‘George Platt Lynes: Billy’ at A.Therien and ‘The Source of Everything’ at Manitoga.
George Platt Lynes: Billy at A.Therien, Cairo, N.Y. through September 21.
George Platt Lynes, Wilbur Pippin & George Tooker, Fire Island, c. 1948-1950. Courtesy A.Therien.
George Platt Lynes, Wilbur Pippin, Holding Leaves, Fire Island, c. 1948-1950. Courtesy A.Therien.
It is important to remember in times of threats to personal freedoms—as seems to be permeating the political atmosphere in the country today—that long before Stonewall, there was an active gay community that celebrated queerness openly, fearlessly, and with boldly creative aplomb. Such was the case with a group of artists active in the 1930s, known as PaJaMa, named after the first letters of its founders: Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French. The group eventually expanded to include George Tooker, Christopher Isherwood, and Lincoln Kirstein. PaJaMa’s favored medium was photography, and they staged impromptu scenes on the beaches of Fire Island or Martha’s Vineyard. Sometimes these Surrealist-tinged set-ups featured full-frontal nudity and large doses of homoeroticism. The group’s leading photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955) was well known for his dramatically lit and flamboyant images—careening from fashion photography to the pornographic images that eventually attracted the interest of pioneering sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey.
This remarkable show at an unusual gallery-bookstore-antiques shop focuses on a more intimate view of Lynes’s work—an homage to a friend and loved one, Wilbur Pippin (Billy), created between 1948 and 1950. These 22 underknown and rarely exhibited photos show Billy in various rather melancholy poses, each with the dramatic lighting that is a hallmark of Lynes’s work. Gorgeous images such as Wilbur Pippin, Holding Leaves, Fire Island, and Wilbur Pippin in Pool, Egremont, Massachusetts, are rather reverent in tone, as if the aim were to idolize rather than seduce his handsome subject. Also on view are PaJaMa-related works, such as Wilbur Pippin & George Tooker, Fire Island, showing Tooker holding a mirror to Billy, who reclines in the sand like a seaside Narcissus. Also of great interest is a vitrine filled with anonymous period photos that may or may not have been made by Lynes and other members of PaJaMa. This display and the entire exhibition offer a fascinating study of a rarified—and fabulous—moment in time when admonishing personal expression and sexual freedom would be unthinkable. —David Ebony
The Source of Everything at Russel Wright’s Manitoga, Garrison, NY. through August 19.
Work by Jeremy Anderson at Manitoga. Ph: Carlton Davis.
Hewn, 2019 by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray. Ph: Carlton Davis.
Untitled (Schindler House, 11), 2018 by Sam Falls. Ph: Carlton Davis.
Since I am able to review only two mid-Hudson Valley art exhibitions per month for this platform, I try to highlight the most memorable or significant exhibitions I have seen. So far this summer, there has hardly been a more unforgettable show than The Source of Everything at Manitoga. The exhibition was organized by Upstate Diary’s founding editor Kate Orne—full disclosure, my former colleague at Brant Publications, and now at Upstate Diary. The exhibition is a sensitive intervention of contemporary works—of modest scale—into the national treasure that is Dragon Rock, the meticulously preserved home, studio, and 75-acre verdant grounds designed and realized by the mid-twentieth-century uber-modernist Russel Wright (1904-1976). The sprawling complex features the Russel & Mary Wright Design Gallery, a permanent display of their prescient and by-now iconic houseware items and textiles, which opened in 2021.
If you have never experienced Dragon Rock, this is the moment to go. After extensive renovation, the unique structures here, and the surrounding landscape, have never looked better. In addition, the striking array of contemporary art interspersed throughout the home and studio this season features works by Jeremy Anderson, Sam Falls, Kieran Kinsella, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Lola Montes, Roger Stevens and Sagarika Sundaram, engaged with a variety of materials and formal concerns. Particularly outstanding are the interconnected modular ceramic objects from 2018 by Falls. With richly textured surfaces embedded with leaf forms and other vegetal shapes, they are part of his series in homage to another modernist architectural masterpiece, the 1922 Schindler House in Los Angeles. Similarly, the sinuous forms of Mimlitsch-Gray’s stunning bronze Hewn (2019) corresponds to a host of abstract modernists, from Julio González to Richard Hunt. Sundaram’s colorful hand-dyed and woven wall relief Sight-Unseen (2024) seems to directly address the innovative textiles of the Wrights. All of the works on view, in fact, are in keeping with the modernist spirit and the reverence for nature that Russel Wright espoused in everything he did. —David Ebony