Founders’ Gala, which proved to be a great success and definitely a festive evening. We again want to thank all who attended and supported our event. We extend a special thanks to our first-time liquor sponsor, Diageo Rainbow Network. They were joined by some of our returning sponsors, including Merrill Lynch, Bernstein Private Wealth Management, Socio Experiences, Christie’s auction house, and Conservation Framing Services. Ever talented and creative John Kelly entertained us with two powerful numbers and led us into our live auction hosted by our favorite auctioneer, Robbie Gordy, who once again this year secured two buyers for a fabulous stay at Charles Leslie’s home in Marrakesh. Along with some amazing food, several auction items found happy homes! Thanks to the following artists for their donations: Ayakamay, James Bidgood, Joan E. Biren (JEB), Caleb Cole, Liz Collins, Vaginal Davis, Jordan Eagles, Benjamin Fredrickson, Chitra Ganesh, Natasha Gornik, Kris Grey, Mon Iker, Alexander Kargaltsev, Scooter Laforge, Rebecca Levi, Gerald Mocarsky, Matthew Morrocco, Cupid Ojala, Gio Black Peter, Maria Pi˜neres, Harvey Redding, Robert W. Richards, Boris Torres, Wayne Snellen, Stanley Stellar, George Towne, Margaret Rose Vendryes, Sophia Wallace, (top left to right) Photos from the 4th annual Founders’ Gala, June 9: John Kelly; Charles Leslie and long time LLM supporter Elzbieta Kielar; Guests at the Gala. Photos: © Stanley Stellar. (right) Cupid Ojala preparing to meet the crowds at the LLM Pridefest booth, June 26.
Jessica Yatrofsky, and Jade Yumang. Later in June, we participated in the annual Heritage of Pride events again this year with a booth at Pridefest on June 26. (Always great to share the Museum with so many new faces!) Also in June, the Museum staff organized and produced a series of curated lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The 1970s: The Blossoming of a Queer Enlightenment. The first event in the series was titled Takin’ it to the Streets: Performing Public Protest. The panel featured Jill Casid, Shaun Leonardo, and Ed Woodham, and was introduced and moderated by Kris Grey. Takin’ it to the Streets explored the timely topic of public space as a site for civic engagement and artistic resistance. The following program, On Performing Identity, showcased research by Steven F. Dansky on Peter Hujar’s iconic 1970 photograph of the early LGBTQ
movement titled Come Out!!: Join the Sisters and Brothers of the Gay Liberation Front. Next we hosted The 2nd Wave: Feminist Legacies, introduced and moderated by Deborah Bright and featuring Flavia Rando, Leah DeVun, and Clarity Haynes. That evening we saw incredible images that spanned over 40 years of feminist cultural production and our audience had a lively, intergenerational discussion. Our final program, Gay Life in 1970s NYC Panel Discussion, featured Stanley Stellar, Ellen Shumsky, Jonathan Ned Katz, and Michela Griffo. Introduced and moderated by Hunter O’Hanian, we heard about what it was like to live and make art during this prolific decade. Ongoing individual and donor support is crucial in maintaining and growing Museum programming, and we thank our individual supporters, members, and donors. During the past few years, we have been actively seeking grant funding and can now say we are making progress in these areas. Now, in addition to the continued generous and ongoing support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council for the Arts, we can include the following foundations to our list of donors. We are honored to announce that The Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Program has awarded the Museum a grant of $50,000 to catalogue and digitize our collection. And for educational programming we’ve received a $6,000 grant from The Keith Haring Foundation, and a $25,000 grant from the Arcus Foundation. As we look to expand in the coming year, greater financial support will be even more important. So as you start planning your tax-deductible year-end gifts, we encourage you to be generous during our year-end appeal. Your gift ensures that we can maintain our vast collection and continue the excellent exhibitions and programming you’ve come to expect. n
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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PRINCE STREET PROJECT SPACE ISSUE 58
News from Prince Street Project Space October — December 2016 All openings Fridays 6-8pm; Continuing Sat & Sun noon-6pm Rob Hugh Rosen, Deputy Director for Exhibitions
Oct 7-9 Dirty Little Drawings Dirty Little Drawings is being presented for the seventh time since 2003. This popular group art sale consists of works on paper produced by members of the Leslie-Lohman Drawing Studio. All works are identical in size—5½ x 5½ inches—and identically priced at $60 each. Although identical in size and price, each little drawing is an original work of erotic art by the 50 or more participating artists. Every one of these artists approaches his work with singular style, and represents masculinity with personal vision. Viewers are offered the opportunity to become instant art collectors; the works are taken off the walls and given to the collectors as each purchase is concluded. On Sunday, visitors will have the opportunity to observe the artistic process as several artists sketch from the live model. See leslielohman.org for news of special events during the run of this weekend exhibition. Dallas Goodbar, Untitled, 2015 Pencil on tan paper, 5.5 x 5.5 in. Courtesy the artist.
Nov 4-6 Tumble and Bloom, Art of Rebecca Levi
Oct 21-23 Mighty Tony and the Asstronauts Anthony Norris was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1973. Anthony earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and his MFA from Tyler School of Art. His alter ego, Mighty Tony, was born in the Maine wilderness in the summer of 1999. Mighty Tony draws at night about “the love that dare not speak its name.” The artist speaks of his work as “a blend of gay erotica, references to 19th-century painting, and to the cheap animation of my youth. Using an adventure-strip illustration style, I explore the objectification of the male body in various situations of distress. The work is a reflection of my own body image issues, fear of rejection, and other anxieties as a gay man, mixed with eroticism and a frank in-your-face aggressiveness in subject matter.” Anthony Norris, The Hope of Rescue (Detail), 2016. Ink and watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist.
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The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
Rebecca Levi is a NYC born and based artist. Her work has appeared in Queer Threads, which originated at the Leslie-Lohman Museum before traveling to other venues, and Stitch Fetish at The Hive Gallery in Los Angeles. Solo shows include those at the Bureau of General Services in New York and the Main Street Museum in White River Junction, Vermont. Her embroidery was also featured in the Visual AIDS Play Smart series. Tumble and Bloom explores expressions of modern masculine and gender non-conforming performativity through the traditional medium of embroidery. Levi both celebrates and challenges the association of “women’s work” with thread-based craft, creating meticulously sewn portraits of queer bodies, as in the series #100tumblrbearscantbewrong. Using botanical motifs in her colorful flower beards, Levi playfully subverts gender signifiers, such as facial and body hair, and embraces multifaceted, shifting, and emerging identities. Rebecca Levi, Flower Beard, Blue Mohawk, 2016, Thread on cotton fabric, 8 x 8 in. Courtesy the artist.
PRINCE STREET PROJECT SPACE ISSUE 58
Dec 2-4 Love Unlocked, Housing Works annual art exhibition and fundraiser Nov 18-20 Queer|Art|Mentorship 2015-2016 Annual Exhibition, produced by Queer/Art Program Coordinator, Vanessa Haroutunian Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) is a multidisciplinary, intergenerational arts program that pairs and supports mentorship between emerging and established queer artists in New York City. This third annual exhibition in partnership with the Leslie-Lohman Museum is a weekend-long series of exhibitions, screenings, and performances featuring work by the 2015–2016 QAM fellows and mentors. Participants in the program are: Arthur Aviles, Monstah Black, Rodrigo Bellott, Shannon Michael Cane, Caroline Wells Chandler, Angela Dufresne, Avram Finkelstein, Erin Greenwell, Silas Howard, Doron Langberg, Jaime Manrique, Jacob Matkov, Mylo Mendez, Stacie Passon, Eva Peskin, Hugh Ryan, Sarah Schulman, Talvin Wilks, Justine Williams, and Brendan Williams-Childs. Founded in 2011 by filmmaker Ira Sachs and Pilobolus CoExecutive Director Lily Binns, QAM has established itself as an ongoing force within the city’s queer and arts communities, with an expanding series of public events and exhibitions. QAM is one of several continuing programs run by the larger Queer/Art organization that includes the popular Queer/Art/Film series at the IFC Film Center in Greenwich Village. Monstah Black, Deeper, Performance, 7/17/2016. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tai.
Housing Works is a healing community of people living with, and affected by, HIV/AIDS. Its mission is to end the dual crisis of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy, the provision of lifesaving services, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain these efforts. The intention of this event is to showcase the creative accomplishments of participants in their adult day healthcare programs. The exhibition provides an opportunity to promote the Housing Works mission and raise funds to support their artists and its art therapy departments. This winter exhibition will be a part of our ongoing commemorative events around World AIDS Day, which is observed internationally on Dec. 1 each year. Luis Herrera, The Key to Your Soul, 2016, Acrylic with glitter on canvas, 27 x 22 in. Courtesy the artist.
Dec 9-11 Feral Women: Large-Scale Photo Prints, Black Velvet Paintings, and Video Projections by Katrina del Mar Born in 1967 in Passaic, New Jersey, Katrina del Mar studied at New York University and the International Center of Photography in New York. The artist has won numerous awards and fellowships, and has had her work exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe and the U.S. Del Mar’s work has been reproduced in numerous publications, and her films have been screened in film festivals internationally. With her PSPS exhibition, Feral Women, the artist continues: “to explore the theme of wild women who break with convention, an obsession... since early on in [her] life. The wildness in women—sometimes overt, sometimes subtle—is...a manifestation of innate power. The high, hard femme, the bad girl, the rocker, the biker, and the surfer-selkie, are icons of a new feminist pantheon.” On Dec. 10 the artist will host another presentation of the series she previously initiated Tough Girls and Lucid Dreamers. Del Mar’s intention is to enhance the visual experience of her exhibition and to nurture a feminist collective. Please see our website for more information as this event evolves. n Katrina del Mar, Otter with Her Dogs, Brooklyn, 2003, Chromogenic print on metallic paper, 70 x 40 in. Courtesy the artist.
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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EDUCATION ISSUE 58
Educational Programming at the Museum Em Miller, Leslie-Lohman Museum Education Coordinator
The Museum is excited to announce the 2016-2017 educational programming that includes the Leslie-Lohman Speakers Series, Family Days, Guest Docent Tours, and a new off-site collaboration with the Fashion Institute of Technology. The goal of these programs is to create opportunities for learning and dialogue between LGBT artists, their work, and our expanding audience. The Leslie-Lohman Speakers Series, now in its third season, kicked off the autumn schedule on September 8. David J. Getsy, the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, presented “Gutter Art: Stephen Varble and Genderqueer Performance on the Streets of 1970s New York.” Getsy’s talk detailed performance artist, playwright, and fashion designer Stephen Varble (1946–1984), who was a fixture on the streets of SoHo in the 1970s, but whose ephemeral practice has gone largely unrecognized in histories of art. Over the past five years, David Getsy has been recovering the story of Varble’s work through interviews and private archives, and he presented this new research that, for the first time, discusses the range and complexity of Varble’s artistic practice. Aaron McIntosh will follow on November 10 with “Queer + Southern: Roots + Diasporas,” a conversation that will address the historic and contemporary creative cultural production of queer Southern artists, as well as the impacts of migration, braindrain, and rural/urban divides on artists’ lives. McIntosh is a fourth generation quilt maker and cross-disciplinary artist whose (above) Peter Hujar, Stephen Varble, Soho, Franklin Street (III), 1976. Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive. (right) Stephen Varble, Flier for Gutter Art (detail), 1976. Courtesy David J. Getsy.
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The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
EDUCATION ISSUE 58
work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, desire, and identity politics in a range of works including quilts, sculpture, collage, photography and writing. He currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, where he is an assistant professor and Fiber Area head at Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Craft/Material Studies. The autumn Speakers Series will close with Hunter Reynolds, visual artist, AIDS activist, early member of ACT UP, and co-founder of Art Positive. Reynolds’s works address issues of gender identity, political, social and sexual histories, mourning and loss, survival, and hope and healing. The Speakers Series will resume in spring 2017. In March, a panel discussion, including Fire Island Artist Residency Co-Founder and Director Chris Bogia and several FIAR alumni, will discuss the impact this unique residency has had on LGBT artists since its inception in 2011. On April 27, Susie Bright, author, editor, and contributor to the feminist magazine On Our Backs, will offer a dynamic co-lecture with interdisciplinary artist and educator A.K. Burns. Burns considers the body as a site of ongoing negotiation, and utilizes video, installation, performance, sculpture and collaboration to actively rework economies of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality. The duo will discuss their own work and its relationship one to the other. All Speakers Series events are free, open to the public, and begin at 6:30pm. Visit the museum website for updates to the Speakers Series schedule. Guest Docent Tours are led by artists, academics, and curators with expertise in various fields to provide diverse perspectives on work in a Museum exhibition—be it work from the Museum’s collection or work on loan to the Museum. Tours are free and open to the public on select Saturdays at 3pm. Be sure to check leslielohman.org for tour schedules. With grant funding from the Haring Foundation and the Arcus Foundation, the Museum will host several Family Day events this year featuring gallery exploration, guided tours, and art making for children and their families. Participants will engage in developmentally appropriate conversation around selected pieces and create their own artwork aligned with the theme of Museum exhibitions. Family Day events will be held on Saturday mornings during selected exhibitions. Visit the museum website for more details. The Museum will collaborate with the Fashion Institute of Technology to present the Queer Culture Lecture and Performance Series. This new, off-site program includes lectures, panels, and performances curated by LeslieLohman and hosted at FIT. Join us on September
21 for our first event of the series, Art/AIDS/ America: The Impact of AIDS on Visual Art, a panel moderated by Jonathan David Katz. The Auditorium at FIT, 6pm. Funding for the Speakers Series has been received in part from the generous support of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. n ...............................................................................................................
(top) Aaron McIntosh, The Bear with Weeds, 2013, Mixed-media fiber sculpture. Courtesy the artist. (above left) Aaron McIntosh, Big Little Man, 2008, Digital textile prints, quilting. Courtesy the artist. (above right) Aaron McIntosh, Bedroom Buddies, 2010, Digital textile prints, quilting. Courtesy the artist.
Em Miller is the Education Coordinator at the LeslieLohman Museum and also works as a coach and Training and Administrative Coordinator for Visual Thinking Strategies. Em recently graduated from Pratt Institute with a Master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management.
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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WOOSTER STREET WINDOW GALLERY ISSUE 58
Cobi Moules Self Portraits: 2009–2015 August 14 — November 4, 2016, Wooster Street Windows Gallery An interview with Cobi Moules and The Archive editor
In the Windows Gallery you are showing eight of nine paintings from your Self Portrait series, showing eight years of your transitioning. Were these painted as you transitioned? Yes, I began this series at the same time that I started transitioning. I am currently working on the tenth piece and create a new one each year or so with no particular end date. The project began partly as documentation so the larger-than-life-size, straightforward positioning was a way of capturing all of the subtle physical changes. I’m curious to see how the project will change over time in regards to what is documented—age, dress, grooming. Recently the differences from one portrait to the next are much more subtle than the earlier paintings.
(below) Cobi Moules, Untitled (5-26-2014), 2014. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist. (opposite page) Cobi Moules, Untitled (8-24-15), 2016. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy the artist.
At what age did you begin transitioning? And what was your life like before you made the decision? I started transitioning, or taking hormones, around age twenty-eight in 2008—I was a bit of a late bloomer. I didn’t start exploring gender until I left home for college and, in a way, transition started at that time, around the age of 20. I grew up in a fairly conservative area and family, so it wasn’t until I left that I felt strong enough to allow myself to be open, self-reflective, and loving of my difference. Once I was able to shed the ideas of who and what I was supposed to be, I began to slowly come into my own. I think we all do this in our own way.
I’ve read that you started painting along side your grandmother as a child. Where was this and has your painting been a continual progression from then? I did! We used to paint landscapes on her porch in Riverbank, California. I was always so hard on myself and needed everything to be perfect. She was so supportive and talked me though some difficult moments when I was crying because I couldn’t get my painting to the place I wanted it to be. My work has definitely progressed since then; no more crying but still an over-critical eye and desire for perfection. I see progress and drastic technical differences when looking at the self-portraits together. After painting on the porch with my grandma, I continued to paint and draw through high school, abandoning landscape. I went off to do my undergraduate work at San Jose State University, focusing on the figure and exploring my newly formed friendships within the queer community through my work. In 2007 I moved to Boston for my graduate studies at School of
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The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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the Museum of Fine Arts. My worked shifted slightly as I began to explore my own queer and trans identity and started to reflect back onto my childhood, thinking about the landscape again and how I could use it as a way to revisit my relationship with family.
The Childhood Drawings series is charming. Thank you. I was sifting through and recreating many of my childhood photos but with a slight alteration: I gave myself a haircut. Looking back, I neither see myself as a little girl or boy, or perhaps a bit of both. But with the haircut and the stripping of color, through the use of graphite, I wanted to blur those gender lines as well as the lines between how I see myself now, the photographic realty of me as a child, and memory. I was close with my family. I have many wonderful memories of growing up and a longing to experience those moments again. Over
time our relationships strained with me being queer and trans, and my family being conservative and religious. So, in a way, with this series, I am trying to allow for who I am now and the wonderful childhood relationships to be able to co-exist. Some of my work, like the Childhood Drawings, start partly with difficult realities within my family relationships but explore them in a playful and often humorous way.
I love the Bois Just Want to Have Fun series that I first discovered through Lyons Wier Galley in New York City. What can you tell me about how these paintings came about and the imagery in the paintings? Oh, I’m glad you like them! I started this series in 2010. I had again been thinking a lot about my family and religious upbringing. I had also been looking at work by the Hudson River School and discovered a lot of threads between their work and the specific religious ideologies that I grew up with: ideas around God, nature, the insignificance of the individual, as well as virginity, purity, and the honor of sacrificing one’s selfhood for the glory of God. Growing up my existence was deemed un-natural and, by suppressing a huge part of myself, I was thought to be living an honorable life. So the landscapes, based loosely on the Hudson River School, became a stand-in for my religious upbringing. I’ve multiplied myself throughout these spaces, overwhelming the landscape with my presence, both as a way of taking precedence over the landscape as well as placing myself as part of nature. I’m exploring within these spaces and creating a community full of excitement and self-worth. In 2011 I traveled alone for about three months, hiking and camping throughout the national parks in the North and West. I would go into a location and explore, taking photos of me playing within the spaces. Sometimes I would have a specific location that directly related to a painting that I was referencing, while much of the time I would allow myself to explore and respond to my surroundings with less parameters. The Grand Canyon for instance was somewhere that I wanted to explore from a different vantage point than looking out onto the vast landscape. I hiked down to the bottom where I could experience it in a much more intimate way.
What’s next? Right now I am working on my tenth self-portrait and building the canvases for the next landscapes. I recently went on a threeweek trip to New England and upstate New York and a few short trips. The first piece that I’m excited to start on is from Acadia, in Maine. I did a piece there in 2010 and was very eager to go back and explore different parts of that coast. Most of my focus this year will be on the Bois Just Wanna Have Fun series. n
The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 58 ● AUTUMN 2016
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Upcoming in 2017 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum Plans for the expansion of the Leslie-Lohman Museum are progressing. At the completion of the project the newly expanded Museum will open with a survey of our organization’s 30 years of actively building a collection of queer art. Recent acquisitions shown here will be included.
(top) Caleb Cole, Birthday Girl, 2008-2010, Archival pigment print, 13 x 19 in. Museum purchase. (right) Scooter LaForge, People Are Strange, 2016, Interactive mixed media sculpture. approx. 44 x 20 in. Partial gift of the artist, partial Museum purchase. (above) Christina Schlesinger, Romaine Brooks and Me, 1994, Mixed media on canvas, 27 x 32 in. Gift of the artist.