Gay Gotham | Museum of the City of New York | 10.7.2016
BY Claire Potter ON September 20, 2016
Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York is opening at The Museum of the City of New York on October 7. Stephen Vider and Donald Albrecht, co-curators of the exhibit, also have a book of the same name available for pre-order on Amazon.
The exhibit and book explore the lives, works, and networks of ten LGBT artists across the 20th century — Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent; lesbian poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta; ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein; photographer George Platt Lynes; composer Leonard Bernstein; artist Andy Warhol; photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; lesbian feminist artist Harmony Hammond; transgender artist Greer Lankton; and dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones. It also examines the broader cultural world around them, with additional original works, including photographs by Carl Van Vechten; Charles Henri Ford’s copy of The Young and Evil, with drawings by Pavel Tchelitchew; one of Beauford Delaney’s portraits of James Baldwin; Larry Rivers’s portrait of Frank O’Hara; photographs of WOW Cafe performers by Eva Weiss; Chantal Regnault’s photographs of Octavia St. Laurent, Willi Ninja, and others from the house ballroom scene; as well as video, music, and poetry read by Carmelita Tropicana, Moe Angelos, and Rodney Evans.
You can read a little more about the exhibit in the New York Times. Tickets are available for the opening event, a discussion on the past and future of LGBTQ New York featuring Sarah Schulman, Jack Waters, Peter Cramer, and Harmony Hammond, and moderated by Slate editor Bryan Lowder, at 6 pm October 6.
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