Monthly Archives: February 2012

James Bidgood

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(1933-2022)

James Bidgood Resume

A stylistic precursor of Steven Arnold, Pierre et Gilles, and David La Chapelle, James Bidgood revolutionized gay male erotic imagery. Bidgood was the first to take the pulp and glamour aesthetic of the 1940s and 50s and apply it to male erotic fantasies.

From a midtown tenement during the 1960s, Bidgood completed the bulk of his creative output of photographs using vibrant colors and exaggerated props and costumes to celebrate homosexuality. His works were first published in underground magazines, and he was also the anonymous filmmaker of “Pink Narcissus” (1971), an explosion of colorful eroticism that has stood the test of time.

Mark Beard

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b. 1956

Mark Beard Resume
Bruce Sargeant Biography
Bruce Sargeant Time Line

Mark Beard, born in 1956 in Salt Lake City, now lives in New York City. His works are in museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton University Art Museums; among many others.

Susan Barnett

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Susan Barnett Resume

Susan Barnett’s photographs are not about the t-shirts per se. “Not In Your Face” is a series about identity, validation, and perception. The artist looks for individuals who stand out in a crowd by the choice of the message on their back. The messages are combinations of pictures and words that reveal much about the identity of the wearer. They tell us who these people are and who they are not, who they want to be and what they want us to know about them. They demonstrate how individuals wear a kind of badge of honor that says “I belong to this group, not the other.” They advertise their hopes, ideals, dislikes, or political views. These individuals create their own iconography exploring the cultural, political, and social issues that impact our lives today. In light of bullying and stereotyping, “Not In Your Face” seeks a better understanding of our own judgments and biases. It presents a time capsule of the kind of messages that people are willing to wear and share without fear of reprisal.

Bodybuilding

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Artist, Brian Finke, spent nearly two years photographing male and female bodybuilders at both professional and amateur competitions. As with his earlier work, Finke transforms what might be a standard photojournalistic project into something much more complex and wholly unique. In many ways, Bodybuilding is a direct continuation of the artist’s earlier interest in and exploration of athleticism — the pageantry and ritual, in addition to the artifice and irony of diversity within uniformity. At its most fundamental, this project comments upon our society’s obvious obsession with the body and appearances. Finke’s subjects have taken cultural standards of beauty to heart, and then pushed them beyond all comprehensible limits. Yet, without judgement or reproof (and instead with lighthearted humor), Finke opens our eyes to the inanity of our own obsessions.

Gregory Halpern | “A @ClampArt,” DLK Collection

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From DLK Collection:

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 color photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in single room gallery space. The chromogenic prints come in two sizes: 10×8 (editions of 7) and 18×14 (editions of 5), with a few images also available in a 40×30 size (editions of 3). There are 8 images in the small size, 14 in the medium size, and 2 in the large size on display in the exhibit. The works were made between 2005 and 2011. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by J&L Books.

View the original article

View the exhibition
Browse all of Gregory Halpern’s work at ClampArt

Stuart Allen

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b. 1970

Stuart Allen is a visual artist whose work deals with fundamental elements of perception such as light, time, gravity, and space. His photographs, sculpture, and installation have been shown throughout the United States and abroad, and his work is found in many private and public collections.

Allen studied architecture at Kansas University and graduated from the photography and video department of the Kansas City Art Institute in 1993. He lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992)

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David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1954. He experienced an extremely difficult childhood with a highly abusive family life. Maturing with a sense of his homosexuality, Wojnarowicz dropped out of high school and was living on the streets by the age of sixteen. He soon turned to hustling in Times Square in New York City. After hitchhiking many times across the U.S. and living for a time in San Francisco and Paris, he finally settled in New York’s East Village in 1978, where he began exhibiting artwork.

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness in New York City in 1992 at the age of 37.