Richard Stabbert

The Artwork of Richard Stabbert

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1959, Richard Stabbert is an American painter, author and researcher. A self-taught artist, he creates small intimate paintings inspired by the memories of people, both past and present, who made an impression on his life. Depicting the casual and positive experiences in life, Stabbert’s sentimental and often whimsical work presents an idyllic retreat from the speed and commotion of the industrial world. 

Born to German immigrant parents, Stabbert spent time in his early years on the beaches of the New Jersey shoreline, a period in his life that provides both inspiration and reference for his work. Stabbert’s later summer experiences in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as the time he spent in Paris also serve as influences in his work. His paintings are known for their simple details, bold color composition and equally strong foregrounds and backgrounds, similar characteristics to those works in  the Naïve genre.

Richard Stabbert’s acrylic and chalk paintings, almost gestural in execution, evoke a casual spontaneity and relaxed sensuality. He creates his work through a limited color palette that is dominated by pink and blue tones. Central to the compositions are Stabbert’s male figures constructed simply with broad, almost impasto, brushwork heightened by strokes of deep black and shaded areas of lighter grays. The background vistas in his work have a flat rendering style composed of simplified details and expanses of tonal primary colors. 

Stabbert’s paintings have been included in the 2011 edition of “100 Artists of the Male Figure: A Contemporary Anthology of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture”; the 2011 “The Art of Man: Volumes 1-6”, a special anthology edition that includes artist interviews and work from six quarterly journals of “The Art of Man”; and Firehouse Publishing’s 2014 “Vitruvian Lens – Edition 5: Fine Art Male Photography”.

One of Richard Stabbert’s first solo exhibitions was “Été”at the Les Mots à la Bouche, an established bookshop and gallery in Paris. He also presented his work in the 2011 “Memories of Moments” held at New York City’s BrianRiley1ProjectSpace, a Broadway creative hub that provides a platform for artistic visions. Other gallery exhibitions include those at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Brooklyn, New York; Asbury Park’s APEX Gallery in New Jersey; Provincetown’s Ray Wiggs Gallery in Massachusetts; the Sidetracks Art Gallery in New Hope, Pennsylvania; and Red Bank’s Susan Berke Fine Arts in New Jersey.

Stabbert is the author of the 2013 “Provincetown Memories: Paintings and Words” published in two editions through North Carolina’s Firehouse Publications. This work presents Stabbert’s simple sensual paintings alongside a personal journal of self-discovery, love, and intimate memories of both the beauty and freedom experienced during Provincetown summers.   

In addition to many private collections, Richard Stabbert’s paintings are housed in the permanent collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. His work is now available through Provincetown’s Art Love Gallery located at: https://www.artlovegallery.com  as well as Galerie MooiMan in Gronigen, Netherlands: https://www.mooi-man.nl

Richard Stabbert’s website, which includes new works and gallery contacts, is located at: http://rstabbert.com

Second Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Carry”, 2021, Acrylic and Chalk Paint on Canvas, 22.8 x 30.5 cm

Bottom Insert Image: Richard Stabbert, “Craig”, 2018, Acrylic on Canvas, 20,3 x 30.5 cm

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo

Textiles by María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo are Venezuelan textile artists who create complex textile works fashioned from multiple materials. They have studied all aspects of their artwork from the sources of their materials to the traditional dyeing and weaving techniques of India, China, and the Andes Mountains of Venezuela.  

Maria Eugenia Dávila was born in Mérida, Venezuela in 1966; Eduardo Portillo, also born in 1966, is from the more northern city of Jajó, Venezuela. Since 1983, they have been devoted to creations fashioned from silk and natural dyes. Twenty years later, Dávila and Portillo studied and integrated their own country’s fibers, derived from bromeliads, palms and roots, into their silk fabric works. 

Long-lasting fibers from the moriche palm, the perennial curague, and the cactus family’s chique-chique had traditionally been used to produce threads, cords, and fishing nets. The incorporation of these fibers into the silk works of Dávila and Portillo gave their work a new look but also required new techniques for inducing color into the fibers. They eventually developed “Mosaics”, a convergence of all previously used patterns and natural dyes in their projects, which became a template for the integration of silk and Venezuelan fibers.

At the beginning of their career, María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo traveled to China and India to better understand the properties and production of silk as well as the traditional techniques of indigo dye making. They spent several years studying sericulture, or silk farming, in order to produce their own silk from a vertical integrated model in the mountains of Mèrida, Venezuela. Their silk farming project developed from silkworm larvae found in the Canary Islands and seeds from Morera trees, commonly known as mulberry trees. The leaves of these mulberry trees provide food for the silkworms, which when grown produce the silk threads that are transformed into textiles. 

Dávila and Portillo see color as an essential element of textile work, one that interacts smoothly with the work’s surface, fiber, texture and structure. Already fascinated by their local natural dyes, they became inspired by lecturer and artist Jenny Balfour-Paul’s 1998 botanical study “Indigo”. Dávila and Portillo traveled to Thailand, India and China to study this traditional organic source of blue color. The indigo plant is a shrub, either annual or perennial depending on the climate, whose leaves are processed to obtain the dye. Soaked in water and fermented, the leaves convert the colorless compound glycoside indican, naturally present in the plant, to the blue dye indigotin. 

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo returned to Venezuela with indigo paste, powder, recipes, indigo seeds and the understanding that the process of indigo dye is more a culture than the color itself. Recognizing that the color blue one sees depends on the setting as well as the time of day, they created indigo tapestries of shaded mosaics and blocks to represent the various color perceptions. Dávila and Portillo’s tapestries from this project, depicting specific times of the day, were showcased in an exhibition that highlighted indigo’s historic color and culture, the December 2012 “Azul Indigo”, held at Caracas, Venezuela.

Dávila and Portillo are now experimenting in the colors of metal. Using metals as textile material, they are working with steel, bronze and copper in casting sculptural works of varied patinas and colors. Dávila and Portillo use their woven textiles to create shapes with folds and wrinkles. Molds of these textile shapes are then prepared for bronze casting. Dávila and Portillo’s exploration of the patina process led to the mixing of copper ribbons with metallic threads of copper, steel, gold and silver which are then woven into their tapestries.

María and Eduardo Dávila Portillo are recipients of a Smithsonian Art Research Fellowship and a Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency. Their work is recognized by UNESCO as a contribution to sustainable practices. Dávila and Portillo are members of the Textile Society of America, a platform dedicated to the exchange and diffusion of textiles. They share their vast knowledge by lecturing in conferences across the US, Central and South America, and Europe.

Dávila and Portillo’s work is part of public and private collections worldwide, including the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England; Longhouse Reserve, a sixteen-acre garden and sculpture museum in East Hampton, New York; the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City; the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Notes:  The Art Institute of Chicago has an interview with textile artists Dávila and Portillo led by Associate Textile Conservator Isaac Faccio, entitled “Anatomy of a White Dwarf: On Life, Home, and Weaving” at: https://www.artic.edu/articles/1134/anatomy-of-a-white-dwarf-on-life-home-and-weaving

Wilton, Connecticut’s sculpture and textile gallery Browngrotta Arts is a representative of Dávila and Portillo’s work in the United States. An article on the artists’ work and an inventory of available textiles can be found at the Browngrotta Arts site: https://browngrotta.com/artists/Eduardo-Maria-Eugenia-Davila-portillo

Second Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Océano Cósmico”, 2022, Detail, Silk, Moriche, Alpaca, Cotton, Indigo and Copper Leaf, 150 x 79 cm, Browngrotta Arts

Third Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Encontrada”, 2013, “New Territories” Series, Cast Bronze, 21 x 22 cm, Museum of Art and Design, New York 

Bottom Insert Image: Dávila and Portillo, “Clev 1”, 2019, Detail, Silk, Alpaca, Moriche, Metallic Fiber, Silver Leaf, Natural Dyes, 209 x 63cm, Private Collection

Arthur Tress

The Photography of Arthur Tress

Born in Brooklyn, New York in November of 1940, Arthur Tress is an American photographer with an anthropological background who is known for his figurative work and staged psychological images . His career has encompassed a vast range of work from ethnographical and environmental documentation to modernist and magical-realistic images.

The youngest of four children born to European-Jewish parents, Arthur Tress became interested in photography early in his life. In his early teen-years, he photographed the buildings and abandoned amusement parks in the Brighton Beach and Coney Island neighborhoods. Tress studied painting at Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962.

After graduating, Tress moved to Paris, France, and briefly attended film school. He traveled extensively for four years around the world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where he developed an interest in the cultural and tribal beliefs of those he observed. Tress began to work in the field of ethnographical photography, which led to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachian communities. Tress’s images from this period formed his 1960s series “Appalachia: The Disturbed Land”. 

Arthur Tress was influenced by the photographers of The American Social Landscape, who in the tradition of straight, documentary photography focused on the aspects of the everyday environment, that is society’s practices, systems, and relationships as well as the boundaries between them. Members of this group included photographer Robert Frank known for his 1958 collection “The Americans”, Bruce Davidson known for his photographic study of East Harlem life, and Danny Lyons known for his documentary work on the civil rights movement. Tress was also impressed by such black and white cinematographers as Edward Tisse (1927 Battleship Potemkin), Gregg Toland (1941 Citizen Kane), and Boris Kaufman (1953 On the Waterfront). 

Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the human and economical costs of pollution. He documented the neglected areas of New York City’s urban waterfronts as well as the economic problems of New York’s inner city and their effects on its residents. From this body of work, two volumes of “Open Space in the Inner City” were published; the 1971 Volume One, an architectural drawing series of  potential recreational areas in the city, and the 2010 Volume Two,  a documentary series of inner city residents with a focus on urban teenagers.  

In the summer of 1964, Arthur Tress stayed in San Francisco and photographed the city during a historic culture clash. San Francisco was the site of the launch of the Beatles’ first North American tour as well as the contentious 28th Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace that nominated Barry Goldwater of Arizona for President. During his time in the city, Tress became one of the photographers to shoot some of the first images of public LBGTQ life. After developing his negatives in a communal darkroom in the Castro District, he mounted two small exhibitions in North Bay galleries that summer. From this body of work, seventy images were later published as the 2012 “Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964”. 

Tress’s “Dream Collector” series began with a visit to a workshop designed to allow children the opportunity to make paintings and poetry from remembered dreams. He followed this visit with research on the nature of dreams, attendance at dream therapy sessions, and interviews with adults on their remembered dreams. Combining his interest in derelict urban spaces with ethnographical photography, Tress created a series of staged black and white photographic work with psychological undertones. One example of this series is the 1970 “Flood Dream”, an image of a child looking out a hole in a roof set against the background of a gray deserted beach.

An exhibition entitled “Arthur Tress, San Francisco 1964” was presented at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 2012 accompanied by a monograph published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Other monographs that examine Tress’s work include “Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector”, “Shadow: A Novel in Photographs”, and “Theatre of the Mind, Reeves and Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000”.

In 2013, an exhibition of Tress’s work from “San Francisco 1964”, “Dream Collector” and “Theater of the Mind” was held at the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. A retrospective of Arthur Tress’s earlier works, entitled “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows” was held from October 2023 to February 2024 at the John Paul Getty Center in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

Arthur Tress’s work is contained in many private collections and numerous museums and institutions including Stanford University, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2021, an anonymous donor gave the University of Pennsylvania an outstanding collection of Arthur Tress photography. Penn Libraries now houses the largest collection, two thousand-five hundred photographic prints, of Tress’s work in the United States. 

Notes: Arthur Tress, interested in Asian culture since his early travels, gathered together over the years a large personal collection of thirteen-hundred Japanese illustrated books. After a 2018 visit to Penn Libraries’ conservation department, he donated his entire Japanese collection to the university’s library.

Arthur Tress’s website, which contains photographic series from 1963 to 2015, can be located at:  https://arthurtress.com

An interview between author Robert Hirsch and Arthur Tress for the January/February 2013 issue of LightResearch magazine can be located at:  https://lightresearch.net/interviews/ArthurTress.html

On September 14, 2024, California’s Cambria Center for the Arts Film Festival will be showing the documentary “Arthur Tress: Waters Edge”. A special exhibition of his work will be shown at the center’s Studio Gallery from September 1st to the 14th. Tickets are available at: https://www.my805tix.com/e/tress-1

For those interested, limited edition photographs occasionally are available through established auction sites. The J. Paul Getty Museum’s shop has a limited edition of signed posters for Arthur Tress’s 2023-2024 exhibition “Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows”: https://shop.getty.edu

Top Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Self Portrait”, 2018, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Young Man & Statue of Adonis, Key West, Florida”, 1980, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Boy on Bike Crossing Williamsburg Bridge, New York”, 1969, Open Space in the Inner City Series, Gelatin Silver Print, Edition of 8, Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Fourth Insert Image: Arthur Tress, “Two Men, Two Rooms, New York”, 1977, Edition of 50, Gelatin Silver Print, 25 x 25 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur Tress, Title Unknown, (Flies), 1984, Spray Paint Series, Gelatin Silver Print

 

Stellan Rye and “Der Student von Prag”: Film History Series

Josef Fenneker, Lithograph Film Poster for Arthur Robison’s 1935 Version of “Der Student von Prag”, Deutsche Kimemathek, Museum für Film and Fernsehen, Berlin

Born in July of 1880 at the Danish city of Randers, Stellan Rye was a film director and screenwriter active during the early twentieth-century. In his short career, he wrote and directed three productions: the 1913 “Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague)”; the 1914 “Der Flug in die Sonne (The Flight into the Sun)”; and the 1914 “Ein Sommernachtstraum in Unserer Zeit (A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time)”, co-written with German actor and horror novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers. 

Rye joined the Reichsheer, the German Army, at the onset of World War I. Taken prisoner almost immediately, he died as a prisoner of war in France on the fourteenth of November in 1914 at the age of thirty-four. 

Stellan Rye is best known for the 1913 German silent horror film “Der Student von Prag”, considered to be the first German art film, a pioneering work that raised cinema from its fairground origins to a viable art form. The film is loosely based on several literary works: Alfred de Musset’s poem “The December Night”, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “William Wilson”, and the German legend of the Renaissance alchemist and magician Johann Georg Faust. 

“Der Student von Prag” featured German actor Paul Wegener in his debut film role as the poor university student Balduin. He acted alongside Austrian actor John Gottowt in the role of Scapinelli, and Austrian-German actress Grete Berger as Balduin’s love interest Countess Margit. “Der Student von Prag” was art director and set designer Robert A. Dietrich’s first production in a career that spanned more than a hundred films. The film was shot on locations around Prague and at the Babelsberg Studios, now the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, having produced films since 1912.

In this horror story, poverty stricken Balduin signs a contract with the diabolical Scapinelli that will award Balduin one hundred-thousand gold pieces in exchange for any item in his lodgings. Scapinelli, dressed in all black, chooses Balduin’s reflection in the mirror and takes it away. During his courtship of Countess Margit, Balduin and Magrit are terrorized by his mirror double. Magrit, too frightened by the sudden appearances of the double, discontinues the courtship. Depressed, Balduin shoots his double with a pistol and it vanishes. However, Balduin himself becomes stricken and falls dead. The evil Scapinelli arrives, tears up the contract and departs happily.

German cinematographer Guido Seeber employed new technical camera effects of seamless double exposures to create one of his most notable accomplishments, the doppelgänger image of Balduin’s mirror double. An accomplished technician and a pioneer in his field, he also employed chiaroscuro, sharp contrasts between light and shadow, to create distinct areas on the sets. Hungarian composer and pianist Josef Weiss wrote the historic piano score that accompanied “Der Student von Prag”; it was the first film score written for a German language film.

Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was both a critical and commercial success. The film tapped into the real sense of dissociation and alienation that was prominent in a society struggling with the collapse of the German Empire. The themes of the film became a major influence on German cinema produced during the years of the Weimar Republic. The insecurity and social changes that followed the deaths and devastation of the first World War became major themes for post-war German film makers.

Expressionism, developed as an avant-garde style before the war, remained popular during the Weimar Republic and extended to a wide range of the arts, including music, literature, dance and architecture. Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was remade twice: Austrian Expressionist director Henrik Galeen’s 1926 version with Conrad Veidt, and German director Arthur Robison’s 1935 version with Austrian actor Anton Walbrook. Other notable films produced during this time period included Robert Wiene’s 1920 “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and two films by Fritz Lang, the two-part 1922 “Dr. Mabuse”, and the 1927 “Metropolis”.

Notes: All insert images are film stills from the original 1913 “Der Student von Prag”, directed by Stellan Rye, that featured Paul Wegener, John Gottowt and Grete Berger.

A full-length version, with subtitles, of Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” can be found on the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/der-student-von-prag-1913

Actress Grete Berger, born Margarethe Berg into an Austrian Jewish family, began her career in 1904 at the Deutsches Theater under prominent film and theater director Max Reinhardt. She was cast in several films directed by Stellan Rye or Paul Wegener, among which was her role in the 1913 “Der Student von Prag”. After the accession of power by the National Socialists in 1933, Berger fled with her husband to Italy where in April of 1944 they were arrested by the German occupational authorities. She was transferred, along with Austrian-Hungarian actor Jacob Feldhammer, in May of 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were murdered on the twenty-third of May in 1944.

An 2023 article on Anton Walbrook, who performed the role of Balduin in Robinson’s 1935 version of “Der Student von Prag”, is located in the Film History Series of this site. A well known German actor who acted alongside some of Germany’s leading ladies, Walbrook, who was homosexual and the son of a Jewish mother, left Germany in 1936 to work for many years in the United States and England.

 

Mel Bochner

The Artwork of Mel Bochner

Born at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1940, Mel Bochner is one of the leading figures in the development of Conceptual art in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. He is a member of that generation of artists who were seeking to break free from Abstract Expressionism and traditional composition. A scholar as well as an artist, Bochner’s influential critical and theoretical essays have always been a central component of his work.

Bochner pioneered the use of language into the visual arts; language progressed from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Over his career, he has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and language- the way we construct and understand them as well as the way their relationship to each other increases our awareness of the world to which we belong.

Born to a sign-painter father in an Orthodox Jewish home, Mel Bochner graduated in 1962 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Fine Arts. He studied philosophy briefly at Chicago’s Northwestern University before making the decision to relocate in 1964 to New York City where he began work as a guard in Manhattan’s Jewish Museum. Encouraged by art critic Dore Ashton, Bochner applied for and was granted a teaching position in art history at the city’s School of Visual Arts.

Bochner’s first exhibition, the 1966 “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily To Be Viewed As Art” held at the School of Visual Arts, is now regarded as a seminal show in the Conceptual Art movement. Not having the necessary funds to frame all his original drawings, Bochner xeroxed copies of his friends’ works and inserted them in four black binders individually placed on four white pedestals. A later conceptual work, the 1998 “Event Horizon”, involved multiple pre-stretched canvases of various sizes, each marked with a horizontal line and the measurement of its length in inches. These canvases were arranged with the lines at the same height along the wall. Seen together, the canveses’ lines formed a horizon of a determined length.

In the 1960s, Bochner was one of the first artists to incorporate the physical gallery space into his art. Some of his works were actually drawn or painted on the gallery’s walls. His 1970 “Language is Not Transparent” presented the white-chalked sentence written on a dripping black square painted directly on the gallery wall. Bochner’s 1969-1970 installation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Theory of Painting”, involved newspapers, spray-painted with multi-sized blue rectangular shapes, spread on the floor of the enclosed exhibition space.

Along with artists Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth both of whom integrated language into art, Bochner was an early proponent of photo-documentary art which included images of temporary works and performance art. Among his many photographic creations is the important 1966 “36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams”, an arranged collection of forty-eight 29 x 29 cm gelatin silver prints. Resistant to showing all the forty-eight mounted photographs and pen-and-ink drawings in their physical form, Bochner photographed each mounted piece and displayed the complete work as an assemblage of two-dimensional photographs, in essence a microcosm of the exhibition.

In the early 1970s, Mel Bochner began producing series of prints at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. An avid print maker, Bochner has continuously explored new ways to experiment with traditional and non-traditional printmaking techniques. In 2022 for his latest edition of his iconic text “Howl”, he printed the piece with glitter and iridescent ink in a combination of shimmery copper, iridescent purple and glimmering black. As the viewer moves around the work, the purple shifts in tone depending on the viewer’s vantage point.

Bochner’s work covers a wide range of mediums including colorful paintings and prints containing words, cast pigmented works made from handmade paper, works on shaped canvases, and evocative installations. Among these many forms are the 1978 “Planar Arc”, three irregular shaped paper panels of different colors that are decorated with pastel marks; the 1999 “If the Color Changes (#?)”, a language piece written in gray-lettered German overlaid with scattered multi-colored alphabet letters; and the 1988 “Fourth Quartet”, four rectangular sheets of paper framed together in a pattern on which scattered geometric cubes were drawn in aquatint.

In 2007, Mel Bochner’s work was the subject of two major exhibitions in the United States: a focused retrospective of his language-based works at the Art Institute of Chicago; and a forty-year retrospective of Bochner’s drawings, that culminated a two-year museum tour, at the San Diego Museum of Art in California. Bochner’s works are contained in collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Mel Bochner’s website, which includes exhibitions, artist texts, public projects and recent works, can be located at: http://www.melbochner.net

Notes: The online Artforum magazine has an article written by Princeton University Professor Carol Armstrong entitled “Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969” that reviews Bochner’s work in connection with the 2002 Carnegie Museum show of the same name: https://www.artforum.com/events/mel-bochner-photographs-1966-1969-178514/

David Lasry’s Two Palms Gallery in New York represents the work of Mel Bochner. Its website has a comprehensive section that contains his works, exhibitions, and articles published by major art periodicals: https://www.twopalms.us/artists/mel-bochner#tab:slideshow

The Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco also represents the work of Mel Bochner. A collection of his work is available for viewing at: https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/mel-bochner

The online ArtDependence Magazine has an interview with Mel Bochner entitled “The Art of Ideas” located at: https://artdependence.com/articles/the-art-of-ideas-an-interview-with-mel-bochner/

Second Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Repetition- Portrait of Robert Smithson”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 80 x 66 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Portrait of Dan Flavin”, 1968, Ink on Graph Paper, Sheet 11.4 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Wrap- Portrait of Eva Hesse”, 2001, Charcoal and Pencil on Paper, 64.8 cm Diameter, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Mel Bochner, “Thank You”, 2015, Four Color Direct Gravure Etching, Edition of 20, 55.9 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Allen Barnett: “Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches”

Photographers Unknown, Like Stones in the Walls of Old Churches

      Horst was also the one in the article with AIDS. Every day at 4 A.M., he woke to blend a mixture of orange juice and AL721—a lecithin-based drug developed in Israel from egg yokes and used for AIDS treatment- because it has to be taken when there is no fat in the stomach. For a while, he would muffle the blender in a blanket but stopped, figuring that if he woke us, we would just go back to sleep. He laughed doubtfully when I told him that the blender had been invented by a man named Fred who had died recently. It was also the way he laughed when Perry phoned to say their cat died.
      Stark asked Noah, “Don’t you think you were a little hard on Perry?”
      Noah said, “The next thing you know, he’ll be getting an agent.”
      I said, “We’re all doing what we can, Noah. There’s even a role for personalities like his.”
      He would look at none of us, however, so we let it go. We spoke of Noah among ourselves as not having sufficiently mourned Miguel, as if grief were a process of public concern or social responsibility, as if loss was something one just did, like jury duty, or going to high school. His late friend had been a leader at the beginning of the epidemic; he devised a training program for volunteers who would work with the dying; he devised systems to help others intervene for the sick in times of bureaucratic crisis. He was the first to recognize that AIDS would be a problem in prisons. A liberal priest in one of the city’s prisons once asked him, “Do you believer your sexuality is genetic or environmentally determined?”. Miguel said, “I think of it as a calling, Father.” Dead, however, Miguel could not lead; dead men don’t leave footsteps in which to follow. Noah floundered.
      And we all made excuses for Noah’s sarcasm and inappropriate humor. He once said to someone who had put on forty pounds after starting AZT, “If you get any heavier, I won’t be your pallbearer.” He had known scores of others who had died before and after Miguel, helped arrange their funerals and wakes. But each death was beginning to brick him into a silo of grief, like the stones in the walls of old churches that mark the dead within.

Allen Barnett, The Times as It Knows Us, Excerpt, The Body and Its Dangers, 1990, St. Martin’s Press, New York

Born in May of 1955 at Joliet, Illinois, Allen Barnett was an American short story writer, activist and educator. He initially studied theater at Chicago’s Loyola University and later relocated to New York City to further his studies and acquire work as an actor. Barnett studied at Manhattan’s The New School and at Columbia University where he earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in 1981. 

In the late 1980s, Barnett worked for American music industry executive Herbert Breslin, who was influential in the early careers of many in the music field, most notably Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 1986, Barnett published his first short story “Succor” in “Christopher Street”, an American gay-oriented magazine founded in New York City by publishers Charles Ortieb and Michael Denneny. 

Learning of the published story, Herbert Breslin forwarded Allen Barnett’s short stories to St. Martin’s Press, a major Manhattan publisher with six imprints, that was founded by England’s Macmillan Publishers. Through St. Martin’s Press, Barnett’s short story “Philostorgy, Now Obscure” was published in “The New Yorker” magazine, a serious publisher of essays, fiction and journalism. 

Barnett lived in New York City at a time when AIDS was building into an epidemic force. It became a vicious disease that was occurring within an environment of medical ignorance as well as indifference on the part of both the political and media establishments. Barnett was one of the earliest volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a task he continued year after year. He was also a co-founder in 1985 of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) that sought to end homophobic reporting by media organizations. Through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Barnett was an AIDS educator for New York’s 23rd Street YMCA.

Allen Barnett only published one volume of short stories in his lifetime, “The Body and Its Dangers”, published in January of 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. This book is widely regarded as one of the most significant depictions of gay life at the height of the AIDS crisis. In 1991, Barnett’s collection was an nominee for the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award and the winner of the  Ferro-Grumley Award for the year’s best LBGTQ fiction. It also won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in the same year. 

Barnett died in New York City from AIDS-related causes at the age of thirty-six on the fourteenth of August in 1991. A memorial service was held in mid-September at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

Notes: One of Allen Barnett’s most notable short stories is “The Times as It Knows Us”. Contained within his 1990 “The Body and Its Dangers”, the story follows its protagonist, Clark, who struggles through life after the recent death of his lover. The full story is available for reading at Harvard’s Resources for Loss located at: https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/resources-for-loss/the-times-as-it-knows-us-by-allen-barnett-contributed-by-colton-carter

Editor Tom Cardamone’s 2010 “The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered” contains twenty-eight essays including one by Christopher Bram that examines Allen Barnett’s life and work. Although there appears to be no recent reprints, used copies are available through various venues; it is also available on Kindle.

Hans Erni

The Artwork of Hans Erni

Born at the city of Lucerne in February of 1909, Hans Erni was a Swiss engraver, graphic designer, illustrator, painter and sculptor. He is best known for his Swiss postage stamp illustrations, lithographs for the Swiss Red Cross, and medal designs for the Swiss government and the International Olympic Committee.

The third of eight children born into a working-class family, Hans Erni attended the local Lucerne elementary school before entering an apprenticeship as a surveyor. Beginning at the age of fifteen, he apprenticed for three years as a draftsman until his entrance into the Lucerne School of Arts and Crafts in 1927. Erni continued his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris and Berlin’s School of Applied Arts under Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. 

Between 1930 and 1933, Erni alternated stays in Lucerne and Paris where he became acquainted with contemporary French painting and influenced by the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and Cubist painter Georges Braque. Through the Abstraction-Création group in Paris, Erni became acquainted with artists Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. During the early 1930s, he participated in several collective exhibitions and painted fresco murals in city of Lucerne.

After his travels to Belgium, Italy and England, Hans Erni began in 1936 to explore Abstraction with his first public mural commissions. This series of murals included frescoes for Lucerne’s General Building Cooperative, Switzerland’s section at the 1936 Triennale in Milan, and two educational murals entitled “Saline” and “Wasserkraftwerk (Hydroelectric Power Station)”. In 1937, Erni co-founded the Allianz, an association of Swiss abstract artists that advocated, with an additional emphasis on color, the concrete art theoriesof Swiss painter and designer Max Bill. Advancing the concept of Abstraction, Concrete Artists fully realized the idea that a painting could represent even an intangible algebraic formula rather than a person or an object.

Erni had his first major public success in 1939 with a mural, entitled “Switzerland: Vacation Land of the People”, that was specifically commissioned and displayed for the Zürich National Exhibition. In 1940, Erni entered into the Swiss Army where he served, until his discharge in 1945, as a camouflage painter due to his painting skills. In 1948, Erni presented his work in the painting competitions at the Summer Olympics held in London; he also participated between 1950 and 1952 in several Latin American exhibitions.

After a period of painting in Guinea and Mauritania, Hans Erni, along with Swiss graphic artists and illustrators Kurt Werth, Celestino Piatti, Alfred Pauletto and Hugo Wetli, organized a 1960 graphic design and painting exhibition in the Solothum canton city of Olten. He also exhibited his graphic design work in the 1964 Documenta Exhibition in the central German city of Kassel. Erni often employed allegories and figures, both contemporary and from Greek mythology. in his work. His symbolic Realist images presented large, powerful forms constructed with lines of a high degree of precision.

Erni created many works in the 1970s and 1980s among which were a tapestry “People, Viticulture and Fishing” for the cit of Küsnacht; a concrete relief mural “Primal Nature and the Work of Man” for the Téléverbier Valley Station in Médram, France; a mural “Man’s Advance into Space” for the Aerospace Hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport; and an aluminum relief “The Human Flight” for the United Nations building of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal. Erni also created a thirty-meter long mural “Panta Rhei” for the auditorium of Lucerne’s Hans Erni Museum which was founded on his seventieth birthday in 1979. 

In his career, Hans Erni designed twenty-eight high-relief medals as well as one official Commemorative coin for the Swiss Confederation. In recognition for his Olympic medal designs, he received the 1989 Sport Artist of the Year award from the United States Sports Academy, a private university offering masters and doctoral degrees in sport education. Erni designed ceramics, theatrical sets and costumes, illustrations for Swiss postage stamps, and art for Swiss bank notes in the 1940s. Although the bank notes were printed, they were never released due to unfounded political objections by a member of the Lucerne State Council.  

Beginning in 1989, retrospective exhibitions of Erni’s work were held in various cities. Two retrospectives were held in Japan, the first at the Himeji City Museum of Art and the second at the Itami City Museum of Art. In 1990, a retrospective was held at the Seibu Museum of Art in Funabashi, Japan, and at India’s Nehru Center in Bombay, now Mumbai. In 1995, Erni was guest of honor at the XI Biennial of International Sports and Arts in Madrid; Queen Sofia of Spain opened the exhibition and presented Erni with the Medal of Honor for his life’s work. 

In addition to his paintings and sculptures, Hans Erni created illustrations for approximately two hundred published books and images for ninety Swiss postage stamps. He continued to create work throughout his later years. Among his last works were a 2011 medal entitled “Forest is Life” for the United Nations International Year of Forests and the 2012 stained glass windows for the Protestant Church in Martigny, Switzerland. Hans Erni died at the age of one hundred and six in Lucerne on the twenty-first of March in 2015. 

The Hans Erni Museum, a detached hexagonal building, is part of the Swiss Museum of Transport complex in Lucerne. It houses an extensive collection of Erni’s work and provides insights into a life engaged with historical, cultural, technical and ecological themes. A public assemblage of Hans Erni’s work from private collections can be viewed at The Open Hans Erni Collection site located at: https://www.hans-erni-collection.org/en/

Notes: The online RTS magazine has ten short video documentaries (French language) in its Culture et Arts section at: https://www.rts.ch/archives/dossiers/3477775-hans-erni-un-artiste-emblematique-de-la-suisse.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hans Erni”, circa late 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Drei Freunde (Three Friends)”, 1970, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 28 x 40 cm, Private Collection, Australia

Third Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Dames des Décans- Pisces”, 1970, Lithograph on Arches Paper, Artist Edition, 50 x 65 cm, Private Collection, Switzerland

Fourth Insert Image: Hans Erni, “Badende”, 1960, Lithograph, 35 of 150 Edition, 47.7 x 39.7 cm, 1993 Catalogue “Hans Erni-Stiftung, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Franco Tettamanti, “Hans Erni, Lucerne”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Artist

John Eric Broaddus

The Artwork of John Eric Broaddus

Born in New York in 1943, John Eric Broaddus was an artist who worked in several mediums including painting, illustration, and performance art. He was one of the prominent figures of the New York City art scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

John Eric Broaddus was one of the most creative and innovative artist to approach the book form. He was a pioneer in the field before the book, as a physical art piece, became an accepted genre of the contemporary art world. Not concerned with the integration of text and image, Broaddus used the pages of books as scaffolds for his colored, cut-out visual esthetic effects. His work is different from other book artists as his creations are unique, not limited editions or multiples.

Broaddus’s 1979 “Meridian Passage” is a volume of hand painted pages in acrylic, tempera, watercolor and ink combined with abstract cut-outs. This volume is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor. Broaddus’s 1982 “Xylocaine” was a volume whose pages were altered with acrylic, ink, glitter, tempera and watercolor and then overlaid with cut-out xeroxes. “Xylocaine” was the first artist book purchased by Robert and Ruth Sackner, prominent collectors who had previously focused on collecting only works of concrete and visual poetry.

John Eric Broaddus’s 1983 “France I” was constructed from a found geographical codex of over a hundred pages that was altered with paint, ink, colored pencil, glitter and sculptural cuttings. Through the use of clever cutting, a photograph of children would appear on the other side of the leaf as a gigantic statue within a dark blue abstraction. For his two-volume 1985 “Above the Trees”, Broaddus used two identical books with spray-painted pages on which were added stuck-on images, drawings and intricately cut-out shapes. This work’s elaborate, vividly-colored and highly sculptural pages demonstrated his interest in both detail and drama.

Broaddus was known for his theatrical scene sets, among which were those for the Provincetown Playhouse’s 1988 production of Justin Ross and John Epperson’s “I Could Go on Lip-Synching”. However, he was better known for the highly original costumes, constructed of found objects, that he wore for his art performance work. Broaddus would appear in his costumes on the streets of New York and in such iconic places as Studio 54 and Xenon, two of the city’s most famous nightclubs. In November of 1974, he made an appearance in a white oriental costume, carrying a bamboo umbrella, at avant-garde artist Charlotte Moorman’s 11th Avant-Garde Festival held at Shea Stadium in the New York borough of Queens.

A vibrant and pioneering artist who contributed to the artistic history of New York City, John Eric Broaddus died from AIDS at the age of forty-seven in 1990. His artwork is housed in many private collections and the world’s major art institutions including London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Spain’s National Library in Madrid, and the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, among others.

A limited edition artist book, entitled “Spin 1/2 : Books, Paintings and Memorabilia by John Eric Broaddus” was published in conjunction with the 1990 exhibition of his work at the Center for Book Arts on 27th Street in Manhattan. In addition to its multi-colored silkscreen illustrations, a forward introduction was written by Jan van der Wateren, the Keeper and Chief Librarian of the National Art Library at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

The award-winning short documentary “Books of Survival: The Art of John Eric Broaddus” was produced and directed by Gabriella Mirabelli under a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Released in 2000 with screenings worldwide, the film reconstructs the artist’s life through intimate interviews with close friends, family and collectors of his art.

Notes: A collection of John Eric Broaddus’s papers, reviews of his work, interviews, symposium records, and memorabilia are housed in the ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa. Correspondence and artist greeting cards are contained in the Archival and Manuscript collection of Northwestern University’s McCormick Library.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Boarddus in Costume”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of John Eric Boarddus

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “John Eric Broaddus, 11th Avant-Garde Festival, Queens, New York”, 1974, Color Print, Mixed Media Performance Documentation, Estate of John Eric Broaddus

Jubi Arriola-Headley: “An Oracle Done Hiding At Last”

Photographers Unknown, An Oracle Done Hiding At Last

Imagine now how your fingertips throb (1)
in silence, wild, (2) an oracle done hiding at last,
all the mystery made, (3) all the grave markers,
all the crude headstones – water-lost, (4) I think
by now the river must be thick (5) – red is the operative
word. (6) What a relief it would be to scream yourself hoarse, (7)
let the empty stage receive the light, (8) linger only with
healthy ideas. Salty ones. (9) God give us a long winter
and quiet music and patient mouths. (10) (We talk about God
because we want to speak in metaphors, (11)
como un demonio sin freno, (12) between hot dog stands
and hallelujahs.) (13) Change our fates, shoot down
the plagues, beginning with time, the children sing to you. (14)
Ha. (15) You have to face the underside of everything
you’ve loved; (16) there will be no more sons. (17)

1. Olga Broumas, (…imagine now/how your fingertips throb,,,)
2. Cecilia Vicuña, “Jungle Kill”
3. Carl Phillips, “Unbridled”
4. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy for the Native Guards”
5. Natasha Trethewey, “Elegy” (I think by now the river must be thick)
6. Linda Dove, “Fear is a Hummingbird Drunk on Taillight”
7. Raymond McDaniel, “No, You Shut Up”
8. Jon Davis, “Gratitude”
9. Alain Border, “Sleep Log”
10. Adam Zagajewski, “A Flame”
11. Jericho Brown, “To Be Seen”
12. cecilia Vicuña, “Horticultura”
13. Matthew Olzmann, “My Invisible Horse and the Speed of Human Decency”
14. Arthur Rimbaud, “To A Reason”
15. Jubi Arriola-Headley
16. Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems” (Poem V)
17. Chelsea Dingman, “Elegy for Empty Rooms”

Jubi Arriola-Headley, Cento, original kink, 2020, Sibling Rivalry Press

Born in Boston, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a Black queer first-generation American poet and author whose work explores the issues of joy, manhood, and vulnerability. In his work, vulnerability is the key to preserving one’s own authenticity and humanity. With the hope that you will be loved regardless, one has to take the risk of being known for who you really are.

The son of Barbadian parents, Jubi Arriola-Headley is a descendent of a long line of Caribbean story tellers. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Miami and is a 2018 PEN American Emerging Voices Fellow. Arriola-Headley’s work explores the themes of masculinity, vulnerability, joy, rage and tenderness. His poems have been published with Southern Humanities Review, Nimrod, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. 

Currently, Arriola-Headley is the author of two collections of poetry, the first being “original kink” published in 2020 by the Sibling Rivalry Press in Arkansas. This volume of poems, written in casual speech rhythm, relentlessly probes the issues of family dynamics, manliness, injustice, and cruelty, both self-inflicted and imposed. The “original kink” collection was the recipient of the 2021 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry presented by Western Connecticut State University.

Jubi Arriola-Headley’s second volume of poetry “Bound” was released in February of 2024 by Persea Books, a New York press co-founded by Michael and Karen Braziller. A collection of lyrical poems in varied poetic format, “Bound” boldly examines conventional notions of race, sexuality, gender and pleasure in an attempt to create a world where Black and queer individuals can live without trauma. Plotting a new path to life, Arriola-Headley points out what it means to be human and how we can find freedom and liberation in the very spaces we thought would destroy us. 

Arriola-Headley is currently working on a memoir in an essay format. An essay from this work, entitled “Pissant”, explored his teenage years in 1980s Boston, the racism he faced, his queer desires, and the hyper-masculinity of his immigrant father. This excerpt won the first place 2023 Prize for Creative Nonfiction presented by Florida’s First Pages organization, a non-profit that recognizes and encourages emerging writers. 

Jubi Arriola-Headley currently lives with his husband on ancestral Tequesta, Miccosukee, and Seminole lands in South Florida. His website, which contains selected poems, interviews and videos, is located at: https://www.justjubi.com

Notes:  A video is available online at the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation site on YouTube showing Jubi Arriola-Headley reciting his poem “Superhero Origin Story (S. O. S.)”. 

An October 2020 interview between Jubi Arriola-Headley and PEN America’s Jenn Dees and Michelle Franke can be located at the Pen America site: https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-jubi-arriola-headley/

A 2024 audio interview between Poetry Foundation’s Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers and poet Jubi Arriola-Headley can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/audio/1530526/jubi-arriola-headley-vs-masculinity?query=jubi%20a

Adrian Lee Kellard

The Artwork of Adrian Lee Kellard

Born at New Rochelle, New York in January of 1959, Adrian Lee Kellard was a gifted American artist known for his uniquely-styled woodcuts and sculptures of religious and often homoerotic imagery. Although many of his works have a practical utility, each of Kellard’s creations holds a story, either a historic religious account or a personal circumstance.

Adrian Kellard was one of six children born into the working-class Irish-Italian Catholic family of Adrian Kellard Sr, a detective lieutenant, and Ordie Figliuzzi, a teacher at the local elementary Catholic school. In the early 1980s he attended the State University of New York, Purchase where he studied under Judith Bernstein, an American painter whose provocative works explored the connections between the political and the sexual. Kellard received his training in woodcuts and printmaking through his studies with internationally-known Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi. Through the SUNY Empire State Program, he relocated to New York City and apprenticed under multi-media artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, a gay activist whose work incorporated queer and Catholic iconography. 

Kellard’s work was influenced by an eclectic group of artists among whom were American modernist artist Marsden Hartley, impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, and Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. His innate connection to the Catholic faith also exerted a strong influence on the themes of his work. Combining his Catholicism with his own homosexuality, Kellard utilized the figurative style of Byzantine iconography and the woodcut techniques of German Expressionism to examine the turbulent issues of the 1980s, particularly the suffering and deaths caused by the AIDS epidemic. Recurring images in his woodblock works depicted the suffering of Christ and the compassion exhibited to others by the Christian saints.

Although trained by Antonio Frasconi in the traditional techniques of woodblock printing, Adrian Kellard created a unique approach to printmaking and woodcutting. Instead of using the carved woodblock to print repetitive reverse images, he filled in the recesses of the woodblock with paint to create relief sculptures. Kellard would often combine these woodblock reliefs with found materials from his Upper West Side area of Manhattan to form large hanging or free-standing sculptural works. He later, through a suggestion from artist Lanigan-Schmidt, began to incorporate his Catholic imagery into more  functional pieces such as towel racks, calendars, desks, and folding screens. 

The first work by Kellard to achieve national exposure was his “Shrine”, also known as “The Wagon Piece”, that he entered into the 1985 group exhibition “Precious: An American Cottage Industry of the Eighties” held at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Constructed of latex paint on wood with added rope and hardware, the wheeled sculptural work is reminiscent of the mobile shrines of Catholic religious processions as well as the medieval mobile stages used for theatrical productions. 

On the “dying” side of “Shrine” is an image of a crucified Christ flanked by large clown faces. The bottom panel contains three faces of women, including that of the Virgin Mary,  who are all expressing grief. Written in the top panel is the quote taken from an eucharistic prayer  “Dying You Destroyed Death”.  The reverse, or “rising side”, of this work features a large face of Christ expressing sorrow. The bottom panel depicts an image of the Sacred Heart flanked by scenes of city and town dwellings. The top panel on this side contains the quote “Rising You Restored Life”. 

Adrian Kellard’s work was first shown at Soho’s Schreiber/Cutler Gallery in 1986 as the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. For the following five years, his work was featured in annual solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions at the gallery. In 1987, Kellard was diagnosed with AIDS. Although the life-prolonging AZT medication was finally approved in 1989 to treat the virus, the drug still had debilitating side-effects and no long-term efficacy. Kellard made the decision not to take conventional medication and relied on alternative healing therapies to continue his active artistic life.

After his diagnosis, Kellard’s work became less overtly religious; a more compassionate tone, expressed through subdued colors, was evident. On the fourteenth of November in 1991, Adrian Lee Kellard died at the age of thirty-two from complications due to AIDS. His work continues to be exhibited in such venues as Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, Saint Louis University’s Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. 

Notes: The largest collection of Adrian Kellard’s work is housed in the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at the Saint Louis University in Missouri. Its articles on Adrian Kellard can be located at: https://mocra.wordpress.com/tag/adrian-kellard/

The Adrian Kellard Tribute Page, which is maintained by Kellard’s nephew Chris, contains a section in which Kellard’s friends reminisce about his latter days working at Kenn’s Broome Street in Manhattan. The Facebook page is located at: https://www.facebook.com/adriankellard/

Kellard’s early personal development of faith and compassion had a profound effect on his art and attitude towards others. An article written by Carl Siciliano, the founder and former executive director of the largest housing program for homeless LBGTQ youth, the Ali Forney Center, can be found at: https://outreach.faith/2023/10/how-saint-therese-of-lisieux-helped-my-gay-friend-as-he-was-dying-of-aids/

A 2023 dissertation for the State University of New York, Purchase  by Leigh Ann Colby entitled “Faith and Function: The Art of Adrian Kellard” can be read at:  https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/14012

Top Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Lee Kellard”, Date Unknown, Palladium Print

Second Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard at His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Bottom Insert Image: Regina DeLuise, “Adrian Kellard in His Studio”, 1989, Palladium Print, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art