A Walk on the Wild Side

Biographical Notes

• Lynda Benglis

  Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) was born in Louisiana and moved to New York in 1964 after she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Newcomb College in New Orleans, where she had trained as an abstract expressionist painter. Her work explores the behavior of fluid mediums such as molten beeswax and latex. She would use these to create works that resembled painting, but occupied space the same way a sculpture would, calling them “pours.” Like many of the artists in the exhibition, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft, becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen. In the ‘70s, her use of bright colors, glitter, and dynamics made her stand out against her male counterparts. When her work was being ignored by the New York art scene, she famously advertised her upcoming exhibition in Artforum by posing naked wearing nothing but sunglasses. This caused great sensation and brought her to the attention of the general public.

  Lynda Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe, and Ahmedabad, India. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s work is in extensive public collections including: Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

• David Bowie

  David Bowie (1947–2016) was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, South London. At age 13, inspired by the jazz of the London West End, he picked up the saxophone and called up Ronnie Ross for lessons. Early bands he played with—The Kon-Rads, The King Bees, the Mannish Boys, and the Lower Third—provided him with an introduction into the showy worlds of pop and mod, and by 1966 he was David Bowie, with long hair and aspirations of stardom rustling about his head. Kenneth Pitt signed on as his manager, and his career began with a handful of mostly forgotten singles and a head full of ideas. It was not until 1969 that the splash onto the charts would begin, with the legendary Space Oddity (which peaked at #5 in the UK). Amidst his musical wanderings in the late '60s, the young Bowie experimented with mixed media, cinema, mime, Tibetan Buddhism, acting, and love. A first rock album, originally titled David Bowie, then subsequently re-titled Man of Words, Man of Music and again as Space Oddity, paid homage to the kaleidoscopic influences of the London artistic scene, while hinting at a songwriting talent that was about to yield some of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s finest and most distinctive work—Ziggy Stardust, Young Americans, and Diamond Dogs, are all albums that still resonate today. His sustained reinventions, innovative collaborations, and bold characterizations revolutionized the way we see music, inspiring people to shape their own identities while challenging social traditions. Although most of his albums were recorded in London, he spent a lot of time in New York. By the time of his death, Bowie had lived in the city steadily for more than 20 years.

• Joe Brainard

  Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was born in Salem, Arkansas. From an early age he showed great artistic talent but felt like an outcast amongst his peers. In high school, he and fellow poet Ron Padgett produced the literary and art magazine called The White Dove Review, which featured original art and poetry, and works by popular beatnik writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. After high school, Brainard moved to New York City and lived in the Lower East Side; like so many of his peers, struggling to make ends meet. In 1963 he met other budding artists and writers and became part of the second generation of the New York School of Poets which thrived in the 1950s and ‘60s, with artists such as John Ashberry, Frank O’Hara, and others. The cross-pollination between writing and visual art was a hallmark of the New York School of Poets. Brainard, as well as being a prolific poet and collage artist, was also a painter.

• William S. Burroughs

  William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated in 1936 with honors from the English department at Harvard University. After college, he worked multiple odd jobs, never staying at one very long, before moving to New York City in 1943. He would become a prominent writer of the Beat Generation, a group of writers that emerged in the 1950s to reject literary formalism and the American culture built on capitalism and materialism. They included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others.

  He wrote his first book in 1953, Junkie: Confessions of An Unredeemed Drug Addict, under the pen name William Lee, but it was greatly inspired by his own life story. A common thread in his books was delving into the subject of drug addiction, which he dealt with ever since a childhood accident at the age of 14 which left him addicted to morphine. His overwhelming anxiety regarding his undefined sexuality, as well as his witness to murders throughout his lifetime were other common topics in his books.

  Continuously getting into trouble with the law, he spent a large part of his life in exile, in South America, Paris, London, and Tangier, Morocco, where he produced the highly experimental work that would become Naked Lunch (1959), Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), all known for their “cut-up” and “fold-in” (collage-) techniques of nonlinear narrative, bizarre imagery, and fragmentary storytelling. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, Burroughs continued to experiment and branch into film and musical recording. Finally, in 1974, Burroughs returned to the United States and joined the artistic circles in New York of the time. In 1981 he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters: the once-shunned outsider had been embraced by the literary establishment.

• Sarah E. Charlesworth

  Sarah E. Charlesworth (1947–2013) was born in 1947 in New Jersey. She graduated in 1969 from Barnard College with a Bachelor of Arts. After graduating, she studied under photographer Lisette Model at The New School in New York. After Charlesworth completed her studies, she worked as a freelance photographer. In 1975, she, along with a few fellow artists, fco-ounded the art theory magazine The Fox. In 1981, she co-founded the magazine BOMB. Her photographs are in the collections of many museums throughout the world. One of her most famous works, Stills (1980), is a series of life-size photograph of people jumping out the windows of tall buildings to commit suicide. She added to the project in 2009, and in 2012 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired the series. She has had over 40 solo exhibitions worldwide. She received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She also received many awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship Award, throughout her lifetime. She taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York University, and Hartford University. In 2012, she was appointed to the faculty of Princeton University. In 2013, at the age of 66, she died from a brain aneurysm.

• Christo

  Christo (1935–2020) was born in Bulgaria in 1935. Hemstudied at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia for three years under the doctrine of Socialist Realism, which distances him from any modern western art. He took courses in drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. He was greatly affected by World War II and moved many times to flee political oppression. He then attended the Vienna Fine Arts Academy for a year. He moved to Paris in 1958, where he met his future wife and artistic partner, Jeanne-Claude. From early wrapped objects to monumental outdoor projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's artwork transcends the traditional bounds of painting, sculpture, and architecture.

  He began his work by wrapping everyday objects material. He used cans, bottles, crates, and furniture. In 1961 Christo and Jeanne-Claude perform their first temporary outdoor environmental works of art and erect a Wall of Oil Barrels blocking Rue Visconti, one of Paris's narrowest streets, to protest the construction of Berlin’s Wall. In the course of the following years, Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed the concept of a Wrapped Monument and begin to imagine wrapping large landmarks. In 1964 Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrive in New York, eventually moving into an abandoned 19th-century building in SoHo. Christo would become part of the famed Leo Castelli Gallery, regularly exhibiting there. Some of their best-known work took place in iconic spots such as Central Park in New York City, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Reichstag building in Berlin or Biscayne Bay outside Miami. Jeanne-Claude passed away in New York City in 2009. Christo continued to realize their planned works until his passing in 2020.

• Ronnie Cutrone

  Ronnie Cutrone (1948–2013) was an artist best known for his satirical paintings of American cartoons. His most iconic works include imagery of Bugs Bunny and Pink Panther over an American flag. Cutrone was born in 1948 in New York City, where he attended the School of Visual Arts from 1966-1970. He established himself in the scene as early as high school, hanging out around Warhol’s Manhattan studio, meeting the man himself at a party, and eventually becoming Warhol’s longtime assistant.

  As a young man, Cutrone was also a go-go dancer for The Velvet Underground rock band and would go on to work for Interview magazine, which was founded by Andy Warhol. A fixture of the Factory, as each of Warhol’s Manhattan studios was known in turn, Cutrone took the evocative series of stereoscopic color photographs on display in the exhibition, that document daily life there. In 2000, Cutrone opened the Rubber Monkey, a TriBeCa nightclub that is no longer in business. He had previously helped design and run the Mudd Club, hub of all things punk and rock at the time, displaying his own work there, as well as that of many others. Cutrone's work has also been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere.

• Jackie Curtis

  Jackie Curtis (1947–1985) was an actress, playwright, and artist who influenced the glam rock movement and was known for her eccentric fashion sense. She did not view herself as a drag queen, but instead as an artist. She was raised by her grandmother, Slugger Ann, who was another prominent name in the New York bar scene. Curtis spentnmuch of her youth working in her bar, often surrounded by drag queens and other artists who inspired her fashion and self-expression. She started being active in different theatres, including the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club where she began acting as a teenager. She starred in Tom Eyen's play Miss Nefertiti Regrets. She started writing her own plays and is best known for Glamour, Glory, and Gold which starred Robert De Niro, this play being his first appearance on stage. Curtis was recognized by her contemporaries of the time. Andy Warhol described her as “not a drag queen. Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier.” She was a prominent member of Warhol’s theatre and worked with the famous queen Divine. Lou Reed wrote the song Walk on the Wild Side about her, her free spirit and creativity inspiring others around her. Jackie Curtis forever changed the culture of rock ‘n’ roll and her influence on the arts is palpable to this day. She died from a heroin overdose at the age of 38.

• Jaime Davidovich

  Jaime Davidovich (1936–2016) was an Argentine American artist known for his visual and conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. He shot the footage of this 7-minute short film in the early 1970s, named Reality Properties: Fake Estates. His film captured fellow artist Gordon Matta-Clark as he traveled around New York City auctions to buy 15 unwanted and unusable properties. The project began as an attempt to bring awareness to land ownership issues in New York. Norman Fisher helped him financially with this project. Unfortunately, Matta-Clark passed away before fulfilling his plans for the properties, and the land reverted to the city.

• Constance De Jong

  Constance De Jong (b. 1945) in Ohio. De Jong’s art has pushed boundaries to open the relationship between language and visual and performing arts. Her first book, Modern Love, was published in 1977 and was re-issued in 2017. Shortly after she first published Modern Love, it was adapted into an hour-long radio program. Composer Philip Glass wrote an original accompaniment for the radio program, named Modern Love Waltz. In 1978, De Jong wrote The Lucy Amarillo Stories, a collection of poetry writings. Philip Glass composed another accompaniment for the live performances of the poetry. Her writing is often tied with performative pieces. She has collaborated with other artists to create live performances and digital artwork. She also collaborated with Philip Glass to create the well-known opera Satyagraha. She created installations that featured programmed modified vintage radios to play word performances of her own writings. She has permanent audio installations in multiple locations throughout the world, including New York and London. She was recently a professor of art in the MFA Studio Art program at Hunter College in New York. Hunter College is also where she received her first solo art show at an institutional gallery.

• Jimmy DeSana

  Jimmy DeSana (1949–1990) was born in 1949 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied art at Georgia State University before moving to New York in 1972. He was a post-punk aesthetics photographer, his artwork often symbolizing resistance to the American dream. His photographs famously consisted of nude models with no faces in the setting of suburban homes. His art commented on consumerism, queerness, and sexual liberation. He embraced surrealism in his photographs, often purposely shooting the models from disorienting angles and making them appear as quadrupeds. He linked sex and death within his art because he wanted to bring attention to the unmentionable topics of society. He photographed many album covers and alternative musicians. He was known for his kindness, and for never taking someone’s photograph without first receiving permission. He had a multitude of solo exhibitions throughout the world. After contracting HIV in the late 1980s, he began making abstract art to combat society’s common narratives on HIV/AIDS. In 1990, he passed away from an AIDS-related illness. His artwork has had a recent resurgence onto the art scene, gaining newfound appreciation and praise for their depictions of queerness in art. The Brooklyn Museum featured a retrospective exhibit in 2022 of his work.

• Peter Downsbrough

  Peter Downsbrough (b. 1940) was born in 1940 in New Jersey. He was studying to become an architect when he decided to change courses and pursue sculpture. He had his first show in New York in 1971, and by the mid-1970s he was exhibiting worldwide. His work focuses on geometricfigures and lines, bringing into play his education in architecture. He also experiments with negative space within his art. He will often print single words onto the artwork, although he leaves his pieces with no explanation, so interpretation of the art and words are relative to each viewer. He had a significant influence on the conceptual art movement of the 1970s, which prioritizes ideas over aesthetics. He mixed in some aspects of concrete art into his work, making for an emphasis on the geometrical designs. He is also known for his photography of city landscapes, as well as video and audio tapes. He has shown at a variety of international solo and group exhibitions, his work often bringing up questions about language, time, and space. His work is still presently shown in various galleries throughout the world.

• Jean Dupuy

  Jean Dupuy (1935–2021) was an interdisciplinary French-born artist who began his career as a painter. In the late1960s, he destroyed most of his paintings and moved to New York to pursue other forms of art. This 55-minute video documents the mix of performances Dupuy put together to form a single show named Soup and Tart. It took place on November 30, 1974, at The Kitchen. The show was a mix of 2-minute performances by more than 30 different artists. The audience was served food, which partly consisted of soup and tarts. 

• Richard Gallo

  Richard Gallo's (1947–2007) provocative performance art and Avant Garde theatre made him a noticeable figure on the streets of 1970s New York. Donning leather, fishnets, motorcycle boots, and his iconic executioner's mask, he would stand outside of luxury boutiques and perform. This would often end in police interruption, and he was arrested on multiple occasions for not having an exhibition permit, but this did not discourage him. He would enlist his fellow artists to be in these public performances with him in Manhattan, garnering the attention of Andy Warhol, who said “He is more glamorous than Marlene Dietrich. They should keep his wardrobe in a memory bank.”

  He began staging performances as a student at the Pratt Institute, studying advertising, theatre, and art. His work blurred the boundaries between performance art, theatre, and fashion. A frequent collaborator of Robert Wilson’s, and a regular at the famed Studio 54, he would perform in numerous theatre productions as well. His life and work exemplify the artistic climate of the time, and how artists defied categorization in terms of how they defined themselves as artists, the medium they supposedly “belonged” to, and to the separation between their life and their art. Richard Gallo did just that as he challenged conventions of identity, masculinity, and sexuality. 

• Tina Girouard

  Tina Girouard (1946–2020) was born in DeQuincy, Louisiana in 1946. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and later moved to New York City in 1969, together with musician Richard “Dickie” Landry. Girouard and Landry moved into an apartment at 10 Chatham Square in Chinatown with the painter Mary Heilmann. The trio’s home soon became a center of avant-garde art, music and performance in New York as well as a meeting ground for other Louisiana-born artists working in the Post-Minimalist scene, such as Lynda Benglis and Keith Sonnier. She was a prominent figure in the art scene in the 1970s SoHo neighborhood. She cofounded the unique restaurant called FOOD (along with fellow artists Carol Goodden  and Gordon Matta-Clark). This was an artist-run 1970s SoHo eatery where everything, from food prep to the act of eating, was considered art. She also helped found 112 Greene Street, the boundary-pushing 1970s artist-run gallery. The gallery liberated artists in their ability to create freely and pursue unconventional methods of art. In those early days, Girouard’s art consisted primarily of  live performances. Later in her career she became part of the Pattern and Decoration movement, which was a post-minimalism movement to combat the male-dominated art world of the time by using traditionally feminine-related materials to create art. After a devastating studio fire in 1978, Girouard and Landry moved back to Louisiana and created a studio near Lafayette. In the 1990s she visited Haiti, became interested in the relationship between Haitian religion and her childhood roots in Louisiana, and set up a studio in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. There, Girouard studied alongside Haitian artists and learned to make traditional Vodou flags. Together with local artists she wrote a book on the use of sequins in Haitian art. In 2020, Girouard passed away from a stroke.

• Philip Glass

  Philip Glass (b. 1940) was born in Baltimore. He studied music in multiple settings, including Juilliard, the University of Chicago, and under French Composer Darius Milhaud. He then moved to Europe to study under the renowned music teacher Nadia Boulanger and the well-known composer Ravi Shankar. In 1967, Glass moved back to New York and founded the Philip Glass Ensemble musical group. Glass termed his musical style “music with repetitive structures.” It is considered part of the American Minimalism movement, associated with the work of American composers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Glass, and later John Adams. One of the most significant musical movements of the 20th century, the minimalist aesthetic seeks simplicity, achieved through repetitive sounds to create a hypnotic feeling for the listener (At one point it was known as the “New York Hypnotic School”.) Glass has composed more than 25 operas, 14 symphonies, multiple concertos, film soundtracks, string quartets, and solo piano and organ pieces. He has composed music for popular media, such as The Truman Show (he has a cameo in the film where he is seen playing the piano), Candyman, and Stranger Things. He also composed the music for the 2002 film The Hours, which he later received a BAFTA award for best film music. He continues to write and perform today.

• Carol Goodden

  Carol Goodden (b. 1940) was born in London. She is a photographer and dancer, known for her work with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In the 1970s, she photographed her boyfriend and fellow artist Gordon Matta-Clark's ephemeral artwork, such as Hair and Jack’s. She danced in Trisha Brown Dance Company’s performances, and documented Trisha Brown’s live dance performances, including Walking on the Wall and Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. She was also a member of the 112 Greene Street artist group, The Anarchitecture Group (a mix of the words anarchy and architecture). Along with fellow artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Tina Girouard, Goodden also cofounded the seminal SoHo restaurant FOOD as principal investor. She oversaw the running of the restaurant and ensured the artist workers had fair wages. In 1974, FOOD closed and Goodden was quoted as saying, “We consumed food, FOOD consumed us.” During the Frieze Art Fair in New York in 2013, Goodden came back to participate and recreate FOOD.

• Suzanne Harris

  Suzanne Harris (1940–1979) began studying medicine before she decided to pursue a career in music and moved to New York City. She began to explore the world of contemporary dance and created the Natural History of the American Dancer improv performance group. Her first solo exhibit Flying Machines debuted in 1973 and featured “An attempt for two to defy gravity with minimum aid: visuallysadistic until set in motion. A most sensation of flying.” This debuted inside the gallery of 112 Greene Street. Harris was also very interested in geometry and traveled to Egypt to study pyramids in person, with the goal of recreating the geometrics within her own artwork. She is known for her interdisciplinary artwork, combining different materials such as wood, plaster, cardboard, metal, and glass. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions. She passed away in 1979 at the young age of 39. Her work continues to live on, with the first auction of her art taking place in 2006. She has also posthumously been featured in many art articles, and had a solo exhibition dedicated to her at Salomon Contemporary in 2012.

• Mary Heilmann

  Mary Heilmann (b. 1940) was born in California. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in literature at the University of California. She then studied ceramics and poetry at San Francisco State University for a short time, before moving to Berkeley to receive a Master of Arts in poetry and ceramics. After graduation, she moved to New York in 1968. There, she began to distance herself from sculpting and move to the world of painting. She is now known as a trail blazer for abstract painting. Her work is known for its combination of geometry, minimalism, and the liveliness of the BEAT generation. She introduced unique uses of color and forms into her art, usually mixing these with simple elementary-seeming shapes. She has described her desire for her art to be seen as “tough” and “plain,” and  she accepts the term “abstract” to describe her art. After the death of her close friends Norman Fisher and Gordon Matta-Clark, she felt alienated in the New York art scene and decided to move home to California. She helped grow the west coast’s younger generation in its interest in painting. After some time, she reconnected herself to the New York art scene. She now lives and works in New York. She has had multiple solo exhibitions in museums internationally and has received great recognition for her work.

• Ralph Humphrey

  Ralph Humphrey (1932–1990) was born in Ohio. He studied painting at Youngstown University before moving to New York in 1957. His first art show was in 1959 at the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York. Since then, he has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout the country. He painted in a way that allowed him to rebel against the norm, blatantly refusing to create art that could be defined specifically as a sculpture or a painting. Humphrey had a signature style of curved edges, muted colors, and soft light. He also played with the physicality of the paint, creating dimensional surfaces to the paintings. Sometimes the paintings would protrude out from the wall as much as ten inches, demanding attention from the viewer. Later, he was known for “window paintings,” which consisted of him painting a window and then portraying the view from the window. He was known for blurring the lines between the abstract, minimalism, and monochromatic styles. His signature color was blue, and his work was known to have a hypnotic feel to it. He was a professor in the graduate art department at Hunter College from 1966 until his death in 1990. There have been multiple posthumous solo and group exhibitions of his work since his passing.

• Jasper Johns

  Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. He used many of the techniques of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the previous generation, but in completely novel ways, creating an unique body of prints, drawings, paintings, and sculptural objects. Jasper Johns was born in Georgia. He spent most of his childhood constantly changing homes between his grandparents and aunt. He studied for a year at the University of South Carolina, and then moved to New York City and studied another year at the Parsons School of Design. In 1952 and 1953, he was stationed in Japan to fight in the Korean War. When he returned to New York in 1954, he soon met composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and fellow Southerner Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he entered into a long-term relationship. In 1958, Johns was discovered by gallery owner Leo Castelli, who offered Johns his first solo show. His paintings are well known for the depiction of numbers, maps, and American flags. He has set several records as the highest price paid for artwork by a living artist. He privately sold his most famous painting “Flags” for a supposed $110 million. In 1963, he helped found the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. He also was the artistic advisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for three years. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

• Joan Jonas

  Joan Jonas (b. 1936) was born in New York City. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Mount Holyoke College in 1958 and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. She began her professional career in sculpting, but became a pioneer of video and performance art, having had a great impact on the development of video as an independent medium. In 1970, she traveled to Japan and it was there that she was introduced to the world of video and filmmaking. Returning to New York, she became an active member of the artistic scene, creating a unique multimedia style, using props, scripts, sets, costumes, sound music, choreography, drawing and installation in her works. She has travelled extensively and in particular her experience of the Noh and Kabuki theater in Japan as well as traditional rituals in Crete and the American Southwest were a key starting point for her mesmerizing performances. Inspired by these cultures’ mythical stories, she weaves current day political topics into her performances that raise questions regarding gender, identity, and our subconscious. She often features her dogs within her art, symbolizing animal helpers from ancient mythology. She has taught at several colleges and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jonas has received multiple awards for her choreography, video, and visual artwork.

• Leandro Katz

  Leandro Katz (b. 1938) was born in Argentina. In 1965, he moved to New York City. He is known for his writing, photography, and filmmaking. He has published artist’s books, some with never-before-seen photographs. He has created more than 18 films, both narrative and non-narrative. His films have been shown in many museums throughout both North and South America. One of his most well-known projects, The Catherwood Project, consisted of him traveling to regions of Mexico to photograph ancient Mayan sites. His documentary film Paradox brings awareness to the poor living conditions of banana growers in Guatemala. He enjoys incorporating research and anthropology into his artwork. He has been on faculty at Brown University, The School of Visual Arts, and William Paterson University. In 2006, he moved back to his childhood hometown of Buenos Aires. He has received many awards, including the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. The Rotterdam International Film Festival, the New York State Council on the Arts, and other entities have supported him and his work. In 2018, his photography collection called Lunar Alphabet was part of Buenos Aries’ first “Art Basel Cities” government art exhibition program.

• Joseph Kosuth

  Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945) was born in Ohio. From 1955 to 1962, he attended the Toledo Museum School of Design. He then attended the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1963to 1964. Then, in 1964 and 1965, he studied at the American Center in Paris. In 1965, he moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts. In 1967, he had made such an impact at the college that he was revoked from the student body and given a teaching position (and remained teaching there until 1985). Soon after his schooling was over, he left painting and moved on to conceptual works, becoming one of the most prominent artists of the conceptual art movement. In 1967, he co-founded an exhibition space called the Museum of Normal Art. In 1969, he joined as an editor for the journal Art and Language. His art has been greatly influenced by philosophy, and he likes to study and incorporate the meaning of language into his artwork. From 1971 to 1972, he studied both philosophy and philosophical anthropology at The New School for Social Research in New York. He has received many awards, honors, and grants from multiple countries and governments throughout his lifetime. He received an honorary Doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna, Italy in 2001. He has served on the faculty for colleges in Munich and Venice and has been invited to be a guest lecturer at numerous other colleges. He has had many international solo exhibitions and has been featured in many museums’ permanent collections worldwide.

• Richard Landry

  Richard Landry (b. 1938) was born in Louisiana. By the age of six, he was singing in a church choir seven days a week. At age ten, he began to learn the saxophone. He attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he majored in music education. After graduation, he taught for two years in a small town in Louisiana. In 1969, he made his way to New York City. To make ends meet while between musical jobs, he took up photography. His first New York City concert took place at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1972. He helped pioneer the use of the quadrophonic delay system, which allowed him to play all five parts for a quintet musical piece. Throughout his career, he has performed concerts worldwide. He helped found the Philip Glass Ensemble musical group in 1969 and continued to play with them for 12 years. As part of the Ensemble, he also performed in the original Einstein on the Beach opera. He has received gold and multi-platinum awards for his music. In 1995, he moved back to his home state of Louisiana and formed a band which still performs and tours today. Along with this, he still manages his family’s 80-acre farm and has taken up painting.

• Jeffery Lew

  Jeffrey Lew (1946-2022) was born in New York. Together with his wife Rachel Wood he purchased the building at 112 Greene Street located in SoHo, which would become a center for the artistic experiments of the time. Lew himself never received formal training for his art, and instead was self-taught. He produced work in the mediums of photography, music, painting, drawing, and sculpture. He was known to play with color and have high contrast within his work. He would often use materials that would make the art appear as if it was jumping out at the viewer. His work is featured in multiple permanent collections, and has been included in numerous group art shows. Later in his life, he moved to south Florida and helped revive the art scene in Miami Beach.

• Roy Lichtenstein

  Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was an icon of the late 1960s pop art movement. He was born and raised in New York City. His interest in art began as a child when he would draw portraits of jazz musicians. After serving in the Army during the final years of World War II, Lichtenstein enrolled in Ohio State University where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree. Lichtenstein’s shift toward the pop art style began when he moved back to New York where beginning with 1961’s Look Mickey, he created works that incorporated cartoons, advertisements, and comic-strip imagery. Lichtenstein would later branch out into different mediums including sculpture and filmmaking but it would be his work during the 1960s including now-classic pieces such as 1963’s Drowning Girl and Whaam! that would solidify him as a pop art legend. He continued working in a variety of artistic fields up until his death in the 1990s. His 1962 pop art painting Masterpiece sold for 165 million dollars in 2017.

• Lance Loud

  Lance Loud (1951–2001) was born in California. In 1971, his family was chosen to be the focus of the new experimental show An American Family, often regarded as the first ever American reality television show. In 1973, the reality show debuted on PBS, and Lance, along with his four siblings and parents, quickly became icons in America. The country became obsessed with the newfound show, making it a sudden hit with millions of viewers watching every week. But the show also brought on much controversy, with many people criticizing the decay of the family and correlating it to an overall decay of all American families. Lance was the first person on American television to be open about his homosexuality, making him a gay icon for pop culture. After the show ended, Lance moved to New York to try and make a career
  for himself. He became close friends with Norman Fisher, and with his childhood idol and pen-pal, Andy Warhol. Lance also formed the punk band, The Mumps, with longtime friends and they received a loyal local following in New York. After the band broke up, Lance moved back to California to become a magazine writer. He wrote for many notable publications, including Vanity Fair and The Advocate. In 2001, at the age of 50, Lance passed away from liver failure triggered by an HIV and Hepatitis C co-infection. After his death, Time Magazine wrote a piece remembering him for his quote, “Television ate my family.” Lance notably said that his fame was hollow and that he could find nothing to fulfill him after that initial burst of fame in 1973 when the reality show debuted. He spent his life trying to find himself after 1973, leading him to years of substance abuse and a crystal meth addiction. He is quoted as saying, “I also stand as a role model as to what not to do in one’s life.”

• Christopher Makos

  Christopher Makos (b. 1948) was born in Massachusetts. He grew up in California and then moved to New York after graduating high school. He has been quoted as claiming that he did not intend to live the life of an artist, but that he was simply in the right place at the right time in the 1960s. He worked as a photo assistant for artist Andy Warhol in the 1970s and 1980s. He became popular in the art scene through the 1977 publication of his book White Trash. This art book was full of Makos’s photographs documenting the New York City punk culture of the 1970s. He photographed the lively clubs in New York, including the famous Studio 54, which many celebrities frequented. Makos helped with the publication of the art book Andy Warhol’s Exposures, and he created the art book Warhol: A Personal Photographic Memoir. His photography has been shown in numerous galleries and museums throughout the world, as well as his photographs being published in many famous magazines. He is well known for his work, The Icons Portfolio (1990), where he photographed some of the most famous people in the world. These photographs included Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dali. Makos is featured in countless private collections and permanent museum collections and continues to be active in the art world.

• Gerard Malanga

  Gerard Malanga (b. 1943) was born in New York. His high school English teacher, Daisy Aldan, introduced him to poetry and continued to inspire him throughout his career. Malanga attended the University of Cincinnati’s College of Art and Design in 1960, but dropped out within a year. In 1961, he attended Wagner College, but dropped out in 1964 so that he could turn his part-time assistantship to Andy Warhol into full-time work. He worked with Warhol for seven years, helping him with all facets of his art. In 1969, Malanga was one of the founding editors for Interview magazine, along with Warhol. Malanga also performed dances during the band Velvet Underground’s live performances. Malanga left Warhol in 1970 to pursue a solo photography career. He often photographs what he calls “New York’s Changing Scene.” He has shot and produced 12 films (1951 - 2001). He has also written and edited numerous poems and poetry collections. Malanga is well known for photographing famous people, such as his iconic photo of a nude Iggy Pop. He recently has been creating a program for museums, art centers, and college students to learn about and teach poetry and film.

• Robert Mapplethorpe

  Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) was born in New York. He attended Pratt Institute where he was pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Arts before dropping out in 1969. From 1967-1972, Mapplethorpe and his girlfriend at the time, artist Patti Smith, lived and worked together. He had his first twonotable art shows in 1977. One at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York which featured his photographs of flowers, the show at The Kitchen in New York which featured photographs of nude male models. From 1977-1980, Mapplethorpe was in a relationship with writer and Drummer magazine editor Jack Fritscher, who introduced Mapplethorpe to the BDSM gay sex club and bar Mineshaft. Mapplethorpe went on to become the official photographer for the establishment. His art was known for almost always being in black and white, and for being mostly of erotic images. His photography raised awareness for funding of the arts, but it also brought along public controversy regarding the nature of the photographs. Mapplethorpe’s art raised questions throughout the country about what was allowed to be
  shown in public and what was considered too obscene to show. Mapplethorpe was also known for his photography of flowers and of celebrities. He died at the age of 42 from HIV/AIDS complications. A year before his passing, he founded the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation which has helped promote art and fund research to find treatments for HIV/AIDS. There have been several books written about Mapplethorpe and dedicated to him posthumously. In 2015, he was named an LGBT icon by Equality Forum, and in 2019/2020 the Guggenheim Museum hosted an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s artwork.

• Gordon Matta-Clark

  Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) was born in New York to a family of artists. He attended Cornell University from 1963-1968 to study architecture. He was known for his artwork that featured urban communities and the people living in those communities. He created the first Garbage Wall, which was a stand-alone art piece made from trash he had collected around the community. This work was meant to bring awareness to the growing homelessness problem facing New York in the 1970s. He also became fascinated with the growing street art scene and documented graffiti art in New York. Matta-Clark helped create 112 Greene Street, the newfound artist-run exhibition and workspace in New York. He also cofounded FOOD, the first-of-its-kind art restaurant which treated everything in the building as art, from the cooking to the eating. He was well known for his work he called “Anarchitecture,” where he cut shapes or lines through buildings that were scheduled for demolition. One famous piece of this kind, Splitting (1974), signified the decay of the
  American dream by the vertical cutting through of an old suburban New Jersey home. Matta-Clark passed away in 1978 at the age of 35 from pancreatic cancer. In 2019, his work Splitting was named as one of the 25 works of art that defined the contemporary age by The New York Times. Since his passing, there have been numerous retrospective exhibitions and ongoing representations of his work through museum collections.

• Gerard Murrell

  Gerard Murrell (1950-1991) was an American photographer and poet. Born in Church Point, Louisiana, the artist would get his BFA in Painting and Dance/Theatre from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1973. In 1986, Murrell would obtain a Master’s in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University in New York City, and a Doctorate’s degree in Anthropology Mesoamerican Art History from Tulane University. In New York City, Murrell held significant positions in the art community and worked as a photographer for renowned individuals and galleries. His photographs were featured in publications including The New York Times and Time Magazine. After travelling to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he captured photographs of local paintings and sculptures, he worked as a photographer for WNET/13. Murrell would make contributions to Gamma-Liason International Photography Agency. His work appeared in several publications and continues to be appreciated.

• Richard Nonas

  Richard Nonas (1936–2021) was an American sculptor as well as an anthropologist. Nonas attended University of Michigan, Lafayette College, Colombia University, and the University of North Carolina, studying literature and anthropology. He travelled across Northern Ontario, Canada, Northern Mexico, and Arizona studying Native American sites. He worked as an anthropologist in Mexico and Canada for a decade before turning to sculpture. While walking his dog, Nonas began to take pieces of wood he found and rearrange them. He continued to work with found materials, such as steel, stone, and wood, and other raw materials to create his sculptures seeking to encourage questions regarding our perception of space. As seen in Hunk, Nonas was well-known for his use of repetition and simplicity. He was quoted as saying that he wanted a “sculpture that activates its space, that confuses you a little, keeps you involved in it as you walked past it.” Alanna Heiss, founder of the now Museum of Modern Art PS1, said this of Nonas, “To make art, he used space as one of his materials. He grasped space in a way most of his colleagues did not.” His pieces vary in size with some being 300 ft in length. Nonas’s work and installations continue to be shown in major museums today.

• Yoko Ono

  Yoko Ono (b. 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. As a child in Tokyo, Ono would take piano lessons and go to kabuki performances with her mother. Her family moved to New York City in 1940, while she remained in Tokyo. During this time, she would enroll in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family. While in school, she endured multiple bombings and the complete desolation of her city during World War II. Ono’s family remained in New York, while Ono struggled and developed her self-professed “aggressive” attitude and understanding of “outsider” status. After graduating from school in Japan, she enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College in New York where she would meet her first husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ono worked several jobs, including being a secretary after she left college. In the early 1960s, she would become associated with the Fluxus group and further develop her avant-garde style. In 1966, attempting to obtain an original song manuscript from Paul McCartney, Ono met Beatles singer John Lennon. Ono and Lennon would begin making music together as well as becoming protesters against the war in Vietnam. In 1969, the two would form the experimental Plastic Ono Band. Ono would release several albums and songs with Lennon, as well as making music as a solo artist, and achieving mainstream success. Ono continues to make conceptual art pieces and participate in exhibitions, as well as publishing books and films.

• Ed Ruscha

  Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) is an American artist born in Omaha, Nebraska. Known for his association with the
  pop art movement, he became known for his painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. After
  spending 15 years in Oklahoma City, Ruscha would leave to go to Los Angeles, California where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts). While in school he co-edited and produced the journal Orb. Ruscha would undergo a shift in artistic focus when he discovered Jasper Johns’s Target with Four Faces in Print magazine. He began to work more extensively with paint, slightly shifting away from his focus in graphic arts and focusing on surrealism, photography, and video.

• Alan Saret

  Alan Saret (b. 1944) was born in New York City, New York. The Brooklyn resident is known for his Postminimalist wire sculptures and drawings. After graduating from Cornell University with a degree in architecture, Saret would become a part of the SoHo alternative art scene in the late 1960s and 1970s. Saret worked with multiple different styles including systems art, process art, generative art, and post conceptual art. His art is primarily comprised of sculptures with flexible materials. Saret has been a major proponent of using wire and mesh to explore sculpting. That approach to art could also be seen in his drawings. His piece, Gang Drawings, used a cluster of pencils to replicate the look of sheet wire. Because of its departure from more hard-edged minimalism,” Saret’s new style began to be known as “anti-form.” However, he rejected the reasoning behind the title and stressed the organic nature of the form. His work continues to be exhibited all across the globe including places such as the Museum of Modern Art, New
  York, and the Brooklyn Museum.

• Richard Serra

  Richard Serra (b. 1938) was born in San Francisco, California. After transferring from the University of
  California, Berkley, he obtained a degree in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating, Serra enrolled at Yale University, where he would obtain a BFA and MFA in painting. His first solo exhibition took place in 1968, with artist Leo Castelli. The following year, Serra would have his first museum showing at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. He is considered to be one of the most significant artists from his generation, and is known for his sculptures, painting, drawings, and architecture. Much of his art is site-specific and has been set in urban and landscape settings across the globe. His work continues to be shown around the world and has been well received by the viewers.

• Edwin Shostak/Rose Royale

  Edwin Shostak/ Rose Royale (1941–2020) was born in the Bronx in 1941. Shostak would attend Cooper Union in the ‘60s where he began a fascination with the geometry of nature. Shostak pulled from botanical motifs to produce the minimalist paisley forms seen most often in his body of work. A staunch advocate and member of the LGBT+ community, Shostak (also known as Rose Royale), used his artistic platform to create awareness and document queer perspectives. Shostak’s works were selected for the first Whitney
  Biennial in 1973 and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. Shostak’s works have
  been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The GrandPalais—Paris, and The Chrysler Museum to name a few.

• Keith Sonnier

  Keith Sonnier (1941–2021) was born in Mamou, Louisiana. After graduating from Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now University of Louisiana at Lafayette), he would go on to pursue an MFA from Rutgers University. As a sculptor, Sonnier radically reinvented the medium, experimenting with different materials including fabrics, found objects, transmitters, video, and, most notably, neon and glass. His sculptures were a departure from some of the medium’s different iterations. In 1968, Sonnier began to make wall sculptures using incandescent light, neon, and sheer fabric. He designed the sculptures by sketching lines, arches, and curves. Afterwards, the sketches would be turned into actual sculptures in which neon was encased in glass tubes. Sonnier has been the subject of more than 150 one-artist exhibitions worldwide.

• Hisachika Takahashi

  Hisachika Takahashi (b. 1940) was born in Tokyo, Japan, but briefly moved to China due to his father working for the Chinese Language Expo. After the death of his father and the end of World War II, Takahashi and his mother moved back to Tokyo. From an early age he had an interest in being an artist. Realizing he wanted to be a sculptor, Takahashi would leave the university he was enrolled in Tama Art. Upon meeting the artist Robert Crippa at an art show, the artist invited him to study in Italy. Excited by the opportunity, Takahashi took money he made from making a sculpture and bought a one-way ticket to Italy. It was during this time that he would forego traditional study at a university, and instead work as an assistant for Crippa, who had been in a plane accident. After some success in Italy, Takahashi sold a painting to John de Menil, earning a free trip to New York City in the process. While in New York, Takahashi met Robert Rauschenberg and became his long time assistant. The two worked on several pieces together, and Takahashi was able sell his art. Takahashi’s time in New York was a highly sociable time, and he would connect with the founders of FOOD to cook for the restaurant.

• Cherry Vanilla

  Cherry Vanilla (b. 1943) was a fixture if the 1970s music scene. A native New Yorker, she rose to fame after
  appearing in Andy Warhol’s 1971 play Pork. Her talent soon carried her across a variety of fields with Cherry Vanilla seamlessly balancing her acting career with stints in several bands including Kasim Sulton and Cherry Vanilla Band, all of which cemented her as a pioneer in the punk rock scene. Vanilla’s creativity extends into prose and poetry as she not only wrote her own music but also self-published the 1974 book Pop Tart Compositions in addition to writing her memoir Lick Me in 2010. Her notable work in business includes a stint as David Bowie’s publicist during the early 1970s, producing radio and television commercials, and overseeing Europa Entertainment, LLC.

• Andy Warhol

  Andy Warhol (1928–1987) born Andrew Warhola Jr., was an iconic American artist and leading figure in the Pop Art movement. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and began his career as a successful commercial illustrator before transitioning to fine art. Warhol, a child of Lemko immigrants, would experience a life-changing event when he was bedridden for a period of time due to having Sydenham’s chorea. During this time, Warhol would listen to the radio while surrounded in his bed by pictures of movie stars. Starting in the 1940s, he would work in the commercial art industry, drawing shoes for Glamour magazine. Warhol
  would continue to experiment with different art styles and would become best known for his vibrant and repetitive silk-screen prints depicting everyday objects, celebrities, and cultural icons. His studio, The Factory, became a hub for creative experimentation and a gathering place for artists, musicians, and socialites. In the late 1950s, Warhol paintings began focusing on mass-produced commercial goods, such as his famous Campbell soup or Brillo boxes, and in 1961, he debuted the concept of "pop art”. In the 1960s, his art became more celebrity focused as he worked with pop cultural figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Elvis. Warhol’s work also included several films that he directed or produced. The 1970s would be a quieter decade for Warhol, who reemerged in the 1980s as a mentor to the decade’s rising artists, such as Basquiat. Having influenced artists of a whole generation, and become one of America’s cultural icons, the controversial figure died in 1987 from complications from gallbladder surgery.

• William Wegman

  William Wegman (b. 1943) was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He began his career as a painter and graduated with a BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design in 1965 and an MFA in the same field from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne in 1967, Although later becoming famous for the series of portraits of his Weimaraner dog “Man Ray,” William Wegman’s early art practice was conceptual based. His pioneering photography and video work were concerned with language, humor, and communication, focusing on the concepts he could portray through the artwork to the viewer. Man Ray, known for his sober and melancholy expression, would become the primary subject of many of Wegman’s photos and videos. In the mid-1980’s, Wegman would continue to work with his pets, as he experimented with the Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. Furthermore, his pets would inspire him to write a series of children’s books. Along with working in painting and photography, Wegman found success working with video, including working on shows such as Sesame Street, and his own film, The Hardly Boys. Throughout his career, his work has been displayed in multiple museums including the Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Paris.

• Lawrence Weiner

  Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021) was an American conceptual artist. After a brief stint studying at Hunter College in New York, Weiner dropped out to travel the country. Throughout the early parts of his life, he worked different “odd jobs” such as on an oil tanker, docks, and unloading railroad cars. Much of his work focused on language and how meaning is represented through text. One of Weiner’s most famous pieces is his Declaration of Intent that includes three rules, or tenets, for the foundation of conceptual art. His career is filled with pieces that fit into his philosophy of unobtrusive art. Many of his wall installations are comprised of textual descriptions of an art piece, instead of a picture or tangible iteration of the work itself.

• Robert Wilson

  Robert Wilson (b. 1941) is a theatre director and playwright born in Waco, Texas. After stints at multiple schools, Wilson discovered his love for art and architecture, gaining a BFA in the latter from the Pratt Institute in 1965. While studying, he would work with multiple famous artists including Italian architect Paolo Soleri. Wilson would develop a unique style as a theatre director. His early works include therapeutic theatre productions with disabled children, where he used lighting techniques that would resurface in his later work. Favoring an experimental style, Wilson would begin to put on more theatrical productions. In 1968, he opened his company the Byrd School of Byrds, putting on several plays. During this time, he met Philip Glass and created one of his most well-known theatre sets for the opera Einstein on the Beach. Much of Wilson’s work focuses on language and the power of silence. These techniques have brought him much acclaim in the art world and have cemented him as one of the most well-known theatre artists.

• Jackie Winsor

  Jackie Winsor (b. 1941) is a Canadian-American artist, specializing in sculpture. After attending the Yale Summer School of Art in 1964, and the Massachusetts College of Art in 1965, Winsor would obtain her MFA from Rutgers University. Inspired by her father (an engineer and carpenter), Winsor would gain prominence in the 1970s as an acclaimed sculptor whose work found appreciation from the growing feminist movement. Because of her paternal influences, much of her work is completed over long periods of time and includes tasks reliant on high amounts of repetition and attention to detail. Her work gained attention for its style that contrasted with the existing minimalist movement, and in 1973 she would receive her first solo exhibit. Winsor’s art focused on lines and symmetry, and much of her work displays her fascination with the convoluted, yet linear construction of rope. Turning away from industrial materials, she used organic materials such as hemp and wood to construct her sculptures. Throughout her career, she has been compared to multiple artists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. However, Winsor considers her art to be a form of self-reflection and she primarily focuses on personal influences.

• Jackie Winsor

  Jackie Winsor (b. 1941) is a Canadian-American artist, specializing in sculpture. After attending the Yale Summer School of Art in 1964, and the Massachusetts College of Art in 1965, Winsor would obtain her MFA from Rutgers University. Inspired by her father (an engineer and carpenter), Winsor would gain prominence in the 1970s as an acclaimed sculptor whose work found appreciation from the growing feminist movement. Because of her paternal influences, much of her work is completed over long periods of time and includes tasks reliant on high amounts of repetition and attention to detail. Her work gained attention for its style that contrasted with the existing minimalist movement, and in 1973 she would receive her first solo exhibit. Winsor’s art focused on lines and symmetry, and much of her work displays her fascination with the convoluted, yet linear construction of rope. Turning away from industrial materials, she used organic materials such as hemp and wood to construct her sculptures. Throughout her career, she has been compared to multiple artists such as Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. However, Winsor considers her art to be a form of self-reflection and she primarily focuses on personal influences.

• Holly Woodlawn

  Holly Woodlawn (1946–2015) was an American actress best known for her work with Jackie Curtis and Andy Warhol. Born in Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico, Woodlawn was raised in Miami, Florida but ran away to New York City as a teenager. Initially homeless and impoverished, Woodlawn met Warhol at the artist’s famous Factory in 1968 where she would also meet Curtis who later cast Woodlawn in her plays. In 1970, Woodlawn would play a starring role in the Paul Morrissey film Trash where she would go on to receive rave reviews for her performance and would soon follow up her work in Trash with appearances in several more films. Woodlawn also dabbled in music and later became a featured singer for several New York clubs in
  addition to gaining fame for her cabaret performances. Aside from being immortalized in the lyrics to the Lou Reed classic Walk on the Wild Side, Woodlawn transcended the taboos and stigmatization of her identity as a transgender woman during a less progressive era, to become an LGBTQ+ icon.