#DRAGINART: FROM DUCHAMP TO WARHOL TO DRAG RACE (+ LOTS OF QUEENS IN BETWEEN)

Do you know where the term “drag queen” comes from? It was apparently first used to describe men appearing in women’s clothing in Polari— British slang that gay men used to communicate in secret. 

From the global phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race to Conchita Wurst winning the Eurovision Song Contest, you can’t deny that drag is having a mainstream moment. 

In 1920, artist Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy became an icon when she was shot by Man Ray. 

Feminist artists like Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing, among many others, played with drag as a means of commentary, and Andy Warhol famously shot Candy Darling, did the silkscreen series of drag queens called Ladies and Gentlemen, as well as posing in drag himself for photographer Christopher Makos. 

Photographer Nan Goldin shot drag queens in Boston as a teenager, and later NYC’s drag communities in the ’80s and early ’90s. In 2015, Charles Atlas was included in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition featuring the Lady Bunny lip syncing.

And last year Contemporary Drag premiered at the NADA art fair in New York. Gallerists Gordon and Robichaux were knee-deep in it with drag artists —from Tabboo! to Drag Racewinner Sasha Velour. Gordon said,

“Everyone really needed some drag right when we served it up… out of the bars and into the streets —or rather into the art fair.

Drag moves in cycles, but it’s interesting to see how quickly the mainstream is finding the alternative.“

RuPaul’s infamous line is now taking equal cultural significance alongside Warhol’s famous 15 minutes’ quote,

“We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.“

For more Drag in Art check out Amelia Abraham‘s A Brief History of Drag in the Art World.

Tabboo! self-portrait

(via Artsy)

NAN GOLDIN & P.A.I.N. STAGE PROTEST AGAINST BIG PHARMA IN THE MET'S SACKLER WING

Yesterday in The Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, people handed out pamphlets that were designed to look like official Met materials, with the acronym “P.A.I.N.”, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now printed on them. Photographer Nan Goldin started the group to put pressure on Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the makers of OxyContin, and some members of the Sackler Family, the company’s principal owners and big donors to The Met.

According to ArtNews at one point during the protest inside the Temple of Dendurwing,

“Many people along the pool suddenly began to throw pill bottles into the water—there were scores of the little plastic containers—as others whipped out black banners, one reading “FUND REHAB,” the other “SHAME ON SACKLER.” Goldin, brandishing white type-written pages, spoke in short phrases, and the crowd echoed her as a human microphone. She said at one point, 

‘In the name of the dead. Sackler family. Purdue Pharma. Hear our demands. Use your profits. Save our lives.‘

The group is calling for them to fund treatment programs and to take other steps to combat the opioid crisis. In the pamphlet, the group demands that “instead of continuing to wash their money in great institutions (like the Metropolitan Museum of Art) they donate their money to helping combat the opioid epidemic.” (Sackler family members have funded projects at Harvard, the Louvre, Tate Modern, and elsewhere, as the New Yorker and Esquire have reported in stories about Purdue’s development and marketing of OxyContin.)

The pamphlets contain statistics about the crisis, like 

‘130 people die a day from opioid overdoses,’ ‘at least 200,000 people have died since 1999 from overdoses involving opioid painkillers,’ ‘$35 billion—Purdue profits from OxyContin, the nation’s bestselling painkiller.‘ 

It also includes a list of demands, among them that the Sackler Family and Purdue should invest 46 percent of their profits toward ending the epidemic, and that they should 

‘advertise the dangers of their products as aggressively as they sell them to the public.‘”

In January Goldin published an essay and portfolio in Artforum where she talked about becoming addicted to opioids after being prescribed OxyContin following a surgery, and going clean only after two-and-a-half months in rehab. Goldin wrote, 

“The Sacklers made their fortune promoting addiction…the Sackler family and their private company, Purdue, built their empire with the lives of hundreds of thousands. The bodies are piling up. In 2015, in the U.S. alone, more than thirty-three thousand people died from opioid overdoses.”

The Met’s Sackler Wing came about when Arthur M. Sackler was approached by the museum in 1973 about funding the expansion project. Elizabeth A. Sackler, daughter of Arthur, who died in 1987, supports Goldin’s cause, saying that, by the time Oxycontin was introduced in ’95, Authur’s Raymond and Mortimer were the main owners of Purdue, and that none of the philanthropy done by Arthur’s portion of the family has used money from the sale of Oxycontin. (The Met declined to comment on this.)

After the die-in concluded, the group marched out accompanied by guards, chanting all the way: 

“Sacklers lie, people die.”

They made their way to the front steps where Goldin stood in front of a banner, held a pill bottle out in one hand, and continued her speech with the protesters gathered around her

“We are just getting started! Read the facts! Read the stats! We’ll be back!“

(Photos, Dung Ngo, Nora Burns; via ArtNews)

#INTERNATIONALWOMENSDAY: 17 AMAZING NON-MALE PHOTOGRAPHERS (& THEIR FEMALE SUBJECTS)

On International Women’s Day what better to represent the power of women in the last 100 years than how they see and represent themselves within the art form of photography. Some of the greats here shot other women and others are self-portraits, either way a lot of females are represented, some of my favorites.

Let’s pay our respects. None of us would be here without one particular woman.

Tina Fey by Brigitte Lacombe

Diana Vreeland by Louise Dahl Wolf

Sally Mann

Nan Goldin self-portrait

Lisette Model

Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti by Tina Modotti

Julia Roberts by Deborah Turbeville

Vivian Maier self portrait

Carrie Mae Weems self-portrait

Mae West by Diane Arbus

Cindy Sherman

Mother Teresa by Mary Ellen Mark

Maxine Albro by Imogen Cunningham

Meryl Streep by Annie Leibovitz

Mickalene Thomas self-portrait

Linda McCartney

I GET MY 15 MINUTES OF NEW YORK PHOTO-FAME (with a flattop, shirtless & in drag)

Everybody has pictures of their friends doing fun things and if you hold onto them long enough, they might just be seen as something other people are interested in. Today billions of pictures a week are shot and plastered all over the internet (what will happen to all of these photos, who knows?) But this week three shots I’m in (and two I took too) were all in NYC galleries, a feat I have never managed before as I’m primarily a painter. Here are my stories of how this happened…

Halloween 1988 at Kenney Scharf’s loft. Can you spot me (in drag) and Ann Magnuson, Joey Arias and Keith Haring (with the giant black dildo)? Photo, Trey Speegle

Tseng Kwong Chi; Performing for the Camera
Last month the fab retrospective of photographer Tseng Kwong Chiopened at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. I knew Kwong, who was famous for his Chinese national costume portraits and documenting a lot of Keith Haring‘s public works. They were pals along with a lot of mutual friends like Ann Magnuson, Kenny Scharf, Bruno Schmidt, Pilar Limosner, Walt Cessna (my ex) and others. But when I walked into the exhibit one of the first pictures I see? A group shot of all of us on Halloween in 1988 at Kenny Scharf’s studio. The only thing was – I took the picture, not Kwong! It took some time to unravel the mystery of how two shots made it into his retrospective, but after I met up later with Muna Tseng, Kwong’s sister who manages his estate, I discovered the large print, along with another I took of Kenny & Kwong (left), that were blown up really large for a dual show of Kwong & Kenny’s work for an exhibit at Eric Firestone‘s gallery. When this retrospective got organized, the big prints were included in this show, as well as the book which I recommend. Actually, I’m thrilled it happened this way. Back in the day, I would shoot 35mm black and white film and then get little prints made of selects at Duane Reade, for like $1 each or something. When it was a group shot or a particularly good one, I’d make multiple prints and mail them to friends. Kwong died 25 years ago, not long after Keith, and the images were found among his things. As I said, I’m happy about the pictures seeing the light of day, as well as the pretty lady “realness” drag of my youth. Just wish a few other people were around too...

Kwong & Kenny, 1988. Photo, Trey Speegle

Trey & Spot, 1986. Photo, Mark Morrisroe

David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, Nan Goldin; Boston to New York
I once designed graphics for art galleries. It was my business. Invitations, catalogues, ads. The Pat Hearn Gallery was near me in the East Village and Pat Hearn, the person, was a friend. She came to New York along with a group of photographers and artists who are now very well-known; Jack Pierson, David Armstrong, Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe, all of who are in the new Whitney‘s opening exhibit, America Is Hard To See. Pat hired me to design a poster/fold-out invite (that’s now kinda collectible) and introduced me to Mark Morrisroe. We became friends and he asked to photograph me with my dog Spot in my apartment at the Christadora House. I had just gotten a MAJOR flat top haircut the day before, somewhat shocking if you are used to me with a shaved head of today. Mark was a really intense guy, who was a street hustler at one time and walked with a sever limp, but he was such a sweetheart one-on-one. He took about 8-10 shots, I still have one. There’ one he kept in a book on his work. These two small images are now up in this new show at Clamp Art in Chelsea, if you want to see them up close. Sadly, Pat, David and Mark are all gone. That’s the great (and sad) thing about photography freezing time for us to remember people and moments.

Jackie Curtis at the Pyramid (Straight To Hell) 1985. Photo, Trey Speegle

Friends In Deed, Benefit Photo Auction
Another friend thing, in deed, Tom Cashin, the charming partner of Jay Johnson, both of Jed Johnson Interiors is a friend and BIG supporter of the AIDS organization Friends In Deed. I’ve contributed to their auctions in the past and volunteered to contribute this year. I thought I would feature a shot from a new photo series I’ve been working on, but as the time got shorter I realized I couldn’t have it framed properly, and so I decided to include a vintage Polaroid shot of the late Warhol Superstar, Jackie Curtis. Back when Polaroid was still “a thing” you could send them shot and they would blow it up and frame it for you. So I did just this one test, this shot of Jackie. It was taken at a series I used to do at The Pyramid for Straight To Hell magazine; The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts. I had a full-time job in the art department of Vanity Fair at the time but every Sunday night, I hosted different downtown luminaries like John Waters, Fran Leibowitz, Kenneth Anger… and Jackie Curtis come talk or perform at the club. When I see the line-up of people it was kind of amazing. The magazine was true stories of gay hook-ups that was edited by my friend, Victor Weaver (that’s me on the cover, btw) Anyway, I put that shot in the auction and everyone seemed to LOVE it. Tom bid on behalf of mega-collector Beth Rudin DeWoodyand won it, so I’m thrilled. And Jackie got her moment in the sun for everyone to appreciate her again. Sadly, she died a few months after this shot was taken of a heroin overdose, which I believe was accidental. She had just gotten “married” to a young guy and was very happy here. Another moment frozen in a week of them on display.

In Good Company; Marilyn Monroe by Andre de Dienes, Debbie Harry by David Croland
and Jackie Curtis by Trey Speegle

RIP PHOTOGRAPHER DAVID ARMSTRONG

Photographer David Armstrong died today. He was 60. He became associated with “The Boston School,” which included artists and friends like Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe and Jack Pierson, the aesthetic being based on intimate snapshot portraits in saturated color. Armstrong entered into the MFA School in Boston as a painting major, but soon switched to photography after studying alongside Goldin, whom he became friends with at the age of 14. Armstrong first received critical attention for his intimate portraits of men, either lovers or friends, in sharp focus. In the nineties, he began to photograph cityscapes and landscapes in soft focus as a contrast to his portraits. In 1981, Armstrong created a series of black-and-white portraits which he showed at PS1’s “New York/New Wave” exhibition. In 1996, Elisabeth Sussman, curator of photographs at the Whitney Museum, enlisted Armstrong’s help in composing Nan Goldin’s first retrospective. She gained such respect for Armstrong’s eye, she acquired a few of his pieces for the Whitney permanent collection and he was subsequently featured in the 1995 Whitney Biennial as well as many gallery and museum shows. Armstrong’s work has also appeared in publications such as French Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, Arena Homme+, GQ, Self Service, Another Man and Japanese Vogue and he has worked on the advertising campaigns for Zegna, Rene Lezard, Kenneth Cole, Burburry, Puma, and Barbara Bui among others. He left behind some great images you can check outhere. An eye like his is rare and influential and shall be missed. But not more than the man himself, whom I knew a little, and shared with MANY friends who are mourning the loss –talk about one-of-a-kind...