From Feature Shoot:
“I got very little respect for this work for a long time,” Mariette Pathy Allen tells me, remembering her early days photographing and collaborating with gender-nonconforming people throughout the United States. “Publishers thought the subject was too limited. Galleries didn’t find the pictures very exciting because my images de-sensationalized the subject matter.”
Back then, she took matters into her own hands, traveling far and wide to share the stories of the people she’d met through slideshow presentations. Now, decades later, her life’s work is being recognized as part of the retrospective exhibition Breaking Boundaries: 50 Years of Images at Culture Lab LIC, curated by Orestes Gonzalez and Jesse Egner.
To coincide with Pride Month, the exhibition will open alongside a second exhibition, Breaking More Boundaries, curated by Allen, Gonzalez, and Egner. Breaking More Boundaries will feature the work of artists who’ve been inspired by that legacy, including invited artists Zackary Drucker and Jess T. Dugan as well as those who submitted via an open call.