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OBJECT LESSON

 

To You

 

Stephen Truax

 

Vibrant stylized painting looking out a window onto vegetation and a pink and yellow sky. A pair of shorts and a book rest on the windowsill.

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I wanted to be sure to reach you,1

— Frank O’Hara

 

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Line drawing of a man. He makes eye contact as he reclines against a pillow, one foot resting on the other knee and his hands clasped in his lap.

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Sketchy pastel-toned colored-pencil drawing of a blond, light-skinned man reading as he lies on a couch.

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FIG.  4

Patrick Angus

American, 1953–1992

Untitled, 1980s

Crayon on paper

27.9 × 35.6 cm. (11 × 14 in.)

Courtesy of Charles Renfro

© The Estate of Patrick Angus

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Installation view, Any distance between us, RISD Museum, 2021

FIG. 8 

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

American, b. Cuba; 1957–1996

“Untitled” (Couple), 1993

Light bulbs, porcelain light sockets,

and electrical cords

Two parts; overall dimensions vary with installation

Installation view: Any distance between us,

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD),

Providence, RI.

July 17, 2021–March 13, 2022. Curated by

Dominic Molon and Stephen Truax

© Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Courtesy of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

  1. Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster,” from Meditations in an Emergency, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42661/to-the-harbormaster. Copyright © 1957 Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
  2. O’Hara had an outsized impact on modern and contemporary art; he championed the work of the Abstract Expressionists and was intimately involved with queer artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg while he served as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  3. O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster,” from Meditations in an Emergency.
  4. “If you’re lucky in life, a place, or two, will be offered to you. . . . The air will taste of ocean, negative ions churned up by the surf” writes Paul Lisicky in Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, in a passage titled “Utopia” (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020).
  5. Any distance between us, curated by Stephen Truax and Dominic Molon, on view July 17, 2021–March 13, 2022 at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI.
  6. Aurora Mattia, “Lipstick Traces,” from The Fifth Wound, forthcoming from Nightboat Books, 2022.     
  7. Stephen Truax, “Nicole Eisenman,” Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2016, https://brooklynrail.org/2016/07/artseen/nicole-eisenman-2016.
  8. Stephen Truax, “Why Young Queer Artists Are Trading Anguish for Joy,” Artsy, November 7, 2017, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-young-queer-artists-tradi….
  9. “Patrick Angus and Hugh Steers, both active in New York in the 1980s–early 90s, dealt with overtly queer, domestic imagery; both succumbed to AIDS-related illness. . . . In Steers' painting, Two Men and a Woman, 1992, a woman washes a naked man suffering from AIDS while his partner looks on, capturing the agony of watching a loved one pass away. Both painters, though underrepresented during their short lifetimes, made work that became instrumental in queer figurative painting today.” Exhibition text for Intimacy, curated by Stephen Truax, on view June 28–August 24, 2018 at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
  10. Walt Whitman, “To You,” from Leaves of Grass (1856 and subsequent editions), https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/100.
  11. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” from Leaves of Grass (1856 and subsequent editions), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry.
  12. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself 52,” from Leaves of Grass (1856 and subsequent editions), https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-52.
  13. Tony Kushner, Scene 2 of Act 2: Perestroika, Angels in America.

 

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