April 3, 2012
Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront
Mark Thompson READ TIME: 2 MIN.
NEW YORK, NY - "The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront" is the first museum exhibition to focus exclusively on the uses of the Hudson River docks by artists and a newly emerging gay subculture. It presents over 70 works of art that demonstrate how the gay liberation movement--spurred by the 1969 Stonewall riots--transformed the cultural and social landscape of New York.
For the first time such seminal works of the New York avant-garde as Vito Acconci's Untitled Project for Pier 17, Gordon Matta-Clark's, Day's End and David Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud in New York, will be shown alongside little known photographs of the gay cruising scene by Leonard Fink, Frank Hallam, Lee Snider, and Rich Wandel.
After years of persecution and repression in the 1950s and 60s, the counter-culture revolution of the late 1960s brought about many cultural changes; this was especially true of changes in sexual attitudes. Public nudity and sex were becoming more accepted, especially as subject matter for artists seeking new forms of expression.
In the post-Stonewall era, these new-found freedoms were swept up into a changing socio-political and historical landscape that gave rise to the gay rights movement. The New York Piers, where many gay New Yorkers gathered in the late 1960s and 1970s, where these new sexual freedoms were often played out, became the crossroads for an emerging gay subculture and for artists of that period.
DETAILS:
The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront
Curated by Jonathan Weinberg with Darren Jones
April 5 - May 10, 2012
Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 4; 6-8 PM
Panel Discussion with Artists & Curators at the NYU Fales Library
Thursday, April 12; 6-8 PM
LINK: http://www.leslielohman.org/
A long-term New Yorker and a member of New York Travel Writers Association, Mark Thompson has also lived in San Francisco, Boston, Provincetown, D.C., Miami Beach and the south of France. The author of the novels WOLFCHILD and MY HAWAIIAN PENTHOUSE, he has a PhD in American Studies and is the recipient of fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. His work has appeared in numerous publications.
