- #ROBERT MAPLETHORPE PICTURES OF GAY MEN AND DRAG QUEENS TRIAL#
- #ROBERT MAPLETHORPE PICTURES OF GAY MEN AND DRAG QUEENS SERIES#
Smith recalls that he was working on an installation and completely covered a stretched canvas “with outtakes from his male magazines.
Prior to Mapplethorpe’s transition into photography, he was spellbound by images in male magazines and used them in his installations. Smith was Mapplethorpe’s first model and he was his own first male subject. It begins with a casual encounter with, and subsequent borrowing of, a Polaroid camera. King went on to curate an exhibit of her discovery at the Whitney along with a catalog (Mapplethorpe: Polaroids, 2007), where she described the pictures as “personal, intimate, spontaneous, and delightful.” These photographs confirm Smith’s account of Mapplethorpe’s creative development, offering insight into his artistic process and subsequent entry into the landscape of taboo and transgression. Sylvia Wolf, adjunct curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, discovered three-ring binders with hundreds of small black-and-white Polaroid photographs protected within archival plastic sleeves in the archives of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Mapplethorpe photos are always beautiful, but a Mapplethorpe photo of Patti Smith is, well, history.” … What’s on show, the works, is documentation or artifact its importance is that it was made by these people. Together, they exuded all kinds of sexual possibilities.” Of the 1978 short film Still Moving, directed by Mapplethorpe in collaboration with Smith, René Ricard wrote in Art in America: “Their friendship is their masterpiece. It was difficult to tell where Robert began and Patti left off. In Patricia Morrisroe’s 1995 biography of Mapplethorpe, a fellow Pratt student remembered: “They began trading clothes friends were struck by their physical similarity to each other. I stood over him, a dying man, who sensing my presence opened his eyes and smiled.” … But as I was leaving something stopped me and I went back to his room. With few words he became my friend, my compeer, my beloved adventure. I stood over him, this boy of twenty, who sensing my presence opened his eyes and smiled. “The first time I saw Robert he was sleeping. In “The Coral Sea,” Smith’s elegiac tribute to Mapplethorpe, she describes their meeting and his death. The dreamlike Just Kids belongs to a subgenre comprising other works that portray the complexities of relationships between women and gay men. Horses album cover with Mapplethorpe’s iconic photo of Patti Smith When they moved into the Oz-like Hotel Chelsea, they encountered fellow residents who were some of the foremost creative figures of that time-William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Andy Warhol, to name a few. I had in mind to become an artist and poet, and through that pursuit I found the root of my voice.” Just Kids is a memoir that evokes an era when subcultural renegades migrated to New York and became the romanticized celebrities of urban legend.
#ROBERT MAPLETHORPE PICTURES OF GAY MEN AND DRAG QUEENS SERIES#
history.Ībout their meteoric rise to prominence, Smith observes: “Life is an adventure of our own design, intersected by fate, and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.
#ROBERT MAPLETHORPE PICTURES OF GAY MEN AND DRAG QUEENS TRIAL#
Mapplethorpe would become one the most controversial artists of the late 20th century, giving rise to the first trial of a gallery for the art it displayed in U.S. Her debut album Horses, featuring Mapplethorpe’s now iconic photograph of her on the cover, made Rolling Stone’s list of 500 greatest albums. Always confident “that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children,” Smith became the legendary poet and punk rocker who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. She doodled accounts of their daily life in journals, which later evolved into poems and lyrics. He strung African trade beads, feathers, and rabbit’s feet into necklaces, experimenting with collages and installations. They were longing for something undefined. When they met in Brooklyn in the late 1960’s while in their early twenties, they were experimenting in different media and didn’t know where they’d end up. The memoir is a meditation on the shared journey of Smith and Mapplethorpe on the way to becoming artists. Just Kids isn’t a lurid exposé but a serious reflection upon creative vision, regeneration, and devotion. The book resonates with all the portentousness of the Fates spinning threads around inextricably entangled mortals. PATTI SMITH’S Just Kids is a memoir about the singer’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989).