From Miss Rosen’s article for AnOther Magazine:
During his brief but brilliant life, Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989) cut a mythic figure as Mark Dirt, a teen hustler turned performance artist and photographer. Widely known as Boston’s first punk, he walked with a distinctive, exaggerated limp thanks to a bullet lodged perilously close to his spine (the work of a disgruntled john who shot him in the back when he was just 17).
Treating the world like a stage, Morrisroe played the role of consummate anti-hero whose weapon of choice was art. It’s a philosophy that was born of survival, ambition, and an exquisite sensitivity to the mysterious realm where the beautiful and the grotesque meet. He quickly found himself at the centre of a coterie of young artists including Jack Pierson (who shot Mike Faist for the new issue of Another Man), Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Gail Thacker, and Stephen Tashjian (aka Tabboo!) – a group later dubbed ‘the Boston School’.
Browse the exhibition “Mark Morrisroe | Pre-Nympho Pia and Other Friends” at CLAMP