The Archive: Issue 48 Winter 2013

W I N T E R 2 0 1 3

T HE ARCHI VE 48 The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

CONTENTS THE ARCHIVE NUMBER 48 WINTER 2013

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QUEER THREADS: CRAFTING IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY

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IF THE FORM FITS

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GALLERIES OF INTEREST

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KRIS GREY: THE NEWEST ADDITION TO THE MUSEUM STAFF

JOHN CHAICH, CURATOR

HUNTER O HANIAN, MUSEUM DIRECTOR

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THE LESLIE-LOHMAN COLLECTION AT THE ECHO ART FAIR

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RECENT ACQUISITIONS

WAYNE SNELLEN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR COLLECTIONS

TOM SAETTEL, EDITOR, THE ARCHIVE

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EVENT PROGRAMMING

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CATHERINE OPIE

The Leslie-Lohman Museum is operated by the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1987 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, entertaining and challenging all who enter its doors.

Charles W. Leslie J. Frederic Lohman (1922‒2009)

FROM THE CLOSET TO THE CATWALK NEWS FROM PRINCE STREET

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 a permanent collection of over 20,000 objects, spanning more than three centuries of queer art. We host 6-8 major exhibitions annually, artist talks, film screenings, panel discussions, readings and other events. In addition, we publish THE ARCHIVE - a quarterly art publication and maintain 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.

Founders

12 A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION:

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About the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Board of Directors

ROB HUGH ROSEN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR PROGRAMMATIC OPERATIONS

JERRY KAJPUST, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR EXTERNAL RELATIONS

JENNIFER EDWARDS

20 STROKE: FROM UNDER THE MATTRESS

Jonathan David Katz, President Steven J. Goldstein, Vice-President, Secretary Daniel R. Hanratty, Treasurer John Caldwell Kymara Lonergan Robert W. Richards James M. Saslow Peter Weiermair

Co-Founder & Director Emeritus

TO THE MUSEUM WALLS

Charles W. Leslie

ROBERT W. RICHARDS, CURATOR

Staff

21 ART & AIDS: PERCEPTIONS OF LIFE 22 KETCH WEHR: EMBLEMS OF THINGS TO COME JAMIE LAWYER

23 JADE YUMANG: POST PERFORMANCE SYNDROME AND CRIMSON FIELD DANIEL J. SANDER

Back Cover:

Current and Upcoming Exhibitions at Leslie-Lohman Museum

Hunter O Hanian, Museum Director Wayne Snellen, Deputy Director for Collections Rob Hugh Rosen, Deputy Director for Programmatic Operations Branden Wallace, Collections Manager Todd Fruth, Office Manager Kris Grey, Exhibitions and Communications Manager Victor Trivero, Exhibition Lighting Stephanie Chambers, Bookkeeper Daniel Sander, Receptionist

Volunteer Staff

Cryder Bankes, Library Steven Goldstein, Collections, Administration Daniel Kitchen, Museum Advocate Johnathan M. Lewis, Collections Stephan Likosky, Collections

Tai Lin, Collections Paul Nissenbaum, Collections Chuck Nitzberg, Events Noam Parness, Collections Frank Sheehan, Drawing Studio

The Archive

The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Number 48 Tom Saettel, Editor Joseph Cavalieri, Production and Design

©2013 The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. No part of this journal may be reproduced in John Burton Harter, Self Portrait, 1990, Oil on board, 40 x 40 in., The John Burton Harter Charitable Trust.

This issue of The Archive is made possible by a generous donation from the

John Burton Harter Charitable Trust.

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 for free in the museum, and is mailed free of charge to LL Museum members.

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: James Gobel, The Fitting No.1, 2007, Felt, yarn and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 72 in., Collection of Costello & Tagliapietra, Photo courtesy of Kravits/Wehby.

EXHIBITION ISSUE 48

Nathan Vincent, Locker Room, 2011 (installation view), Lion Brand Yarn, 144 x 228 in., Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Stephen Miller.

Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community Jan. 17–March 16, 2014 Leslie-Lohman Museum John Chaich, Curator

Queer Threads: Crafting

Identity and Community presents contemporary artists who employ threadbased craft materials, techniques, and processes to create work that engages, challenges, and transforms notions of aspiration, socialization, and representation. Merriam-Webster defines the adjective queer as “differing in some odd way from what is usual or normal.”

Debated for decades, craft has been considered the queer stepchild of fine art. Thread the verb means “to move forward by turning and going through narrow spaces.” This exhibition seeks to explore how LGBTQ artists today move through the narrow space that is gay or straight, art or craft, to redefine personal identities and art practices.

While formidable exhibitions such as the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2007 Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting, and the Bellevue Arts Museum’s 2011 The Mysterious Content of Softness, have included a range of LGBTQ identified artists, Queer Threads marks the first time these works have been shown together specifically to highlight their queerness— and at the first dedicated art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ art and to foster work of the artists who create it.

Loaded with gender and power hierarchies, fiber and textile craft traditions such as knitting, crochet, macramé, and quilting, the exhibition provides a fitting platform for examining tastes, roles, and relationships born from and challenged

by queer communities. And thread—be it yarn or embroidery floss—parallels the potential for connectivity in our lives as queer people. Our commonalities may be as thick as a knot or thin as a string.

As individuals we are strands; as a community we are interwoven. Both can be broken or braided.

Queer Threads fully activates the Museum’s 26 Wooster St. gallery through felt paintings, yarn drawings, embroidered portraits, knit sculpture, quilted tapestries, and crocheted installations, as well as video.

From Nathan Vincent’s life-sized, crocheted men’s locker room to Liz Collins’ enormous knit pride flag based on Gilbert Baker’s 1978 original design, and from Allyson Mitchell’s found afghans

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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EXHIBITION ISSUE 48

emblazoned with phrases such as “Pride is a Pyramid Scheme” to James Gobel’s use of craft felt and yarn to paint a portrait of fashion designers Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra, many of Queer Threads’ artists rely totally on craft processes to fully create their work while others mix craft technique or materials with traditional mediums.

Flowing off the wall to the floor, is L.J. Roberts’ The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Bruekelen, Boswyck and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Smithsonian purchased the piece after it was shown in its 2013 40 Under 40: Craft Futures exhibition. It incorporates knitting, embroidery, and quilting to create a colorful, multi-textured sculpture mapping queer, cohabitating collectives.

With references to the AIDS quilt and ACT UP iconography, the piece honors punk DIY aesthetics and traditional craft as well as the families we create, giving each a coat-of-arms-like icon, available as a take-away badge for viewers.

In Selfie w/ Pink Eye, Chris Bogia uses hard-edged abstraction, infused by the history of mid century interior design and softened by the use of craft yarn overlay, to fill a frame who’s shape references the

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smart phones and devices often used to surf cruising apps and dating sites. Contrasting medium, form, content, and context, the piece recalls a screen in mid-shatter, capturing the frenzied pace and often messy indulgent content of a “selfie” while questioning the perceived value of modern homo-social vanity with socialized aesthetic taste.

Atlanta-based Aubrey LongleyCook led a series of community workshops teaching embroidery and crossstitch techniques to fill embroidery hoops recreating stills from RuPaul’s groundbreaking mainstream music video, “Supermodel.” Longley-Cook has looped images of the embroideries into a stopframe animation. By transforming handmade craft into high-tech video, the resulting piece, RuPaul Cross Stitch Animation Workshop, and related process celebrate the power of the image, collaboration, and communication.

Throughout Queer Threads, work is informed by gay and lesbian symbols, spaces and histories, and filled with immediately intimate and often physical imagery. A tapestry from a series in which the artists appear as gender stereotypes—from Bears to Geishas, across cultures—the Familia Guarini by Buenos Aries-based Chiachio & Giannone celebrates the traditional family

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

(above) John Thomas Paradiso, Leather Pansy II (Detail), 2010, Leather, thread, and plastic hoop on wood panel, 10 x 10 x 1.5 in., Courtesy of Horst Boelendorf, Photo: Pete Duvall. (below) Sheila Pepe, Your Granny s Not Square, 2008, Crocheted shoelaces and yarn, 72 x 144 x 48 in., Courtesy of the artist.

EXHIBITION ISSUE 48

portrait. Only here we see Amazonian warrior husbands holding their beloved dachshund amid a colorful, immaculately detailed rainforest entirely hand-embroidered with bead accents.

In Bona Fide! (In Good Faith!), a selection from her recent Playland series, Maria E. Piñeres employs a range of traditional and idiosyncratic needlepoint techniques to celebrate pre-gentrified Times Square sex culture. Juxtaposing the visual language of pinball machines with nude pin-ups in classical poses, Piñeres questions nostalgia, risk, losses and gains.

In Two Ladies, Rebecca Levi pulls from the visual language of quilting to create a graphic frame around graphic content: a pair of unlikely pin-ups from a vintage photograph found at a flea market which she has lovingly rendered in hand-embroidery.

Capetown-based artist Pierre Fouché laboriously creates lace by hand into a towering, lone figure of a bare-chested demonstrator, contrasting the homoerotic, hyper-masculine figure with traditionally feminine practice in a politically charged setting.

Using materials and techniques to parallel butch/femme aesthetics and roles, John Thomas Paradiso delicately embroiders pansies onto black leather in traditional circular hoops mounted on raw plywood squares.

While these artists relish in finished detail, others work in intentionally organic techniques or unfinished forms, deconstructing, (above) Rebecca Levi, Two Ladies, 2007, Cotton floss embroidered on cotton fabric, 20 x 20 in., Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Rebecca Levi. (far left) Maria E. Piñeres, Bon a Fide! (In Good Faith!), 2013, Cotton floss on plastic mounted on wood panel, 24 x 23 in., Courtesy of DCKT Contemporary, New York. (left) Aubrey Longley-Cook with Community Workshop Participants, RuPaul Cross Stitch Animation Workshop (Frame 17), 2013, Stills from video animation, front and back views, Courtesy the artist.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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EXHIBITION REVIEW ISSUE ISSUE 4248 and fiber-craft processes while layering queer perspectives in broader folk, bring in feminist, and conceptual narratives.

Leaving threads loose, seams torn, and shapes ambiguous, Buzz Slutzky marks the phantom limbs of postoperative gender reassignment surgeries. Handstitched details and craft notions are applied to deconstructed—and sometimes destroyed—knit items such as leggings and shoulder pads from a girlhood past.

In Then and Now (Rainbow Order), Larry Krone forms an irregular rainbow from crochet pieces found in thrift stores from New York to the Midwest, and the resulting wall hanging embraces American Kitsch and the multiplicity of identity.

Sheila Pepe’s 2008 Your Granny’s Not Square rightfully positions itself in a context with Eve Hesse’s 1969 Right After and Faith Wilding’s Womb Room/Crocheted Environment from the 1972 Womanhouse. The traditional granny square serves as the foundation for her looping 12-foot-wide installation in which scale, light, and material transform the intimate act of crocheting into a mysterious, multilayered amorphous object.

Suspended from the ceiling, Jesse Harrod’s macramé sculpture featuring unidentifiable shapes recall sex toys, anatomy, and botany, and imply unprescribed desires and identities. For Harrod, the relationship between craft and queerness is clear: “Queer lives and sexual practices, like craft making, often rely on do-it-yourself strategies of creativity: there is no guidebook or inherited cultural roadmap for lives lived outside of normative structures.”

These pieces question the opportunities for and constraints on self-identity within a larger community, echoing queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s declaration in her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet “People are different.” By experimenting with thread and employing craft techniques, the featured artists fulfill legendary textile artist Anni Albers’ 1959 artistic manifesto to “let the threads be articulate.” Inclusive, adaptive, and responsive to both the gallery space and sociopolitical climate, Queer Threads aims to let threads articulate queer differences. ■

(left) Aaron McIntosh, Fragment #3: Roses Are Red, 2012, Digital textile print, vintage fabric thread piecework, 26 x 20 in., Courtesy of the artist. (right) Chiachio & Giannone, Familia Guaraní, 2009, Hand embroidery with cotton threads, jewelry effect thread, and rayon on fabric, 51 x 48 in., Courtesy of artist, Photo: Daniel Kiblisky.

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A range of guest docents will lead tours of the exhibition, including designers Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra; Debbie Stoller, author of the Stitch n Bitch Nation series of knitting books and editor-in-chief of BUST Magazine; and designer Todd Oldham, who recently launched the Kid Made Modern craft book and supplies.

John Chaich is an independent curator, designer, and writer living in New York City.

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L.J. Roberts, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, (based on a 2010 drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky, with 24 illustrations

by Buzz Slutzky on printed pin-back buttons), 2011, Poly-fill, acrylic, rayon, Lurex, wool, polyester, cotton lame, sequins, and blended fabrics, 138 x 114 x 108 in., Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Elaine Reuben, Photo: The Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

THE MUSEUM ISSUE 48

If the Form Fits Hunter O’Hanian, Museum Director

The Musée d’Orsay in Paris

recently opened an exhibition entitled Masculin/Masculin, containing works focusing on the male form, mostly from 1800 to the present. Among others, the exhibition was curated by Museum Director Guy Cogeval, Xavier Rey, and Ophélie Ferlier.

Occupying the museum’s major temporary gallery, the exhibition has been in the planning stages for a more than a decade.

The curators claim to have been spurred on by another recent European exhibition.

The show opens with the following question: “Why has there never been an exhibition dedicated to the male nude until the one opened at the Leopold Museum in Vienna last year?” The two organizations worked cooperatively in making the exhibition possible.

Press reports reveal that the curators assert that the male form has grown “out of favor” and it is now being given “a place of pride” with a major museum exhibition.

One can only wonder if the great attention to gay rights and marriage equality over the past decade has influenced their thinking. It’s an interesting inquiry. But indeed, one must stop and examine why so many museums have been and remain shy about addressing issues of gender and sexuality. In particular, why is showing the male form considered so taboo? They strive to make a distinction between nudity (a body simply without clothes) and the nude (a body idealized by the artist).

There are more than 200 objects in this exhibition. While desire is mentioned, the exhibition is mostly academic in approach.

It starts with the classical ideal of the male nude before moving on to heroes and athletes. Work by firmly seated members of the art world pantheon—Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, August Rodin, and Egon Schiele— are sprinkled throughout to great effect.

The organizers make it clear that this exhibition is about art, not politics. They argue that in the art world, depicting the male form is the epitome of artistic talent—“the ultimate aim.” They offer that the male form is more difficult to draw than the female form and argue that the male form was considered the “archetypical human form” and it is an academic achievement to represent its passion and accuracy. Further, the representation of the male form

Signage for Masculin/Maculin in front of the Musée d Orsay, Paris.

could not be of “an ordinary man,” but the “distinctive features of the model had to be tempered to elevate the subject.”

Without question, the vast number of artists who made the work shown in the exhibition are male—this is an exhibition about men depicting an idolized male form. Only a handful of women—Louise Bourgeois, Imogene Cunningham, Nan Goldin, Zoe Leonard, Alice Neel, and a few others—are included.

The exhibition acknowledges a postSecond World War “puritan outlook” in the United States but recognizes Paul Cadmus for not balking at “depicting a pickup scene between men” in Finistere (1958).

The exhibition includes plenty of openly gay artists: Francis Bacon, James Bidgood, Paul Cadmus, Jean Cocteau, F. Holland Day, Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Bob Mizer, George Platt Lynes, Raymond Voinquel, Wilhelm von Gloeden, and many others.

Familiar topics such as St. Sebastian, bathing, athletics, heroism, and mythology are well represented in the imagery. Fans of Pierre et Gilles will not go away unhappy, as there are many pieces sprinkled throughout. However, given the number

of male forms—and gay male artists—the topic of same-sex desire feels oddly absent.

Although they state homoeroticism is one of the themes and “is a thread throughout the exhibition,” it is hard to find. Perhaps if they included work by Tom of Finland, Cathy Opie, or Attila Richard Lukacs, that thread might have been easier to follow.

We are each left to view the work from our own perspective.

But the show does not fully answer the opening question: Why has it taken so long for a major exhibition to focus on the male form? What role has shame of our bodies played in displaying these works in a celebrated fashion, particularly since they are so revered from an artistic perspective?

It would have been nice if they took the discourse to the next level and addressed why the male form was pursued by so many beyond its use in displaying artistic merit.

While the exhibition is a breakthrough in many ways, it leaves one wanting more.

We certainly have seen other, more direct, homages to both the male and female form.

But does the acknowledgment of one’s sexual orientation have to be so underplayed because it is considered “a political statement?” To do so seems to miss the point.

Through the personal, lies the universal. ■

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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GALLERIES ISSUE 48

Galleries of Interest

See Current and Upcoming Exhibitions at Leslie-Lohman Museum Back Cover NEW YORK CITY Andrew Edlin Gallery, 134 10th Ave, NYC, edlingallery.com C24 Gallery, 514 W 24 St, c24gallery.com thru Dec 21 Skylar Fein: Lincoln Bedroom ClampArt, 521-531 W. 25th St., NYC, clampart.com thru Dec 21 Jim French: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor; Jan 9-Feb 15 Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989) Envoy Enterprises, 87 Rivington St. NYC, envoyenterprises.com thru Dec 22 Kelsey Henderson Lambert Fine Arts, 57 Stanton St., NYC, lambertfinearts.com La MaMa La Galleria, 6 East 1st St., NYC, lamama.org/category/lagalleria Michael Mut Gallery, 97 Avenue C, NYC, michaelmutgallery.com thru Jan 25 Love Yourself Store Munch Gallery, 245 Broome St., NYC, munchgallery.com Jan 8-Feb 2 Paper, Twenty Danish artists, B/W work on paper Museum of Sex, 233 Fifth Avenue, NYC, museumofsex.com Ongoing Universe of Desire; Sex Life of Animals Participant Inc, 253 E. Houston St., NYC, participantinc.org P•P•O•W, 535 West 22nd St., NYC, ppowgallery.com thru Dec 21 Dotty Attie, The Lone Ranger Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. whitney.org thru Jan 5, 2014 Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE; thru Feb 2 Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama; Manhattan, 1970‒1980; Mar 7-May 25 2014 Whitney Biennial

NEW YORK CITY—BROOKLYN Figureworks 168 N. 6th St., Brooklyn, NY, figureworks.com thru Dec 15 Susan Newmark: Layered Narrative

Center for Sex & Culture 1349 Mission Street, San Francisco sexandculture.org thru Jan 31 SAFE SEX BANG: The Buzz Bense Collection of Safe Sex Posters; Catalog Party Jan 24 7-10pm GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th St., San Francisco, CA, glbthistory. org/museum thru Feb. 28 Transgender Performer Vicki Marlane; 1950present; Ongoing Our Vast Queer Past ONE Archives Gallery & Museum, 909 W. Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA onearchives.org thru Jan 16 Caroline May: The Killing Pictures and Other Works ONE Archives Gallery & Museum, 626 North Robertson Boulevard, West Hollywood, CA onearchives.org thru Jan 26 Art & Physique Circa Bob & Tom; Feb 1-23 The Gay Rub; Mar 15-Jun EZTV:Queer history of this video cooperative

CANADA

Rio Bravo Fine Art, 110 N Broadway St., Truth or Consequences, NM riobravofineart.net thru Dec 29 Delmas Howe: Guys and Canyons

La Petite Mort Gallery, 306 Cumberland St., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, lapetitemortgallery.com Dec 5-Jan 2 Aleks Bartosik: Mar 7-30 Andrew Moncrief: New Paintings

MIDWEST

EUPOPE

Leather Archives & Museum, 6418 N. Greenview Ave. Chicago, IL leatherarchives.org thru Jan 5 HIDE: Karl Hamilton-Cox of Art On Leather; Ongoing Etienne; Leather Bar; Leather History Timeline; Fakir Musafar; From Sir to Grrr; Debates in Leather

SOUTH World Erotic Art Museum, 1205 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, FL, weam.com/web Dec 2-Feb 28 At the Beach From the Hudson River to the World: Photograph portraits of George Daniell; thru Mar 31 Helmut Newton: A Liberating Force

Splatterpool, 138 Bayard St., Brooklyn NY, splatterpool. com

NORTHEAST Firehouse Gallery, 8 Walnut Street, Bordentown, NJ, firehousegallery.com Work by Eric Gibbons Kymara Gallery 2 Main St., Biddeford, ME kymara.com The Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky St., Pittsburgh, PA, warhol. org thru Jan 14 Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self; Ongoing I Just Want to Watch: Warhol s Film, Video, and Television Vitruvian Gallery, LLC, 734 7th Street, SE, Washington, DC, vitruviangallery. com Nov - Dec Male Nudes; Jan 1720 Mid Atlantic Leather Erotic Male Art; Jan- Mar Male Nudes

WEST Antebellum Gallery, 1643 N Las Palmas Ave., Hollywood, CA, antebellumgallery.blogspot.com (cover for openings)

George Daniell, Courtesy World Erotic Art Museum, Miami, FL.

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Susan Newmark, Nancy and Her Adventures with the Fox Hunters (detail), 2013, Mixed media collage, 24 x 36 in., Courtesy of Figureworks, Brooklyn, NY.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

Berlin NGBK, Oranienstrasse 25 ngbk.de thru Jan 5 LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX I: Art AIDS Activism 1987-1995; Jan 18-Mar 9 LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX 2: Art AIDS Activism 1995 until today Schwules Museum, Lutzowstrasse 73, Berlin, schwulesmuseum.de thru Dec 1 Wilfried Laule: Desire, Love, Passion; thru Mar 10 Renata Har & Conor Creighton If the Sand Could Talk: Corrective Rape in Cape Town; thru Mar 10 Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau; thru Jan 6 New in the Collection; thru Aug 10 Transformation

Groningen, NL Galerie MooiMan, Noorderstationsstraat 40, 9717KP Groningen, NL, mooi-man.nl

Madrid La Fresh Gallery, Conde de Aranda 5, Madrid, lafreshgallery.com Work by Bruce LaBruce, Gorka Postigo, Nicolás Santos, and Slava Mogutin

Munich Kunstbehandlung/Saatchi Gallery 40 Müller Strasse 40, Munich, kunstbehandlung.de Exhibition room for contemporary figurative art. Focused on homoerotic and gay art.

Paris La Galerie au Bonheur du Jour, 11 rue Chabanais, Paris, aubonheurdujour.net thru Jan 31 Nus Masculin: Academic and Erotic Nudes 1860-2011; Ongoing Erotic objects, paintings and drawings Musée d Orsay, 62 Rue de Lille, Paris musee- orsay.fr thru Jan 2 Masculin / Masculin: The Nude in Art from 1800 to the Present

Vienna Leopold Museum, at the MuseumsQuartier, Vienna leopoldmuseum.org thru Jan 27, 2104 Kokoschka: The Self in Focus; Mar 21-Sept 1 Schiele Rediscovered

THE MUSEUM ISSUE 48

Kris Grey

The Newest Addition to the Museum Staff

Kris Grey, Central Park, 2012, Photo: Em Miller.

In September 2013, we were

very thrilled to welcome Kris Grey to the Leslie-Lohman staff. Kris joined us as the Exhibitions and Communications Manager and filled the position that had been vacated by Julia Haas.

“My first contact with the Museum was in graduate school,” Kris says. “I was doing research on queer archives and was delighted to have access to parts of the collection online. It was especially helpful considering my studies kept me in Ohio for three years.

Before I moved to New York, I made a special effort to visit the museum for the Del La Grace Volcano show. That show was so important for me personally. As a genderqueer artist I have always been searching for figures in culture that I feel connected to and reflected by. Del’s work has long been an inspiration to me, but I haven’t ever had the opportunity to see the work in person. That exhibition demonstrated the importance of the museum’s position as a platform for queer visibility.

After seeing that show I knew I wanted to get more involved at Leslie-Lohman.”

Today, Kris is a practicing genderqueer artist with a robust visual and curatorial practice (Kristingrey.com), whose work combines strategies of communication,

activism, community building, education, lecturing, and studio production in mediums two dimensional, three dimensional, and in time-based work. Kris received an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Kris has more than five years of cultural nonprofit experience, including working with Printed Matters, Baltimore Clayworks, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, and the Baltimore Museum of Arts. In addition, Kris has worked directly with many artists, including Ron Athey, AA Bronson, Barbara Hammer, Ann Hamilton, and Annie Sprinkle.

“First and foremost I hope to become a productive, helpful, energetic part of an already wonderful team,” Kris says.

“I’m interested in extending the reach of the Museum’s content beyond our walls as well as creating and administering programs to bring people in. I’m really looking forward to expanding the internship and volunteer programs, two great ways for people to participate.

The Museum is an important piece of queer history and makes a great impact in contemporary visual culture. I’d like to help even more people experience the collection, exhibitions, and programming we produce.”

Kris will provide valuable assistance installing exhibitions, promoting the Museum’s programs, and being the face that greets visitors to the Leslie-Lohman Museum. ■ (below) Kris Grey, 2012, Performance documentation. Durational performance in which the artist remained submerged in the middle of an illuminated swimming pool for four hours breathing through a bamboo reed. The performance reanimates one person s experience from the1960s. During a frequent police raid, a Cherry Grove resident evaded police arrest by running through the Grove and into the bay. He hid among the reeds, submerged his body in the dark water for hours, used a reed to breathe and remain invisible underwater. Grey s performance was public and audience members observed the performance from the decks and bar above at the Ice Palace on Fire Island. This performance was completed while in residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency. Photo: Jade Yumang.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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THE COLLECTIONS ISSUE 48

The Leslie-Lohman Collection at the Echo Art Fair Wayne Snellen, Deputy Director for Collections

The Leslie-Lohman Museum

was invited to participate in the annual Echo Art Fair in Buffalo, New York in early September 2013. The Fair, founded in 2011 by E. Frits Abell, is on its way to be a major art event. Last year, more than 10,000 people visited the exposition over the three days. This year, the fair was held at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. The Fair seeks to represent the best of contemporary artists and galleries, mostly from the northeastern United States.

Representing the Leslie-Lohman Museum in a general interest art fair is quite an interesting challenge. How do you capture the work of such a complex organization in a weekend fair and a booth 8 by 16 feet?

For this opportunity, we selected

twenty pieces of art from our permanent collection—with one loan from private collectors—in an attempt to reflect a gender-balanced display of work that spoke to the entire LGBTQ experience through work of exceptional quality. It was an opportunity for the fair attendees to learn more about the Museum and its collections and exhibitions. Specifically, we included work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Horst P. Horst, Duncan Grant, Peter Hujar, G.B. Jones, George Platt Lynes, Deborah Bright, Cyndy Warwick, Duane Michals, Del LaGrace Volcano, Sara Swaty, and Catherine Opie. The work held together nicely and represented the organization well. Fair attendees responded very positively and repeatedly expressed appreciation for the high quality of the Museum’s exhibition. ArtFCity, a

leading NYC art blog noted, “Without a doubt, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art offered one of the strongest booths in the Fair.” While in Buffalo, Jonathan Katz, Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation board president, and Museum Director Hunter O’Hanian served on an educational panel.

The Museum has had a relationship with the Buffalo area for several years as it has participated in a joint lecture series with the University of Buffalo’s visual studies department. Past participants of that series included Catherine Opie, Kent Monkman, and others. Each artist has spoken in New York and in Buffalo.

We look forward to sharing the Museum’s collection at other fairs and exhibition venues throughout the county and internationally in years to come. ■ Director Hunter O Hanian talking to visitors at the Museum s booth at the Echo Art Fair in Buffalo, NY on September 7, 2013, which he attended with Deputy Director Wayne Snellen and Collections Manager Branden Wallace. Photo by Wayne Snellen.

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The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

THE COLLECTIONS ISSUE 48

Recent Acquisitions Arthur Tress, Figure in Smoke, 1979, Panchromatic B&W photographic print, 10.5 x 10.5 in., Gift of Arthur Bennett Kouwenhoven, Cover of Arthur Tress first book of male nudes, Facing Up, 1980, St. Martins Press.

(above) Don Bachardy, Untitled (Ron Barone), 1969, Pen, ink and wash on paper, 24 x 19 in., Gift of Richard Gerrig and Timothy Peterson. (right) Don Herron, Robert Mapplethorpe, Photographer, 1978, Silver gelatin photographic print, 20 x 16 in., Gift of Arthur Bennett Kouwenhoven.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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OUTSIDE OUR WALLS ISSUE 48

A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk

Sep. 13, 2013–Jan. 4, 2014 The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology Tom Saettel, Editor, The Archive

Installation view A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, Pretty Gentlemen platform. Photograph The Museum at FIT, New York̶ Mural: Oscar Wilde in Aesthetic Dress, Napoleon Sarony, 1882; Left to Right: Vivienne Westwood, 18th-century Style Suit Worn by fashion editor Hamish Bowles, 1991; Man s Three-Piece Suit, 1790-1800, France; Man s Banyan (Dressing Gown), c.1750-1760, Germany; Molly House Ensemble, 1700, England.

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A Queer History of Fashion:

From the Closet to the Catwalk is the first exhibition to examine the relationship of LGBTQ people to fashion—from haute couture, to ready-to-wear, to the street. Many visitors to the exhibition will have the background to interpret the more than 100 garments on display.

I found the accompanying book and videos invaluable guides to the goals of the exhibition.

A Queer History of Fashions, arranged in chronological order, is a walk through the queer interface with and contribution to fashion in the last three centuries. The exhibition opens with examples of 18thcentury clothing—one is clued in on mollies, men milliners, and macaroni men.

Kicking off the exhibition, an apparent Little Red Riding Hood costume is actually an ensemble worn by a cross-dresser from a molly house in 1700. Molly houses were the clubs where homosexual men met for sex and companionship. Raids on molly houses and subsequent trials,

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executions, and torture are well documented in British archives from the early 18th century.

Men milliners made, decorated, and sold women’s dresses, hats, and accessories, taking over the field from women in the 18th century. At a time when sobriety was subduing men’s clothing and manners—perhaps as a reactions to this burgeoning flamboyant group generally known to be homosexual—the men milliners continued to wear fancifully embroidered garments and elaborate hats, and behave with exaggerated fastidiousness.

Macaroni men refer to a broader category of flashy dressers—heterosexual and homosexual—better known as fops.

The term “macaroni men” refers to Italy’s reputation at the time as a land of libidinous sexual freedom.

The exhibition continues with the dandy. Dandies adhere to the sartorial style of the day, but with such precision as to set them a part. The style of a dandy is above reproach in its adherence to

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

the norm and in that sense is a form of “passing.” However, his exacting detail, fancifulness, and elitism, served as an important signifier of his homosexuality to other homosexuals. Oscar Wilde is represented with clothing and a huge photo of the author.

Elite menswear looks became an important style for lesbians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several examples are on display from the 1890s to the 1930s. Lesbians dressed in tailored suits—usually skirted, but not always— as an identification with masculine power and a signifier to other lesbians.

The period heralds the evolution of the butch/femme styles. The huge photo of the Monocle Club in Paris is a wonderful document of how lesbian butch/femme style played out in the 1920s and 30s.

The book explains, “Although the garçonne style was worn by innumerable fashionable heterosexual women, it was also associated with lesbianism, which was increasingly visible in the

period after World War I, when France had lost so many young men.” Several examples are on display, including some

by Coco Chanel.

Marlene Dietrich’s gender-bending style is represented by five examples of her clothing from her tailored tuxedos to her boyish street wear. Yves Saint Laurent’s 1982 tribute to the bisexual Dietrich, Le Smoking, is nestled among Dietrich’s ensembles. Male dandies of the first half of the twentieth century are represented by examples such as Noel Coward’s famous dressing gown.

The early 20th century also gave rise to haute couture as most of us perceive it, and the rise of the gay male designers—Adrian, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, Christian Dior, Norman Hartnell, Charles James, and Edward Molyneux—all represented in the exhibition.

Coco Chanel evidently resented this rise of male designers and reacted with vitriol to the fashions, as reported by Franco Zeffirelli, “Look at them. Fools dressed by queens living out their fantasies.”

World War II camaraderie—among groups of men as well as groups of women—emboldened homosexual men and women in the postwar period. This was met with a savage reaction in Europe and North America known as the lavender scare or kulturkampf. “Passing” was for the most part the name of the game for homosexuals. But even in the 1950s there were signs of what would later blossom as the 1960s “Peacock Revolution” in menswear—the New Edwardian look, the Italian look—and the mod look for all. Clothing from Andy Warhol to Rudi

Gernreich’s mod kaftans represent this phenomenal era. The accompanying video by Simon Doonan—Creative Ambassador for Barneys New York—is a great window into the Carnaby Street style.

The post-Stonewall era ushered in hypermasculine styles among gay men— the western look, the clone look, SMBD styles—and an anti-fashion look among lesbians—flannel shirts and overalls—all represented here.

An entire wall is dedicated to the effect of AIDS on fashion. Designers we lost to the epidemic are represented with clothing

by Halston, Perry Ellis, Willi Smith, Patrick Kelly, Bill Robinson, Carmelo Pomodoro, and Franco Moschino. But the list is long.

The wall also features gay t-shirts—bar and club t-shirts from Spike, Eagle, The Mineshaft, and The Cock—but the majority of the t-shirts are activist t-shirts. Jonathan David Katz points out in his video and catalog essay that these t-shirts were the first emphatically gay fashion. Nothing about “passing” here: “QUEER” is boldly spelled out across the torso.

The fashion explosion from the 70s to the present is clearly one half of the exhibition, with all its complications and richness from sleek Calvin Klein creations to Claude Montana’s leather jumpsuit, John Bartlett, Dolce and Garbana, and beyond. The great reciprocity between gay vernacular, designer fashion, and back again is very evident. A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk was curated by Valerie Steele, director, and Fred Dennis, senior curator of costume, of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ■

(left) Installation view A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, Le Monocle platform.

Photograph The Museum at FIT, New York̶Mural: Albert Harlingue, Le Monocle, Montmartre (Paris), 1930; Left to Right: Suite with Tuxedo Collar, 1924, USA; Lucian Lelong Ensemble, 1927, France; Chanel Suit, 1925, France; Dress with Jacket, 1925, USA.

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(center) Installation view A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, the Leather platform.

Photograph The Museum at FIT, New York̶Mural: Gay Pride Parade, San Francisco, 1978; Various Ensembles.

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(right) Gianni Versace, Leather Evening Dress, 1992 Photo courtesy Fashion Group Foundation.

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The book A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, published by Yale University Press contains seven essays̶ Valerie Steele, an introductory essay; Peter McNeil, Conspicuous Waist: Queer Dress in the Long Eighteenth Century ; Christopher Breward, Couture as Queer Auto / Biography ; Shaun Cole, Queer Visibility: Gay Men, Dress, and Style 1960-2012 ; Elizabeth Wilson, What Does a Lesbian Look Like? ; Vicki Karaminas, Born This Way: Lesbian Style from the Eighties ; and Jonathan David Katz, Queer Activist Fashion.

The seven videos presented by FIT and on view at the exhibition are available on YouTube: John Bartlett, designer; Anna Blume, professor, history of art, FIT; Simon Doonan, Creative Ambassador for Barneys New York; Jonathan D. Katz, Director, PhD program, Visual Studies, University at Buffalo; Hal Rubenstein, author, editor at large, InStyle magazine; Karlo Steel, owner of Atelier New York; Glennda Testone, Executive Director of the New York City LGBT Center.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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PRINCE STREET PROJECT SPACE ISSUE 48

The News from Prince Street Rob Hugh Rosen, Deputy Director of Programmatic Operations

Friday Dec. 13–15: Push and

Pull, a group show of the artists of the Leslie-Lohman Drawing Studio curated by Frank Sheehan. As the battle for same-sex marriage continues, and the institution of marriage is redefined in many places in the United States, samesex couples are, for the most part, still invisible other than in gay-friendly media. With this in mind, Sheehan chose to focus on drawings of two models sharing the same space. The artwork presented a scale of emotions from tender and loving, to erotic and sexual, to angry and antagonistic, in a range of media such as crayon, charcoal, graphite, ink, and watercolor. More than 30 artists who attend the weekly studio sessions participated.

Thursday Jan. 23–28: Co-founder Charles Leslie will curate a group photography exhibition. Paco Cao, Kim Hanson, and David Zash will be represented among others to be announced.

Friday evening, Jan. 31: After the opening reception of Jade Yumang’s Window Gallery exhibition at 26 Wooster St., he will debut Crimson Field, the newest performance piece from his Queer Monsters series, at our Prince Street Project

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(left) Alexander Kargaltsev, On the Rocks, 2010, Polaroid, 4.25 x 3.5 in. (above) Jade Yumang, The Attack of the Tweed Dandy and Its Dandlings, 2012, Fabric (tweed and floral dress shirt), human hair, yarn, and chicken wire; Performance and poem, I Bring You by Hunt Scarritt; Audio by Hunt Scarritt and Jade Yumang, 75 x 30 x 25 in., Installed and performed during the residency in Atlantic Center for the Arts in the artist s suite.

Space. Yumang, performance and visual artist, presents the performance to celebrate the opening of his 26 Wooster Street Window Gallery exhibition, Post Performance Syndrome. Crimson Field a site-specific performance is an immersive installation consisting of sculptures, intricately costumed performers, and the participation of the audience.

Thursday Feb. 13–18: Charles Leslie will present the recent work of the Greek artist Michail Tsakountis. The artist is best known for his large-scale portraits of brooding and beautiful young men painted in deep rich color. Tsakountis, whose work is represented in the LeslieLohman permanent collection, will be in New York from his home in Athens, Greece.

Friday Feb 28–Mar 2: A solo show

by Alexander (Sascha) Kargaltsev, who won a scholarship at the New York Film

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

Robin Crutchfield, Redd Meets Blu, 2013, Ink and watercolor on paper, 8 x 5 in.

PRINCE STREET PROJECT SPACE ISSUE 48

Academy and moved to New York in 2010. Having suffered persecution as a gay man in his native Russia, he requested and was granted asylum in the United States in 2011. Kargaltsev will be showing his recent work shot in the new 600 series Polaroid film. For Kargaltsev, the revival of Polaroid photography evokes questions about the role of nostalgia in contemporary photography while allowing him to create self-portraits, nude studies, still lifes, portraits of lovers and friends, and depictions of alternative lifestyles—all rendered in this most spontaneous of mediums.

Friday Mar. 14–16: A group show comprised of alumni from Fire Island

Artist Residency (FIAR), the first program exclusively for LGBTQ artists in the United States. Founded in 2011 by artist Chris Bogia and curator Evan Garza, FIAR provides free live/work space for emerging queer artists, with studio visits and lectures by renowned queer leaders in contemporary art and curation, all while being immersed in the century-old LGBTQ community of Cherry Grove, New York. Works by many of the 15 artist alumni who have participated in the summer program in its first three seasons will be featured in the exhibition. Leslie-Lohman Museum sponsored an artist residency in 2013 and will do so again in 2014. ■

Upcoming at Prince Street Project Space In April: tentatively scheduled; two weekend shows curated by Robert W. Richards to compliment the Leslie-Lohman Museum exhibition STROKE May 2-4 An Erotic Art Fair curated by Daniel Kitchen May 16-18 group show of Comic book artists curated

by JC Etheredge

(clockwise from above) FIAR Studio; Travis Boyer and Katherine Hubbard, 2011, Digital photograph, Image courtesy of FIAR. Michail Tsakountis, Untitled, 2013, Oil on canvas, 35 x 27 in.

Kim Hanson, Sheer Lust, 2013, Archival digital print, 13 X 19 in.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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SPECIAL EVENTS ISSUE 48

Event Programming Jerry Kajpust, Deputy Director for External Relations

(left to right) Duane Michals I Am Gay Lecture Video Still, Video by David Maire, 2013.

Catherine Opie, 2012, Photo: Heather Rasmussen.

We continue to program

powerfully moving events designed to reach the broadest spectrum of the LGBTQ community.

August brought us Duane Michals who gave an engaging lecture, I Am Gay, to a full house where he discussed his life, his photography, and his passion.

Michals’s work makes innovative use of photo-sequences, often incorporating text to examine emotion and philosophy.

He talked about life energy and the ongoing creative process fueled by imagination. This keeps him excited, alive and very active still today as a man in his 80s. Michals, in his ever witty and often humorous style, shared very serious moments as well. Not only a photographer, he is also a poet and writer, and he read passages from his latest book, The Lieutenant Who Loved His Platoon. During the evening, he provided insights into the photographic process, some of the inspirations for his photo sequences, life with his partner of more than fifty years, and what it was like growing up gay in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. One of my favorite quotes from the evening was “Imagination, that space between the synapses of the brain.” To see the full lecture go to: vimeo.com/75599494.

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On September 12th, the Museum presented Catherine Opie to a group of over 80 people; we offered this lecture at NYU’s Fales Library and was done in conjunction with the Department of Visual Studies of the University of Buffalo. Opie talked about her varied career and the key themes of her portraits and community, the threads that tie all her work together. Whether it was her early radical leather community, a community of fishing houses on a Twin City lake, or her domestic community complete with what she wittingly refers to as a “lesbian washer and dryer”—as if they are any different than straight ones—all in an attempt to reflect the interaction of relationships and community. Opie has investigated aspects of community, making portraits of many groups, including the LGBT community, surfers, and most recently high school football players.

Opie is also interested in how identities are shaped by our surrounding architecture. Her assertive portraits bring queers to a forefront normally silenced by societal norms. (See Page 18 for an article on Catherine Opie.)

Also in September, Douglas Blair Turnbaugh started his talk, I Knew They Didn’t Wear Loincloths In The Jungle—

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

An Artist’s Naked Truth, with a quote by Andy Warhol: “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” Not only did this quote set the tone for the evening, it served as the opening to his book and the ongoing inspiration for Turnbaugh’s art making. As he said, “Just do it!” The event showcased his newest book, Freehand: Sketchbook Drawings 1940–Present, a collection of drawings that document the many varied points of Turnbaugh’s life from childhood through his career in dance and to that of an artist. With the help of Harvey Redding, Turnbaugh shared stories, anecdotes, and reflections of life, art, and sex as they continuously interplay throughout his life.

In October, screenwriter David Weissman presented his 90-minute film, We Were Here (2011). This screening and conversation were presented in conjunction with Visual AIDS. This award winning and 2013 Emmy nominated film, is regarded by many as the first documentary to usher in the current wave of films about the early days of the AIDS epidemic in America. Deeply touching, the film concentrated on the lives

changed forever as witnesses to the beginning of the ongoing AIDS crisis, the experience of community, healing, and conversation. It illuminated the profound personal and community issues raised by the AIDS epidemic as well as the broad political and social upheavals it unleashed.

Later in October, we had a packed crowd for the book reading and signing by Dolores De Luce. Her book, My Life, A Four Letter Word: Confessions of a Culture Diva took us from 1950s New Jersey, to the free-wheeling, drug-fueled Venice Beach of the 1960s, leading to the post Stonewall, ultra-fabulous queer theatrical community of 1970s in San Francisco. Through tears and glitter, Dolores survived bitter family estrangements only to face the pain of the AIDS crisis first hand. At different times in her life, De Luce lived with legionary Divine and performed with the bending community of the times. Along the way, Rip Taylor declared her the winner of the $1.98 Beauty Show; Edie Massey crowned her Miss Alternative L.A.; and her drag persona, Ms. Lois Standards got a nod from Joan Rivers even though the censors at FOX thought her impersonation of Joan was too racy to air on Rivers’ late night talk show.

As part of the Queer New York International Arts Festival, we offered in

November the performance piece, A Dorado by Guillermo Riveros. This piece reflected the anxieties present at certain borders— the borders between the private and the public, the masculine and the feminine, desire and rejection, and “reality” and fantasy. Through a staged fashion photoshoot, the one-time performance offered an investigatory and sensorial experience for those present and the performers, breaking down the walls and limits that demarcate the borders we face every day.

The performance illuminated and revealed the actions and processes wherein mainstream culture lives, wrapped in golden packaging for consumption. ■

We are always adding new events to our programming at the Museum, so be sure to check our calendar section at LeslieLohman.org to keep up to date. Also, you can join our e-mail list by signing up on our website (Join Mailing List). You’ll receive our weekly update of events and happenings here at the Museum, and once a month you’ll receive our Leslie-Lohman Recommends, featuring exciting events and exhibitions happening throughout New York City and beyond. (top left) Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, Jealousy Lust Modesty, 1956, Watercolor on paper, 15 x 11 in. (top right) David Weissman, We Were Here, 2011, Documentary Film. (far left) My Life, a Four Letter Word: Confessions of a Counter Culture Diva, Dolores DeLuce, 2013, Double Delinquent Press. (left) A Dorado, Performance

by Guillermo Riveros.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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OUTSIDE OUR WALLS ISSUE 48

Catherine Opie Jennifer Edwards

Several years ago, I stood

fixated in front of an image. Confronted with a woman’s back, her pale skin raw from a fresh cutting of a childlike image: two girls standing hand-in-hand, a house, cloud, the sun peaking through, and two birds flying in the flesh-colored sky. I was simultaneously stimulated by the sensuality of the blood dripping from the deeper cuts and left unaffected by the banality of the domestic scrawl. However, it was the “superficial safety” of this image that allowed me to fall deeper into the soft curved body of this anonymous figure and imagine either the intense joy or deadening sadness that must have provoked both this act and the desire to capture it.

Eventually my eyes drifted to the title of the work, Self Portrait/Cutting, by Catherine Opie, 1993.

Over the last several years, I have run into Opie’s work several times—at the Whitney in New York City, at Centre Pompidou in Paris—and most recently, I learned that the Leslie-Lohman Museum has one of her large-scale Polaroid por-

traits of Ron Atthey in the permanent collection.

Opie began her journey as a photographer at an early age, while growing up in Sandusky, Ohio—shooting the people around her, taking photos at school plays and sharing them with her peers. It was a way for her to make friends, as documented by Anna Samson in the Art Tattler (2009). After earning a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (1985) and a MFA from CalArts (1988), Opie returned to live in San Francisco where she used that same sensitivity and closeness to a community to draw attention to LGBTQ issues. In the Art Tattler article, Opie shared, “I was part of Act Up and Clear Media, and a lot of my friends were dying, so I wanted to do a political and personal body of work.”

Opie feared the series would be censored for being transgressive; instead, it was embraced by the art world. “That has allowed me for the last 20 years to make

Catherine Opie, House #2 (Bel Air), 1995, C-print, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

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Catherine Opie, Julie & Pigpen, 2012, Pigment print, 50 x 38.4 in., Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

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work that I am interested in making and the art world really followed along.”

In fact, much of Opie’s portrait work depicts members and aspects of LGBTQ communities and lifestyles rarely shown in mainstream settings. Working in series, she continually switches from people to environments. Her work allows her subjects to be the focus, as opposed to using her subjects merely as objects to manipulate the viewer. Opie provides an unobstructed bridge between the viewer and the subject in such a way that you are unaware of Opie’s presence. I am consistently stuck, when experiencing her work, by the space she allows the viewer to inhabit. You feel like a part of the work, sitting with the person in the portrait, or putting you in a landscape. You don’t feel the artist’s lens between you and the material. However, her impact on the art world is evident. Opie is a professor of photography at UCLA, where she has taught since 2001. Her work has been exhibited around the world. Regen Projects in Los Angeles, representing her work since 1993, lists 59 solo exhibitions of her work since 1989, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Galeria Massimo De Carlo

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

OUTSIDE OUR WALLS ISSUE 48

(left) Catherine Opie, Joanne, Betsy, & Olivia, Bayside, New York, 1998, C-print, 40 x 50 in., Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

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(below left) Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 (Icehouses), 2001, C-print, 50 x 40 in., Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

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in Milan; and the Ginza Art Space in Tokyo. She has won numerous awards, including the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006.

With the $50,000 award from the United States Artists Fellowship, Opie purchased a top-of-the-line digital camera—her first. She had previously only worked only in film. Digital has allowed series of portraits which would have been previously impossible, but it has complicated the editing process exponentially.

I recently had the opportunity to sit with images from her Icehouses series. I encountered them when viewing a PBS production titled Art 21: Catherine Opie, and I found myself compelled to freeze each image on the screen and absorb it.

In the same way Opie allows you to steep in the raw personal-ness of her portraiture, she invites you to sit with yourself in a landscape. For me, each shot is a meditation, an opportunity to observe your response to an intimate, perhaps arousing, moment with an untouchable stranger, or an equally intimate moment with yourself on foreign terrain. ■ ............................................................

Catherine Opie recently gave a lecture on her work cosponsored by The Leslie-Lohman Museum and the University of Buffalo Department of Visual Studies. It was presented at the Fales Library, New York University.

Jennifer Edwards is a speaker, writer, choreographer, and performer who believes that art provides people with the opportunity to know themselves on a deeper level. JenEd Productions, jened.com.

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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UPCOMING EXHIBITION ISSUE 48

STROKE: From Under the Mattress to the Museum Walls

Mar. 28–May 25, 2014, Leslie-Lohman Museum Robert W. Richards, Curator

In the 1950s, there developed

a surprisingly large and growing market for what can only be described as male “pinups.” But of course their real intent had to be camouflaged.

These “pinups” came in the form of little magazines with titles like Grecian Guild Pictorial and Tomorrow’s Man, and pretended to be bodybuilding magazines, strength and health journals, and sometimes, more rarely, anatomy guides for “artists.” Those who bought them, however, understood that they were a means to allow gay men and boys to look at handsome, well-made, virtually naked men. They were available in drugstore magazine racks and

Touko Laaksonen (Tom of Finland), Till Bengt, 1969, Graphite on paper, 9 x 11 in., Founders gift, Courtesy Tom of Finland Foundation.

Kevin King (Beau), Pinned, 1997, Acrylic on paper, Founders gift.

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newsstands across the country.

Certainly buying one of these publications required an act of courage, especially if the small-town drugstore owner knew the buyer and his family most of their lives. But the exhilaration of knowing that something so exciting existed so close at hand, and the possibility of owning one of these publications overwhelmed any misgivings or obstacles that stood between him and the thrilling object of his lust. So he bought it!

The STROKE exhibition curated by Robert W. Richards will explore the history of the artists whose illustrations were published in these magazines from the 1950s until the magazines’ demise in the 90s when VHS tapes, then DVDs,

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

and finally the Internet made them forever obsolete.

An era in “Gay History” had died.

Among the artists drawing for the magazines from the primitive pamphlettype publications to the progressively slicker Blueboy, Torso, Mandate, Honcho, etc., and whose work will be represented in the exhibition are Tom of Finland, George Stravinos, Harry Bush, Mel Odom, Benoit Prevot, Jim French, Richard Rosenfeld, Michael Kirwin, Kent, Neel Bate (Blade), and Michael Breyette. ■ ............................................................

Robert W. Richards, curator of STROKE, is an artist and illustrator, and member of the board of the Leslie-Lohman Museum.

EXHIBITION ISSUE 48

ART & AIDS: Perceptions of Life

An Exhibition of the Humanity, Spirit, and Love of Artists Living with HIV & AIDS Dec. 19, 2013–Jan. 5, 2014 Leslie-Lohman Museum Since the early 1980s, AIDS

George Towne, Adriano with Coffee Mug, 2013, Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in., Courtesy the artist.

has been a prevailing theme in gay art.

As people saw themselves and others getting sick and dying, and there was little or no governmental or medical attention, art and activism worked side by side to voice frustration through creativity. From the early efforts of Gran Fury and the Names Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt to the work of David Wojnarowicz and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, AIDS has been a powerful subject to convey passion about a shared human condition.

Now, over thirty years later, in an era when there are many more treatment options and the federal government has launched the Affordable Care Act, people dealing with AIDS/HIV still seek creativity to channel feelings and emotions. While the landscape

has changed, AIDS/HIV remains a potent threat, creating the potential to forever alter the course of a human life.

This is particularly true for younger adults as they explore their sexuality in a complicated and often uncertain environment.

This exhibition seeks to display the compelling work of artists—both those professionally trained and those just beginning the exploration of their creative side. The participants range from those recently diagnosed to longterm survivors. The exhibition captures feelings and emotions associated with HIV/AIDS: isolation, fear, stigma, faith, death, loss, religion and spirituality, as well as beauty, nature, love, life, and social imagery.

Now in its fifth year at the LeslieLohman Museum, this exhibition is done in conjunction with the Art & AIDS Program at the Gay Mens’ Health Crisis (GMHC), one of the oldest organizations in the world devoted to addressing the needs of people facing AIDS/HIV. Much of the work exhibited is an outcome of the weekly art classes, part of GMHC’s Volunteer, Work and Wellness Center.

Art teachers donate their time to teach classes for GMHC clients.

The exhibition will be from Thursday, December 19, 2013 until January 5, 2014, with an opening reception on December 19th from 6 to 8 pm.

Work by the artists will be available for sale and the proceeds will go to the individual artists. Approximately 40 artists will participate and there will be almost 100 pieces of work in the exhibition curated by Osvaldo Perdomo and David Livingston, with input from Museum staff. Selected pieces will be available for purchase through a silent auction to benefit the programs at GMHC. ■

Brian Crede, Chuck #2, 2013, Cut and layered paper, 11 x 20 in. , Courtesy the artist.

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WINDOW GALLERY ISSUE 48

Ketch Wehr: Emblems of Things to Come Oct. 18, 2013–Jan. 26, 2014 Jamie Lawyer

(from left to right) Ketch Wehr, Boudica, 2013, Gouache, acrylic, and wood, 48 x 23 in. Boudica (died c.

A.D. 61) was the warrior-queen of the Iceni people, a Celtic tribe of the British Isles, and led a rebellion in A.D. 61 sacking Roman settlements and liberating her people from the Roman yoke.

Ketch Wehr, Sarojini Naidu, 2013, Gouache, acrylic paint and wood 48 x 23 in. Sarojini Naidu (18791949), known as the Nightingale of India, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist, and poet.

From the City of Brotherly Love to the Big Apple, emerging transfeminist artist Ketch Wehr sat down with me to shed light on his artistic transformation and insight into his major NYC debut featured at Leslie-Lohman Museum’s Wooster St. Window Gallery. Wehr, a twenty-something Westchester, NY native and Smith College graduate, reveals in Emblems of Things to Come, his most mature work to date. Wehr’s earlier feral

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imagery illustrated an anthropomorphism, the animalistic qualities we choose to embrace and ignore, and what the treatment of animals tells us about our humanity.

While his current work still contains his interest in the feral and wildness, Wehr has begun to uncover histories of powerful women of the past who defied the expectations of their times.

Wehr cites his shift to the human form motivated by his desire to challenge him-

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

self, after receiving a grant in Art and Social Change from the Philadelphia-based organization Leeway Foundation in 2011.

A series still in progress, his grant-sponsored work is investigating the personal histories of members of the LGBTIQ community to discover what role models or icons they used to better accept themselves. The attraction to narrative, history, and iconography has always been of interest to him and becomes the premise of his latest work.

At a young age, Wehr recognized the strength and inspiration in the stories of women in history. His selection of icons in this exhibition ranges from ancient times to more recent female figures in feminist and queer history. Wehr provides visibility to these deserving women, whose history is often lost or incorrectly recorded. In the haunting illustrative portraits presented in saint-like fashion, Wehr finds their empowering tales can provide strength and a sense of community to LGBTIQ individuals. However, these stories from a queer, feminist, or a combined perspective speak to a larger “history of defiance,” which Wehr says is important and can be utilized by everyone.

This idea can be seen by further understanding the title, Emblems of Things To Come. While these figures may exist in the past, Wehr feels they are alive with us in the present and exist in the future as well, therefore continuously giving their stories relevance in our lives. The title can also be seen as a premonition of the continuation of this series, with his current work as only the beginning. However, while we wait to see what fantastic women from a lineage of defiance Wehr unveils to us next, his latest work is currently on view in the Wooster St. Window Gallery at the Leslie-Lohman Museum until January 26, 2014. Available 24/7. ■ ............................................................

Jamie Lawyer is an artist and aspiring museum educator interested in using art to empower various individuals. An MFA graduate from The Virginia Commonwealth University, she is currently finishing her second master s degree at City College of New York in Art History/ Museum Studies.

WINDOW GALLERY ISSUE 48

Jade Yumang: Post Performance Syndrome and Crimson Field Jan. 31–Apr. 27, 2014

Daniel J. Sander

Jade Yumang is a Canadian

artist who lives and works in Brooklyn and whose installation Post Performance Syndrome will be featured in the LeslieLohman Museum’s Wooster St. Window Gallery beginning in late January. Yumang will also stage an accompanying performance, Crimson Field, in the Prince Street Project Space on the evening of Jan. 31.

Yumang’s window installation, which he is conceiving under the auspices of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency, will present sculptural elements and costumes of some of his previous performances over the past two years, paired with photographic documentation printed on fabric. The configuration Yumang has chosen for the installation—of soft, repurposed materials hung as if from a clothesline—already begins to suggest the motivation behind the work, what Yumang calls ‘queer form.’ By this, he means to extend the queerness of the work beyond representational same-sex content and into its ongoing physical construction and deconstruction. He does so by employing joint tactics of palimpsest and agglomeration. Both techniques rely on a gesture that is repeated ad infinitum until an organic pattern, teeming and aquatic, begins to emerge—something like the leaves of an artichoke or the feathers of a wing. Similar forms can be encountered in the work of a lineage of feminist art that includes, for example, the poetics of Gertrude Stein and the sculptural work of Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Eva Hesse, and Ana Mendieta.

On the one hand, the generative, biomorphic qualities of work like this—what it conjures of the cancerous and the viral— speaks to the contemporary and menacing predominance of capitalist accumulation engineered by computer algorithms. On the other hand, the persistence of the phenomenological body actively resists such capture and reduction. As Roland Barthes recognized in the work of Cy Twombly,

Jade Yumang, A Jaunt through the Forest with Two Spirits, 2012, Handmade costume (poly organza) and performance with Nicolaus Chaffin, at the Meat Rack in Fire Island, NY, 76 x 32 x 25 in. and 67 x 30 x 25 in.

Performed during the residency in Fire Island Artist Residency.

Photo by REH Gordon.

“the body always escapes beyond the terms of exchange in which it is involved. None of the commercial systems of the world and no set of political virtues can ever exhaust the body.”

Throughout his career and education, which includes a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Parsons New School for Design, Yumang has moved promiscuously across media, from printmaking and photography to sculpture and installation to performance.

The artist likens his movement to performance, to inserting himself—literally— into his own work. However, rather than doing so nakedly, as performance artists are sometimes wont to do, Yumang intricately enfolds and obscures his own body and those of the performers who occasionally accompany him. Specifically, such obfuscation draws on Yumang’s different experiences of the body growing up—from ornate, Catholic decoration in the Philippines, to Islamic aniconism in the United Arab Emirates, to recognizing the norms of white gay masculinities in Canada and the United States. More broadly, while Yumang’s costumes for performance do depersonalize and desexualize the body they do not deflate the indefeasible life force. Rather, through Yumang’s work, we come to experience life not as bound by

the preexistent form of a specific body, but as the mutability of form made manifest in the space between bodies. ■ ............................................................

Jade Yumang: Post Performance Syndrome, Wooster St. Window Gallery, Jan. 31‒Apr. 27, 2014.

Crimson Field his newest performance piece from his Queer Monsters series, Prince Street Project Space, 127B Prince St., Jan 31, 2014, immediately following the Window Gallery opening.

Daniel J Sander is an artist and academic whose work concerning libidinal materialism and queer nihilism has been exhibited, published, and performed internationally. He is currently a doctoral student in performance studies at NYU.

The Wooster St. Window Gallery is a street-facing gallery featuring work by contemporary, emerging, and underrepresented LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender, identity, sex and pop culture. The Window Gallery is visible from the street, and is on view 24 hours a day.

Upcoming in the Wooster St. Window Gallery: Ketch Wehr through Jan. 26, 2014 Jade Yumang Jan. 31–Apr. 27, 2014 Gonzalo Orquin Apr. 29–June

The Archive: The Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art ● NO 48 ● WINTER 2013

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Current and Upcoming Exhibitions at Leslie-Lohman Museum

GMHC / 26 Wooster Street Dec. 19, 2013‒Jan. 5, 2014

Works by GMHC art therapy program participants.

Curated by Osvaldo Perdomeo and David Livingston.

James Horner, Pilate Washing His Hands, 2013, Acrylic and mica chip on tarp, 54 x 90 in.

STROKE / 26 Wooster Street March 28‒ May 25, 2014

Artwork from gay male magazines (1950s-1990s) exploring the role magazines played in an area with few opportunities for sexual expression. Curated by Robert W. Richards.

Kent, The Mechanic, 1992, Acrylic and pencil on illustration board, 13 x 9,5 in., Published in MEN, November 1992.

Queer Threads / 26 Wooster Street Jan. 17‒ Mar. 16, 2014

Ten contemporary artists using thread-based materials that changed notions of aspiration, socialization, and representation. Curated by John Chaich.

Allyson Mitchell, Queer Un-Nation, 2012, Yarn and felt, 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist, Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Fresh Fruit Festival exhibition / 26 Wooster Street June 5‒ July 27, 2014

Female identified queer artists who create work in resistance to body-centered oppression and invisibility, 1970s to today.

Curated by Alexis Heller Zanele Muholi, Lungile Cleo Dladla, KwaThema Community Hall, Springs, Johannesburg, 2011, Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.