Mikhail Kuzmin: “Night Was Done. We Rose and After. . .”

Photographers Unknown, Night Was Done

Умывались, одевались,
После ночи целовались,
После ночи, полной ласк.
На сервизе лиловатом,
Будто с гостем, будто с братом,
Пили чай, не снявши маск.

Наши маски улыбались,
Наши взоры не встречались,
И уста наши немы.
Пели «Фауста», играли,
Будто ночи мы не знали,
Те, ночные, те — не мы.

Night was done. We rose and after
Washing, dressing, — kissed with laughter, —
After all the sweet night knows.
Lilac breakfast cups were clinking
While we sat like brothers drinking
Tea, — and kept our dominoes.

And our dominoes smiled greeting,
And our eyes avoided meeting
With our dumb lips’ secrecy.
“Faust” we sang, we played, denying
Night’s strange memories, strangely dying,
As though night’s twain were not we.

Mikhail Kuzmin, Night was Done. We Rose and After…, 1906

Translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky

Born in October of 1872 in Yaroslavi, Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin was a Russian poet, musician and novelist who was a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, an exceptionally creative period of poetry at the turn of the twentieth-century. Born into a noble family, he grew up in St. Petersburg where he studied music at its Conservatory under Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, known for his mastery of orchestration.

Although the main focus of his career became poetry, Mikhail Kuzmin still retained his interest in music. He composed the music for theatrical producer Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1906 production of Alexander Blok’s play “Balaganchik (The Fair Show Booth)”. Kuzmin’s personal compositions, sung while playing the piano, were popular in the city’s salons, such as The Stray Dog cafe and Ivanov’s Tower, the most famous of St.Petersburg’s literary salons and a major intelligentsia gathering place owned by the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov and his wife. Kuzmin was charismatic and well-liked, and the fact that he was open about his many relationships and trysts did not damage his social standing.

One of Kuzmin’s closest friends and a major influence as a young man was the aristocrat Georgy Chicherin, a distant relative of Aleksandr Pushkin and a passionate supporter of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and composer Wilhelm Wagner. In his youth, Kuzmin made pilgrimages to Egypt, Italy, and northern Russia with the Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox Church sect which maintained its old liturgy and traditions. Settling in St. Petersburg, he began, at the age of thirty-two, to associate with the art circle centered around the art magazine Mir Iskusstva or World of Art, which introduced Russian artists to the European art movements.

Mikhail Kuzmin’s first work, “The Green Collection of Verse and Prose”, was published in 1905; this work was seen by writer and critic Valery Bryusov who invited Kuzmin to publish in the literary magazine Vesy. Kuzmin published two works in 1906: his most celebrated work, “Alexandrian Songs”, a collection of free verse love songs with homosexual undertones, and his first erotic novel, “Wings”, a story of a young man in St. Petersburg learning to accept his homosexuality. Told with Platonic subtexts, the novel caused a scandal but was immensely popular. Kuzmin’s writing style earned praise from the critics, which protected it from prosecution in the Tsar’s crumbling regime.

Kuzmin’s work, original and philosophical with a simple unpretentious style, set him apart from his Symbolist contemporaries’ writings. With the success of his publications, Kuzmin became a member of Russia’s cultural elite, his work sought by prestigious journals and publishers. In 1908, Kuzmin published “Seti (Nets)”, his first collection of one-hundred poems which was widely acclaimed. He was living in that year with set-design artist Serge Sudeikin and Sudeikin’s first wife, Olga Glebova; however, he was asked to move out after Olga discovered the affair between Kuzmin and her husband.

In February of 1913, Mikhail Kuzmin met in Kiev the seventeen-year old writer and painter Yuri Yurkun, who would remain his lover until Kuzmin’s death. They lived in St. Petersburg with Yurkun’s mother in a communal apartment. Yurkun was arrested in 1918 by the Bolsheviks and detained for a brief period. Two years later, Yurkun met the young actress Olga Arbenina, who moved into the couple’s apartment and later married Yurkun. Kuzmin distanced himself from all political events after the Russian Revolution and continued writing; but it was clear that his writing was becoming less appreciated.

For the rest of his career, Kuzmin made his living primarily as a literary translator most notably of Shakespeare’s plays. The last volume of poetry Kuzmin published was the 1929 cycle of narrative and lyric poetry entitled “The Trout Breaks the Ice”, which except for two contemptuous reviews, was ignored by the Soviet press. Mikhail Kuzmin died in poverty of pneumonia in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, in March of 1936. Two years later in 1938, Yuri Yurkun was arrested by the secret police and executed in a massive political purge.

At Kuzmin’s birthday ceremony in 1920, poet Alexander Blok expressed in his speech a wish that conditions be created in the future where a literary artist such as Kuzmin would have the right “to remain himself”. Considered by literary figures of his time to be a pioneer for a future age of sexual tolerance, Kuzmin became after the revolution a nonperson. The Soviet government for decades attempted to dismiss Kuzmin’s contributions to literature and kept his diaries from Western scholars.

The personal diaries Kuzmin kept from 1905 to 1934, previously published only in part, occupy a special place in his legacy and has been prized by historians of Russian culture for its unique intimate view of the country’s cultural life during that period. Interest in Kuzmin’s works and life was revived in the 1970s with the 1977 publication of a three-volume edition of his poetry, and a twelve-volume collection of his prose which was published between 1984 and 2000. Several editions of Kuzmin’s works also have been published in Russia since 1990.

Top Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Mikail Kuzmin”, circa 1911

Second Insert Image: Aleksander Golovin, “Mikhail Kuzmin”, 1910 Oil on Canvas

Third Insert Image: Original Book Jacket, Hand-Colored Linocut by Ekaterina Turova for Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1913 “Dvum (For Two)”

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Yuri Yurkun”, Date Unknown

Rane Arroyo: “Secret Sleepwalking into Each Other’s Doubts”

Photographers Unknown, A World of Color

It’s the story of my life; minus
the big budget close-ups, plus a film
director unsure of my fate, minus
a season among sheep, plus mountains
looking like saddles for my true
love to ride, minus extras with tire irons,
minus awards, but the yes of two
men becoming one, the sí of kissing far
from angels (how Blakean), plus
Mormon underwear stripteases, Sundays
wearing vodka haloes, plus
nights spent on the floor and somehow
not stepped upon by God, plus
exorcisms and cold rivers, whispers in
Spanish from our missions, plus
secret sleepwalkings into each other’s
doubts, free to quote Wilde, plus
a plan to escape America, but
it’s the exact story of my life with
my cowboy, minus the sense of an impending
Patmos, that franchise of whispers and
wild kisses, minus the script
(we were our best scriptures), we the scarred
ghosts wearing landscape’s honesty, photogenic
Adam’s Apples, designer sorrow, minus
talk show rodeos, paparazzi round-ups,
politically-correct high fives, minus
the nightmares of winged horses with
hooves striking rocks to start fires, plus
slow motion nights on Speed, education
and library cards, the Spanish of my skin, plus
a belief in doom, nights bedding the moon,
two men without spin doctors, plus
an unedited nakedness, joy rides in beds
offering amnesty for the crime of being,
plus our Tijuana plans for a destiny makeover,
our nights as free verse Rimbauds
in cowboy boots, plus vaqueros keeping
quiet about specifics that become
the story of my life, plus Judgement Day
drinking games: showing God just
Brokeback Mountain to explain myself,
minus the editing, each moment as
Love’s monument and God’s cameo, in my
image, in my imagination, in my
nation while I and my cowboy are silent
having to learned to speak wind,
wind from nowhere, wind with news of home,
of our entangled shadows seeking
us with the plus and the minus of having
form, and we ride away from the cosmic
to the specifics of long nights without stars
with clenched fists, us undressed and
wondering what it feels like to become fiction

Rane Arroyo, Brokeback Mountain

Born in November of 1954 in Chicago, Rane Arroyo was an American poet, playwright and scholar of Puerto Rican descent. He earned his PhD in English and Cultural Studies form the University of Pittsburgh. Arroyo was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

In the 1980s, Rane Arroyo began his career as a performance artist in Chicago’s art galleries and eventually focused on his poetry. Openly gay, he wrote poetry, short stories and plays that were frequently self-reflexive, autobiographical works. Arroyo’s work dealt to a large degree with the issues of homosexuality, immigration, and the Latino culture. In his poetic stanzas and narratives, he juxtaposed his literary knowledge with contemporary pop culture.

Arroyo’s 1996 poetry collection, “The Singing Shark”, won the 1997 Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize and his poem “Breathing Lessons”, published in Emerson College’s literary journal, won a 1997 Pushcart Prize. For his 2005 collection “The Portable Famine”, Arroyo won the2004-05 John Ciardi Poetry Prize. Included among his ten poetry collections are the 2006 “Don Quixote Goes to the Moon”;“The Roswell Poems” and “Same-Sex Séances”, both published in 2008; and his last collection, the 2010 “White as Silver: Poems”.

In addition to his poetry, Rane Arroyo wrote a book of short stories in 2005 entitled “How to Name a Hurricane”. His performed plays include such works as “The Amateur Virgin”, “Emily Dickinson in Bandages”, Prayers for a Go-Go Boy”, and “The House with Black Windows”, co-written with poet Glenn Sheldon, and performed in 1995 by the Polaris Theater in New York City.

Arroyo served as the co-Vice President of the Board of Directors for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and as the co-Chair for the 2009 Chicago Conference. Nominated sixteen times for the Pushcart Prize for Poetry, Arroyo was awarded a Stonewall Books Chapbook Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize, The Sonora Review Chapbook Prize from Arizona University, and a 2007 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award in Poetry.

Rane Arroyo died in the early morning of April 7th in 2010 due to a cerebral hemorrhage. He is survived by his life-long partner, American poet Glenn Sheldon. In 2015, Rane Arroyo was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. His papers are archived at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York City.

Elisàr von Küpffer

The Paintings and Writings of Elisàr von Küpffer

Born in February of 1872 in Tallin, an industrial port city in Estonia, Elisàr August Emanuel von Küpffer was a Baltic-German artist, poet, historian and anthropologist who used the pseudonym Elisarion for most of his writings. The only son of an aristocratic family, he was in delicate health from an early age, having suffered from scarlet fever, meningitis, arthritis and measles. Von Küpffer was a good student throughout his formative years and wrote his first play, “Don Irsino”, at the age of nine.

In 1891 at the age of nineteen, Elisàr von Küpffer entered Saint Petersburg’s German Annenschule, a school in the Levashovo municipal area founded for its German citizens. During this time, he met historian and philosopher Eduard von Mayer, who would become his best friend, and his first partner Agnes von Hoyningen Huene. In 1894, von Küpffer relocated to Germany where he published, in the following year, his first poetry collection “Leben und Liebe (Life and Love)”. In the autumn of 1895, he entered the Berlin Art Academy and moved in with Eduard von Mayer; Von Küpffer later left his partner Agnes in 1896.

Von Küpffer wrote two dramas in 1896, “Irrlichter (Wisps)” and “Der Herr der Welt (Master of the World)”, as well as three one-act plays. He published his anthology “Ehrlos {Infamous)” in the following year. After Eduard von Mayer’s graduation at the University of Halle in 1897, the two men travelled throughout Italy, Southern France and Switzerland before returning to Berlin. In the early part of 1900, Adolf Brand, whose publishing firm produced the German homosexual periodical “Der Eigene (The Unique)”, published von Küpffer’s influential anthology of homoerotic literature “Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltiliteratur (Love of Favorites and Between Friends in World Literature). This anthology was created in part as a protest against the two-year imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

In 1901, Elisàr von Küpffer published his first book of poems, “Auferstehung, Irdische Gedichte (Resurrection, Earthly Poems”. His book on one of the first High Renaissance painters Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known by the nickname Il Sodoma, was published in 1908. Together in 1911, Von Küpffer and Eduard von Mayer founded the Munich publishing house Klaristische Verlag Akropolis, through which von Küpffer published three major works: “Hymns of the Holy Castle”, “A New Flight and a Holy Castle”, and a play entitled “Aino und Tio”. French novelist and poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, who lived in self-exile in Capri with his lover Nino Cesarini, also reviewed and published von Küpffer’s work in his gay magazine “Akademos”, named after an Attic hero in Greek mythology.

In 1913, von Küpffer had the first exhibition of his artwork at the Brogi Gallery in Florence. With growing animosity towards Germans at the outbreak of World War I, he and von Mayer left Italy and moved to Ticino, one of the Swiss Cantons, where von Küpffer established himself as a muralist and painter. Both were granted citizenship in 1922 and settled in a villa with a large art collection in the Swiss municipality of Minusio. Also a photographer, von Küpffer shot many photographic studies of young men to use in the creation of his paintings, although, most of his works featured youthful self-portraits.

In 1911, Elisàr von Küpffer and Eduard von Mayer established the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion, a small community in Weimar, Germany, based on a Neo-religious idea of Clarism, or clarity. In 1926, they established the second community at Minusio. During the 1930s, there was a large number of visitors; however, by the outbreak of World War II, the visitations had ceased. As von Küpffer’s health declined, he became increasingly reclusive until his death in late October of 1942, at the age of seventy. Elisàr von Küpffer’s ashes are interred in the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion in Minusio, alongside the ashes of Eduard von Mayer, who died in 1960.

After von Küpffer’s death, Eduard von Mayer, who was the main proponent of the Clarism communities, devoted his time to documenting and securing their communal achievements, which included letters, sketches, drawings, plans, and paintings. However, he also did a purging of the homosexual aspect of his relationship with von Küpffer: the intimate correspondence between them, traces of their association with the “Der Eigene” magazine, any contributions to the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and proofs of his authorship to the 1923 “Das Mysterium der Geschiechter (The Mystery of the Sexes)” which expounded the Claristic theory of the sexes.

In his will, Eduard von Mayer left the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion and all its contents to the Canton of Ticino and the property to the municipality of Minusio on condition that the gardens should be made accessible to the public. It was not until 1968 that the community decided to accept this gift. The material that is necessary for a better understanding of its pictorial and philosophical oeuvre was to be kept in a cupboard on the ground floor. The paintings, the urns with Elisàr von Kupffer and Eduard von Mayer’s ashes, and family heirlooms were to remain in the building. Furthermore, the gardens were to be maintained.

Today the men’s legacy is distributed across different places in the community. Most of the surviving paintings, fragments of the former library, and the literary remains can be found in a room of the former sacred building. The inventory in its entirety has yet to be undertaken. The monumental cyclorama “Die Klarwelt der Seligen (The Clear World of the Blissful)” was saved from destruction and later installed at Monte Verità where it can be visited under provisional circumstances. The Centro Culturale Elisarion, whose program is dedicated to cultural projects in the community of Minusio, opened in 1981.

Notes: The website of the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion, which includes a life history of Elisàr von Küpffer, a collection of his artwork, and a history of the community project, is located at: http://www.elisarion.ch/en/welcome.html

For those interested, I recently found an article written by gay American author and mathematician Hubert Kennedy,“Reviews of Seven Gay Classics”, which discusses seven historical publications on homosexuality among which is “The Riddle of ‘Man-Manly’ Love” written by German gay emancipation advocate Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. This collection of reviews can be found at: https://hubertkennedy.angelfire.com/Classic.pdf

Second Insert Image: Elisàr von Küpffer, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, The Entrance to the Cyclorama at the Sanctuarium Arts Elisarion

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Elisàr von Kupffer”, 1929-1930, Centro Culturale e Museo Elisarion, Minusio

Alireza Shojaian

The Artwork of Alireza Shojaian

Born in Tehran in September of 1988, Alireza Shojaian is an Iranian artist. Shojaian received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Tehran’s Islamic Azad University in 2014. Encouraged in his art studies by one of his professors, he began to explore his queer identity in his work through themes and narratives. Shojaian pursued his Masters of Fine Arts for two years at the Islamic Azad University; however, as his final thesis project was queer art, he was denied his degree.

In 2015, Shojaian’s artwork, the majority of which were prints, appeared in several group exhibitions in Tehran including shows at Laleh Art Gallery and Vista Art Gallery. He also exhibited work at the 2015 Printmaking Exhibition held at the Cultural Section of the Embassy of Cote d’Ivoire.

The prevalent theme in Alireza Shojaian’s work is homosexuality in both identity and relationships. His work reflects on his own personal experiences as a queer person and the queer history of western Asia and its context in present society. Created with acrylics and color pencils, Shojaian’s images depict male figures, most often nude, in both portrait form and group presentations. His drawings present intimate relationships, often entwined and embracing, sometimes fighting; however, they all attempt to present real stories that are mutual to all human beings. Through his art, Shojaian attempts to fight societal prejudice against LGBTQ people and make space for non-heteronormative masculine identities.

Unable to exhibit work dealing with issues affecting the queer community in an open dialogue with the Iranian people, Shojaian relocated in 2016 to Beirut, Lebanon, as a place with more freedom to develop his art and identity. His university professor in Tehran, who knew of Shojaian’s sexual orientation, connected him with the owner of the ArtLab Gallery in Beirut, Antoine Haddad, who offered him a solo show. Shojaian entered the Beirut art scene with two solo exhibitions at the Artlab Gallery: the 2017 “Corpe à Corps” and “Sweet Blasphemy” held in 2018.

The title for the “Sweet Blasphemy” exhibition was taken from Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s novel entitled “The Forty Rules of Love”. This exhibition was centered on the love story of Persian poet Jalai ad-Din Muhammed Rumi and fellow poet Shams-i-Tabrizi. After years living together in the Turkish city of Konya, Shams left Rumi, who after Sham’s untimely death dedicated his writings to his departed lover. The main image of the show consisted of a partially nude male figure, either asleep or dead, lying on a white blanket. Eight additional drawings, all modeled by Lebanese artist Mo Khansa, were included in the highly successful sold-out show.

Alireza Shojaian exhibited his work at the Beirut Art Fair in 2017 and 2018. He relocated to Paris in 2019 after being offered by the French Embassy in Lebanon an art residency with the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Shojaian served as resident-in-art at La Villa les Pinsons in 2019 to 2020 and at Château de Lourmarin in 2021. His work was most recently presented in “Ombres D’Hommes” held at Nice’s Depardieu Gallery and in a group exhibition at Paris’s Lafalande Gallery, both in 2021.

Alireza Shojaian’s personal website, containing images, contact information and press coverage, can be found at: https://www.alirezashojaian.com

Note: A more extensive biography on Alireza Shojaian, including images of his work, can be found in the November 30th of 2018 issue of Queer Here located at: https://wearequeerhere.com/queerart

Middle Insert Image: Alireza Shojaian, “Remi”, 2021, Acrylic and Color Pencil, 60 x 60 cm, Private Collection

Jim French

The Photography of Jim French

Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in July of 1932, James Thomas French was an American artist, photographer, illustrator, filmmaker, and publisher. He is best known for his association with COLT Studio, one of the most successful gay male erotica companies in the United States.

For his formal art education, Jim French entered the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in 1950 to study towards a career in fashion illustration similar to that of J.C. Leyendecker. In 1953, the year before his graduation from the Museum School, he joined the United States Army Reserves and went on active duty in 1955; French earned a honorable discharge from service in 1957. Settled in New York City, he pursued a successful freelance career as an advertising illustrator for several Madison Avenue advertising firms.

In addition to his work for Neiman Marcus and other high-end department stores, French also created textile designs for designer Tammis Keefe; collections of her work are now housed in Cooper Union and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Working with Columbia Records, he created portrait drawings of singers, such as Johnny Mathis. Frank Sinatra and Maria Callas, for use as album art. While working on Madison Avenue in the mid-1960s, French drew homoerotic drawings in his spare time, under the pseudonym of Arion. His drawings were offered in 1966 through Ed Wild’s Times Square Studio as well as his own short-lived mail order venture, the Arion Studio.

Jim French was approached by a friend from his Army days, Saul Stollman, who had seen some of his Arion drawings, to create a physique studio in New York City. French adopted a new pseudonym for this venture, Kurt Lüger, and under the name of Lüger Studios began producing new, more masculine figured illustrations, which featured leather men, cowboys, wrestlers, and other similar archetypes. Lüger Studio artwork first appeared as two drawings from the “Cowboy” series in the May/June 1966 issue of “Young Physique”. This series of six to eight drawings was advertised in other male erotica magazines and was available for purchase through mail order.

The success of Lüger Studio developed quickly after being featured in the pages and on the covers of a wide assortment of physique magazines. Saul Stollman bought out French’s interests in the studio in February of 1968 and briefly ran the business on his own. However, now featuring photographs and eight millimeter films from substandard producers, Lüger Studio did not attract enough interest to survive beyond 1968.

On December 5th of 1967, Jim French and Lou Thomas, a friend and astute businessman, took out a business license to form COLT Studio. Although originally named to evoke the image of the Colt pistol, the studio quickly changed its COLT image to that of a stallion. For this new venture, French adopted a new pseudonym, Rip Colt, and began to make highly detailed pencil drawings, using the newly marketed Polaroid camera to shoot photographs of male models for research studies. Before the camera’s advent, it had been a challenge getting erotic subject matter that was shot on film processed as many venues were reluctant to deal with this material. The Polaroid camera which contained its own processor solved that issue with its instant results.

In the initial years of the company, COLT Studio released French’s illustrations, under the Rip Colt name, and photo sets of masculine male models, The studio eventually added short films, magazines and calendars. Based for six years in New York City, COLT Studio was relocated in 1974 to Studio City in California, due to French’s frequent travels to Southern California. At this time, French bought the company shares owned by his partner Lou Thomas, who soon formed his own business, Target Studios, a venture which provided the underground demographic with quality homoerotic art and film.

COLT Studio grew into one of the most successful gay photography studios of its time and offered the highest quality male erotica commercially available. Jim French’s company was famous not only for its stable of male models, but also for its magazine brands which included Spurs, COLT Men, Manpower, and its film venue, COLT Studios Presents. French ran the company until 2003 when he sold the studio to former Falcon Studios director John Rutherford and his partner Tom Settle. For a few years after the sale of COLT Studio, Jim French continued to privately sell salon-style prints of his photographs before he settled into quiet retirement. Jim French died peacefully in his sleep at his Palm Springs, California, home on the 15th of June in 2017. He was survived by his husband Jeff Turner.

Under his own publishing imprint State of Man, Jim French published eight volumes of fine art male photography from 1972 to 1999, among which are “Man”, “Quorum”, “The Art of Jim French: the Nude Male”, and “Opus Deorum”. French’s work has been published in several collections: Felix Lance Falkon’s 1972 “A Historic Collection of Gay Art”; a collection of early 1970s photographs of model David Scrivanek entitled “Like a Moth to a Flame”; and an anthology of his early Polaroid photographs from the 1960s and early 1970s entitled “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor: Jim French Polaroids”. French’s photographs and illustrations can be found in many private and public collections.

Notes: In 2004, Gabriel Goldberg convinced Jim French to tell his own story to the public for the first time. This personal account entitled “Life Thru a Lens: Jim French: In His Own Words” can be found at the Advocate online magazine located at: https://www.advocate.com/people/2017/6/29/story-jim-french-and-colt

Many of Jim French’s Polaroid photographs can be found at the Wessel and O’Connor Fine Art website located at: https://wesseloconnor.com/exhibits/french/french1.phpd

Second Insert Image: Jim French, Untitled (Sailor with Shadow), Polaroid Print, 10.8 x 8.3 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Jim French, Untitled (Sailor), Polaroid Print, 10.8 x 8.3 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jim French, Untitled, circa 1970s, Gelatin Silver Print, 56.5 x 71.7 cm, Private Collection

Maurice Kenny: “Hands Which Did Not Recognize Me”

Photographers Unknown, Hands Which Did Not Recognize Me

The book lay unread in my lap
snow gathered at the window
from Brooklyn it was a long ride
the Greyhound followed the plow
from Syracuse to Watertown
to country cheese and maples
tired rivers and closed paper mills
home to gossipy aunts . . .
their dandelions and pregnant cats . . .
home to cedars and fields of boulders
cold graves under willows and pine
home from Brooklyn to the reservation
that was not home
to songs I could not sing
to dances I could not dance
from Brooklyn bars and ghetto rats
to steaming horses stomping frozen earth
barns and privies lost in blizzards
home to a Nation, Mohawk
to faces I did not know
and hands which did not recognize me
to names and doors
my father shut

Maurice Kenny, Going Home, Between Two Rivers, 1988

The youngest of three children to a father of Mohawk and Irish heritage and a mother of English and Seneca heritage, Maurice Frank Kenny was born in Watertown, New York, in August of 1929. He spent his younger years in Watertown and on a family farm in nearby Cape Vincent. After his parents’ separation, Kenny remained with his father in Watertown until running away, at age sixteen, to Bayonne, New Jersey, to live with his mother. Truant at school, he was returned to his father’s custody in Watertown where he completed his high school education.

Upon graduation, Maurice Kenny spent the summer traveling with a theater troupe in New York State. He spent a year in New York City attempting to establish a career as an actor; but after a year, he returned home. Kenny studied under Professors of English Warner Beyer and Roy Marz, a Fulbright Scholar, at Indiana’s Butler University, where he graduated in 1956 with a degree in English. He took additional classes under author and Professor of English Douglas Angus at St. Lawrence University in New York.

Kenny moved to Manhattan, New York, in 1957 and became a manger for Marboro Books, which put him in contact with literary, cinematic and theatrical figures. He also took courses at New York University, where he met and studied under the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress, Louise Bogan, who influenced his early development as a writer.

Maurice Kenny began writing poetry as a teenager. He was particularly influenced by the writings of Walt Whitman, whose natural language and rhythm were qualities he found later in Native American oral literature. Encouraged by his former professor Douglas Angus, Kenny wrote the poems of his first chapbook, the 1956 “The Hopeless Kill”. His first full-length collection, “Dead Letters Sent and Other Poems”, was published in 1958, his first year at New York University. After a hiatus of travel in the early 1960s, Kenny settled for two decades in Brooklyn Heights, New York, to concentrate on his poetry.

Kenny’s career coincided with a period of activism for Native Americans. In 1969 Native American activists occupied Alcatraz Island and, two years later, the American Indian movement was formed. A series of confrontations with federal authorities followed, which culminated in a violent confrontation in early 1973 at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Native Americans were starting to embrace their traditional cultures and reject assimilation into the general society. A renaissance in Native American literature began as a result of native writers and poets seeking to authenticate their cultural identities. Poets, such as Kenny, began to draw on their heritage to produce a synthesis of traditional and modern forms in their work.

Maurice Kenny’s exploration of his heritage resulted in his long 1973 poem “I Am the Sun”, which was written in response to the actions at Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre and the culmination of the pan-tribal Ghost Dance religion. His 1977 “North: Poems of Home”, the first full-length collection published after a span of thirteen years, and the 1979 “Dancing Back Strong the Nation” epitomized the growing consciousness of his native heritage.

Kenny asserted his gay identity in the 1976 “Gay Sunshine” which included the poem “Winkle” and “Tinselled Bucks: An Historical Study in Indian Homosexuality”, a essay that claimed the two-spirit, or berdache, tradition as a shining example for contemporary Native Americans. Kenny was among the first nationally recognized American Indians to come out publicly as gay.

Maurice Kenny’s “Blackrobe Isaac Jogues”, published in 1982, told the story of a Jesuit missionary martyred in 1646 by the Mohawks; it received the National Public Radio Award for Broadcasting and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His “Takonwatonti / Molly Brant” is narrated by a prominent Mohawk woman who married an Englishman. Kenny in these works and later ones portrayed individuals who inhabit two worlds at the same time and crossed the boundaries between cultures and identities, such as missionaries among Indians, Indians in a white society, and gay men in a heterosexual world.

In 1986, Kenny moved back to upstate New York and settled in Saranac Lake. He continued to travel and teach, and held the position of poet-in-residence at North Country Community College and the Potsdam campus of the University of New York. In 1995, Kenny received an honorary doctorate from the St. Lawrence University. He published over thirty collections of poetry, essays and fiction; his work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. A recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Maurice Kenny passed away, at the age of eighty-six, on April 16th of 2016.

Note: The anthropologist James Mooney, born 1861, wrote a thousand-page account of the tragic events at Wounded Knee which was published in 1896. A summary of this account and others written about the massacre, including an article on the Ghost Dance, can be found at: https://www.encyclopedia.com/places/united-states-and-canada/miscellaneous-us-geography/wounded-knee

Luis Medina

The Photography of Luis Medina

Born in Havana in June of 1942, Luis Medina was a Cuban-American photographer based in Chicago, whose work focused on the documentation of marginalized groups, such as the gay and Latino communities. During his childhood, he attended a private military school until 1958 when, at the age of sixteen, he left for Spain to complete his education. In Spain, Medina met the exiled Cuban poet and writer Gastón Baquero, who introduced him to Spanish literature, painting, and architecture. He toured through Europe, working a series of jobs to finance his trip, and visited Italy, Germany and France.

In 1961, Luis Medina migrated to Miami, Florida, and was reunited with his mother and stepfather, who had immigrated from Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Supporting himself with temporary jobs, he studied history, philosophy and sociology at Miami Dade Junior College, where he graduated with honors in 1967. At Miami Dade, Medina reunited with old friends, among whom was his closest friend José Lopez, a fellow student from the military academy in Havana.

Sensing he was stagnating in Miami, Medina left the influence of his parents’ Cuban culture and relocated to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with dreams of becoming a sculptor. Reaching a similar decision about life in Miami, José Lopez also moved to Chicago to attend its Art Institute. The two friends found two American mentors at the Institute: Harold Allen, a teacher who was an architectural photographer, and Hugh Edwards, who was the Institute’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs.

A Mormon in upbringing, Harold Allen was a steadfast, quiet man who was well informed in art history and proficient as a photographer. It was Allen who first instilled in Medina a fascination for photography. In working with Allen on site photograph projects, Medina learned how to calculate a precise point of view and capture the quality of light. Self-educated in French literature, Art history and American history, Hugh Edwards came from a working-class family. A friend of musician Duke Ellington, he was trained in classical music, appreciated a wide range of singers and motion pictures, and was well-read in the works of Faulkner, Proust, Whitman, and other notable authors. Through these mentors, Medina and Lopez gained an unique education in photography and North American culture.

Luis Medina turned his artistic interests to photography in a collaborative effort with José Lopez. They had their first joint museum exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973; versions of the show traveled to Finland in 1974 and Australia in 1976 as a representative of North American photography. After being introduced to Hugh Edward’s Puerto Rican friends, Medina and Lopez began taking images of the diverse cultures in the city of Chicago. In the fall of 1973, they worked with an art historian and an architect in Illinois’s Quincy and Adams counties photographing its architecture and local crafts for the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration’s project, “Community Rediscovery ’76″.

In 1974, Medina and Lopez worked together to document the campus of the University of Chicago for a book entitled “Dreams in Stone”. With their aesthetic and personal points of view diverging, their intimate eleven-year partnership eventually dissolved. After an illness in 1977, Lopez moved back to Miami and gave up photography; Medina inherited their mutual work and stayed on in Chicago. With Lopez’z departure, Medina’s photography shifted in focus; his sudden domestic solitude generated less optimistic and more introspective work. Rekindling his interest in human contradictions and tragedies, he began to develop a more private side of work which, more satisfying and outspoken, gave voice to his Cuban origins.

Luis Medina began a series of photographs on Latin-American life in Chicago, which included Puerto Rican Day parades and local weddings. He also began to photograph Chicago’s LGBTQ scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of work that documented the community from a unique inside perspective. Beginning in 1977, Medina started photographing the altars and ceremonies of the African-Cuban religious folk cult known as Santeria. Although he continued to produce architectural photos on commission, the main focus of his work became his immediate surroundings. Seeing the explosion of territorial graffiti throughout the city, Medina started photographing Chicago’s neighborhood youth gangs and their personalized graffiti. Through time, he earned the trust of the gangs and began to also shoot their portraits. A solo exhibition of both portraits and photographed graffiti was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1980.

Beginning in late 1984, Medina was diagnosed with a cytomegalovirus infection, which often is associated with AIDS; his infection possibly developed as early as 1981 and had now become debilitating. Medina lost partial control of his left hand but, through a course of handwriting exercises, slowly regained his dexterity. He kept his rapidly progressing illness a secret from his family and friends and continued to believe in his survival. By June of 1985, Medina was with his parents in Miami and knew he was dying. Surrounded by his parents and a few friends, Luis Medina died, at the age of forty-three, at Jackson Memorial Hospital on October 12th of 1985.

The publishing of Luis Medina’s work after his death was accomplished through the efforts of his mother, Olga Bohorques, who was determined that his work would not be forgotten, and members of Chicago’s Photo Circle and its Art Institute. A retrospective of Medina’s work, entitled “Facts and Fables by Luis Medina, Photographer”, was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993. His work also appeared in the 2018 group exhibition, “Never So Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950-1980”. held as part of Art Design Chicago.

Note: A collection of Medina’s photographs, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, is housed in the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection. The collection is comprised of approximately twenty-two thousand items of mixed media: slides, silver gelatin prints, negatives and color prints. The collection is unprocessed but open for research.

Kenneth Pobo: “I Colored the Paper Lavender”

Photographers Unknown, Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Fifteen

After Langston Hughes

Professor, you tell us about
your nice wife and two children.
People should be nice. I’m nice.
Sometimes I’m smug. I have
bad days. You’re straight,
a perfectly fitted back door.
Gay, I don’t fit. Is it good
to fit? You say tonight
I should write a poem
about myself. I’ve written
a few before. They stay in
my notebook like condoms
in a wallet. I’ll pull one out.
It won’t be about wives
and kids and fitting in.
Is that OK? I could fake it
for an A. You wouldn’t
dock me for following
instructions, right?

So here’s my poem-
I colored the paper lavender
just for you.

Kenneth Pobo, Theme for English C, The Antlantis Hit Parade, American Journal of Poetry, 2019

Born in August of 1954 in suburban Chicago, Kenneth Pobo is a poet, essayist, critic and story writer. The only child of Louis Pobo, a chemist, and Myrtle Pobo, a housewife active in church activities and later.very supportive of her gay son and his partner. Both of Pobo’s parents were enthusiastic gardeners, a trait which he later emulated in his adult life.

Kenneth Pobo began his early poetic work, influenced by his love of 1960s popular music, as an outlet for emotions he could not express as a gay child in the contemporary society. His first poem, written on July 4th of 1970, was an imitation of the 1969 song “Crystal Blue Persuasion” by Tommy James and the Shondells. As Pobo stated in the introduction to his 2002 collection entitled “Greatest Hits” , he used the bubblegum imagery of pop music as an overlay for emerging sexual feelings.

Pobo received his Bachelor of Arts in 1976 from Wheaton College in Illinois. In 1979, he earned his Master of Arts in English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where he studied under James Liddy, a poet both Irish Catholic and gay, who is best known for his collections, “A Blue Smoke” and “Blue Mountain”. Pobo’s creative writing thesis, later published with changes as a chapbook in 1981, was entitled “Billions of Lit Cigarettes”. Pobo was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1983; his creative writing dissertation was entitled “A Vision Tested in the Flower: The Aaron Stern Poems”.

Kenneth Pobo writes in a wide variety of styles and poetic forms. His work contains references from all the things that enthuse his life, including music, gardening, his friends, astronomy, movie stars, naps, and martinis, among others. Pobo’s poetry covers many topics including politics and popular culture, as well as contemporary gay life with its love and passions. The majority of his poems are of medium length; however, great attention is paid to the smallest detail even though it might at first seem mundane.

The first collection of poetry by Pobo was the 1979 “Musings from the Porchlit Sea”. In this volume, he uses his knowledge of past literary verse and, by the addition of popular cultural models such as disco, gives the verse a new voice for contemporary culture. A prominent example is his poem “The Disco Version of the Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” which took T. S. Eliot’s 1915 canonical poem and molded it into a campy exposé of contemporary life.

Pobo’s second volume of poetry, “Evergreen”, was published as a chapbook in 1985. Inspired again by Tommy James and the Shondells, the collection takes its title from a song on their 1969 “Cellophane Symphony” album. “Evergreen” features poems about plants, places, and people he admires; the volume includes the poem “Cass” about Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas band. A fictional poem set during the Civil War is also included in this collection. Entitled “Joshua to Andy, Appomatox, 1865”, the poem tells the story of two soldiers who were lovers and, ironically, parted with the end of hostilities. Within this homage to previous war poems by such poets as Whitman and Melville, Pobo placed homosexual love and tenderness inside the world of warfare.

Kenneth Pobo’s 1986 chapbook “A Pause Inside Duck” contains overtly political poems that are composed in traditional poetic form. Contained in the 1991 “Ferns on Fire” is his angriest gay political poem, “Shasta”, which connects the centuries-long holocaust of Native Americans peoples with the lives of contemporary gay men. The 1996 “A Barbaric Yawp on the Rocks” contains the usual mundane details and pop references, such as The Cowsills and the Rolling Stones; however, Pobo uses these references more sharply in his depictions of both political and romantic modern gay life experiences.

Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. His most recent works include the 2011 chapbook “Ice and Gaywings” which won the Qarrtsiluni Chapbook Contest; the 2012 chapbook “Save My Place”; a collection of both prose and traditionally composed poems entitled “The Antlantis Hit Parade” and “Dindi Expecting Snow”, both published in 2019; and the 2020 “Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose” which won the Stonewall Chapbook Competition.

In addition to poetry, Pobo also writes fiction and essays which include “The Gay/Lesbian Teacher as a Role Model” for the March/April 1999 edition of “The Humanist” magazine and “But Can You Dance to It? Musical Imagery in the Poetry of Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, and David Trinidad” for the October edition of the “Intercultural Writer’s Review”.

Kenneth Pobo taught English and Creative Writing at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, for thirty years until his retirement in 2020. He shares his life with his husband, Stanley Slater, in Media, Pennsylvania.

Note: A reading by Kenneth Pobo of his poem “Sudden Fear”, titled after the 1952 Joan Crawford movie, can be found at the online crime poetry weekly, “The Five-Two”, located at: https://poemsoncrime.blogspot.com/2015/09/kenneth-pobo.html

Douglas Alain Powell: “The Earth Has Asserted Itself”

Photographers Unknown, The Earth Has Asserted Itself

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road
its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss?
—this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle
and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white

past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would
—poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves

I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions:
the smell of a bare neck in summer
a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs
the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill

in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields
the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty

if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them
anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract

the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks
—that was all

and yes, someone took me in his car. and another against the low fence
in the park at the end of our block. under the willow branches
where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away

I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains
the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing
the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night

granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted
and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart

for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing:
a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink
a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass

we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs
the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing
and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing

you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink
half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green

you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us.

you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song

—for Haines Eason

D. A. Powell, continental divide, Chronic, 2009, Graywolf Press

Born in Albany, Georgia in May of 1963, Douglas Alain Powell is an American poet whose work is experimental in form. Growing up in Georgia and Tennessee, he relocated, after his parents’ divorce, with his brother to live in California with their mother and new stepfather. Powell lived on and off the streets in his teen years, often running away from home and working odd jobs to support himself. He graduated from Lindhurst High School and made several attempts at colleges, including a short term at San Jose State University.

At the age of twenty-two, Powell entered Sonoma State University where he began to write poetry under the tutorage of poet David Bromige. During his years in Sonoma County, he organized poetry readings and co-founded “Avec”, which became a major journal of the post-Language Poetry avant-garde. Powell received his Bachelor of Arts in English in 1991 and his Masters in English in 1993, both from Sonoma State University.

After completing his graduate studies, Douglas Powell entered the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and received his Masters in Fine Arts in 1996. For his work during the Writer’s Workshop, he received an Academy of American Poets prize. While in Iowa, Powell wrote his first full-length poetry collection, “Tea”, which focused on AIDS in particular and the gay subculture in general. The poems in this collection examine pain, loss, abuse, rejection and suffering; however, the essence of the volume is one of survival. Published in 1998 after Powell’s return to California. this first work generated a great deal of excitement. Powell’s openness about his HIV-positive status contributed to interest in the book and readers’ response to it.

The writers cited by Powell as influences on his work cover a wide range; he uses their writings as a litmus test for his own work. These writers include t. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, and the Black Mountain poets, among others. Known for his syntactically inventive, longer lined and sometimes untitled work, Powell creates poems that are almost collage-like in form, where fragmentary elements of allusions and references are joined together into mosaic compositions. The source list for his 1998 volume of poems, “Tea”, include the following: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, the Supremes, Tennessee Williams, mid-1980s disco divas, gay slang, Batman’s sidekick Robin, and “The Exorcist”, among others.

Settled in California, Powell began doing work in San Francisco’s new media industry. In 1997, he was awarded a Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. In addition to his career as a poet, Powell was a university professor with teaching positions at Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University and Harvard University, where he was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry, a prestigious five-year position.

In 2000, Douglas Powell’s second collection of poetry, entitled “Lunch”, was published by the Wesleyan University Press. This volume built on the survival aspect in “Tea” and directed it onward to restoration and rejuvenation. While again examining the issue of AIDS, the poems were not about dying from the virus, but about living with it and through it. “Lunch” was more eclectic, both in its formality and theme, and contained biblical and mythological allusions, such as the stories of King Midas and the birth of Aphrodite. The lines in the poems were shorter than those in “Tea”, almost conventional, while the poems were generally longer in length, with a greater variety.

Powell’s next collection of poems, “Cocktails”, was published in 2004 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His 2009 “Chronic” won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The 2012 “Useless Landscapes, or a Guide for Boys” was a witty and emotional collection of poems which examined the occupied spaces of boonies, backstages, bathhouses, and bars. This fifth volume of poetry by Powell won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His poetry can also be found in the 2008 anthology “Best American Poetry” and “American Hybrid”, an anthology published in 2009.

Note: A collection of twenty-six poems by Douglas Alain Powell, including a reading of his poem “continental divide”, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. The link to the recorded reading is: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51144/continental-divide

Justin Liam O’Brien

Paintings by Justin Liam O’Brien

Born in Flushing, New York in 1991, Justin Liam O’Brien is a painter and digital artist. In his early years, he was interested in drawing concept art, graphic novels, and modeling video games, whose construction became a serious occupation until his early twenties. After attending Long Island’s Suffolk County Community College, O’Brien earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Arts and 3D Animation from the Pratt Institute in 2016.

In 2017, O’Brien started producing paintings with figurative elements and gradually developed a style which combined his skills at animation with his identity as a queer person. Impressed by the works of Diego Rivera and Leger, O’Brien strived to achieve their simplicity in his early figurative paintings; his focus gradually changed to more complex, narrative works which expressed his personal life and relationships. With his technical painting skill, O’Brien is able to express an exploration of issues centered on a very clear, delineated community of people.

Justin Liam O’Brien’s figurative paintings emerge from his experiences of queer affection, tenderness, longing, and loneliness. The male figures are archetypal, fashioned with soft edges and placed in carefully crafted tableaux, which reflect his technical training in the digital arts. While drawing on personal experiences, O’Brien portrays universal, relatable narratives, often tinged with tension or poignancy, that speak to our feelings of self-doubt and powerlessness. Through these visual communications, he hopes to clarify to its viewers our shared experiences and feelings, and in this way strengthen the communal bond.

In November of 2019, O’Brien had his debut solo exhibition, entitled “Losing in the Form of Darkness”, at New York’s Monya Rowe Gallery on West 30th Street. The figurative compositions in this show depicted unidentified male characters, with blurred features, engaged solitarily or entangled in moments of leisure and passion, as well as, boredom and loneliness. In conjunction with the exhibition, O’Brien developed a book of sketches, executed in the previous year, which contained a more personal side of his work.

In May of 2020, Justin Liam O’Brien left his position as a 3D modeler for a real estate company and began to concentrate full time on his studio painting. He exhibited his paintings in two shows that year. The first was entitled “Damned by the Rainbow” and was held in July at the GNYP Gallery in Berlin; the title of this show was suggested by a verse from French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The exhibited work reflected O’Brien’s exploration of intimacy and the emotions that emerge in shared personal space.

In November of 2020, O’Brien’s solo show “When Acting as a Wave” opened at Los Angeles’s Richard Heller Gallery. His paintings frequently examine the effects of being close to people, which can be wonderful or terrible depending on circumstances. O’Brien’s paintings in this show, executed during the period of covid quarantine and isolation, showed these opposing feelings at their balance point. His 2020 “Bread on a Seder Plate” shows a gathering of friends with a lone figure almost blending into the wall. Another painting in the show, “I’m Afraid of How This Ends”, shows a room, suggestive of a prison cell, with two figures together, each alone except for the other, with seemingly no means of escape.

In September of 2021, Justin Liam O’Brien returned to the Monya Rowe Gallery for an exhibition entitled “Dreams”, the centerpiece of which was a large canvas, “NYC Inferno”, an ode to a sex party in Brooklyn, New York. Other works in the exhibition derived from references in queer cinema and literature, and the religious art of Italian Early-Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. O’Brien’s other 2021 shows at the gallery included “Me, Myself and I” and “Equal Affections”.

O’Brien’s works have been exhibited in many group exhibitions including presentations at Galerie LJ in Paris; Chart Gallery and the High Line Nine, both galleries in New York City; the contemporary Kapp Kapp Gallery in Philadelphia; and Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin, among others.

“I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would forever be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.”

– Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), 1873

Notes: More images and information on Justin Liam O’Brien’s work can be found at the artist’s site located at: http://justinliamobrien.com

Justin Liam O’Brien’s sketchbook “Losing in the Form of Darkness”, which was published in conjunction of his exhibition of the same name, can be found at the online Raw Meat Collective located at: https://rawmeatcollective.com/shop/losing-in-the-form-of-darkness-by-justin-liam-obrien

Top Insert Image: Laura June Kirsch, “Justin Liam O’Brien”, 2020, Juxtapoz Magazine

Second Insert Image: James Liam O’Brien, “Fais Comme Si J’Avais Pris La Mer”, 2021, Oil on Linen, 175 x 139.7 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Justin Liam O’Brien, “Stay in My Arms, If You Dare?, 2018, Oil on Canvas, Monya Rowe Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Justin Liam O’Brien, “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”, 2021, Oil on Linen, 152.4 x 152.4 cm, Monya Rowe Gallery

Alejandro Amenábar: Film History Series

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Thirteen Men

Born in Santiago in March of 1972, Alejandro Fernando Amenábar Cantos is a Spanish-Chilean film director, composer, and screenwriter. In August of 1973, his family relocated to Spain where they settled in Madrid, initially living in a camper-van and later moving to a complex in Madrid’s outer neighborhoods. From the age of fifteen, Amenábar was passionate about cinematic art; he also wrote stories and musical compositions for the guitar and keyboard.

Amenábar began his education at The Immaculate Piarist Fathers, a parochial multi-discipline school in Madrid, and later transferred to the secular Alameda de Osuna Institute, one of Madrid’s prominent private schools. After graduating, Amenábar enrolled at the sciences faculty of Madrid’s historic, public research Complutense University where he studied cinema and directing. There he met people who would lend support to his career in cinema including Argentine journalist Carlos Montero, actor Eduardo Noriega and Mateo Gil Rodriguez, a filmmaker who would co-write most of Amenábar’s films.

In 1991, Alejandro Amenábar released the first of his short films, “La Cabeza (Head)”. The script, based on an urban legend, was written by Mateo Rodriquez and Amenábar, who also composed the musical score in collaboration with Alfredo Alonso. This film earned Amenábar a prize from the Amateur Independent Film Association. His second short film, the 1992 “Himenóptero”, was shot on location at Alameda de Osuna Institute, his former high school. Amenábar wrote the script and music for the horror suspense film, was director and editor, and performed the only male role. (Note: Hymenoptera is a large order of insects which includes wasps, bees, sawflies and ants.)

At the age of twenty-two, Amenábar released his first full-length film, the 1996 “Tésis (Thesis)”, which secured his reputation as one of Spain’s most promising cinematographers. This film, which commented on the Spanish film industry, Hollywood’s influence on the industry and the voyeurism of the horror genre, was nominated for eight Goya awards, of which it won seven including Best Film. In 1997, Amenábar released the science-fiction based, psychological thriller, “Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)”, which starred Penelope Cruz and Eduardo Noriega. The rights to this movie were later acquired by actor Tom Cruise who directed and starred in the American remake entitled “Vanilla Sky”, with Penelope Cruz playing the same role of the original film.

Alejandro Amenábar followed his success with an English language movie in 2001, entitled “The Others”, a psychological, gothic horror film. Written and directed by Amenábar, the supernatural film relied on tension built during disturbing scenes for its horror rather than the use of special effects. “The Others”, with its film score by Amenábar, was a box-office success and won seven Goya Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. It also won three Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film, Best Actress for Nicole Kidman, and Best Supporting Actress for Fionnula Flanagan, who played the housekeeper Bertha Mills.

In 2004, Amenábar had another success with his “Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside)”, based on the true life story of Ramón Sampedro. Paralyzed from the neck down, Sampedro fought a thirty-year campaign to win the right to end his life with dignity.The film won fourteen Goya Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In 2008, Amenábar released the historical drama “Agora”. Written by Mateo Gil and Amenábar, the biopic told the life story of Hypatia, the fourth-century female mathematician and astronomer who investigated the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system of the solar system and the heliocentric model that challenged it. Winning seven Goya Awards, the film had limited release in the United States but was Spain’s highest grossing film of 2009.

After a seven year hiatus, Alejandro Amenábar released his psychological horror mystery film “Regression” in 2015. The film premiered at the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival. In 2019, he released the Spanish-Argentine historical drama “While at War”, the plot of which tracks the plight of writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in 1936 Salamanca, a city controlled during the Spanish Civil War by the Rebel faction.

In addition to composing the scores of his own films, he laid the sound tracks for Josè Luis Cuerda’s 1999 coming-of-age film“Butterfly’s Tongue” and Mateo Gil’s 1999 mystery film “Nobody Known Anybody”, among others.

Top Insert Image: Mateo Gil, “Alejandro Amenábar, Himenóptero”, 1992

Third Insert Image: Javier Aguirresarobe, “Alakina Mann, The Others”, 1992, Written and Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, Warner Brothers

Corrado Cagli

The Artwork of Corrado Cagli

Born in the city of Ancona in February of 1910, Corrado Cagli was an Italian painter of Jewish heritage. Little information on his formative years is available; however, it is known that, at the age of five, his family relocated to Rome. Cagli grew up in a largely assimilated secular family, who had come to terms with its Jewish religion as antisemitism became more aggressive in Fascist Italy. His ties to his Italian heritage were always strong; even in his later years of exile from Italy, it was important for him to maintain a tie with his homeland.

Corrado Cagli’s first commissioned work was a 1927 mural painted on a building in Via Sistina, the street at the top of Rome’s Spanish Steps. In the following year, Cagli received another commission in Rome for a mural in Via Vantaggio. He had a remarkably early success in Italy; still in his twenties in the early 1930s, he was already famous nationally. Cagli had his first solo exhibition in 1932 at Rome’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna and showed at the Milan Triennale in 1936.

Along with other artists such as Emanuele Cavalli and Giuseppe Capogrossi, Cagli was a member of the Scuola Romana, an art movement of Expressionist painters in Rome who were active between 1928 and 1945. A rising star of the Scuola Romana, Cagli was supported by Italy’s Fascist regime despite being both Jewish and a homosexual. He was chosen to represent Italy at the 1930 Paris Exposition, the Venice Biennale, and other prestigious expositions.

In 1938, the Leggi Razzial were promulgated by the Fascist government; this series of laws enforced racial discrimination in Italy, directed mainly against Jewish Italians and inhabitants of Italy’s colonies. Two of Corrado Cagli’s murals were censored by the government as they did not fit with the regime’s rhetoric and stylistic preferences. With the enactment of the Racial Laws, Cagli was forced into exile, first to Paris, a place he had visited as a young star painter from Italy, and then to the United States, where he later became a citizen. His first showing was at the Julien Levy Gallery, a source for surrealist work.

Corrado Cagli rarely had a proper studio during his exile years, which made painting difficult. Most of his work done in the United States is on paper. Cagli had always valued drawing as an art form; in his exile, they became the primary instrument of his artistic search. His use of paper as a medium was also the result of a crisis he went through with his idea of painting. In the 1930s, despite having been forced into exile, Cagli still retained the artistic ambitions of Italy and saw painting as a public art essential to constructing an Italian national identity.

Cagli enlisted in the United States Army and was recognized for his artistic talent. During his training he painted barracks, made his own drawings, and illustrated a military magazine. Later during the war, he worked as a military artist drawing scenes from the campaigns. Cagli fought at the 1944 Normandy landings and, later, in Belgium and Germany. Near the end of the war, he drew a series of dramatic drawings based on the liberation of the Buschenwald concentration camp.

After the war, Cagli returned in 1948 to Rome and made it his permanent residence. Because of his past as a former regime-endorsed artist and a Jewish exile from Fascism, Cagli did not fit into any of the factions of Italy’s post-war heated cultural disputes. He arrived into Italy’s art world with a metaphysical route towards abstraction which was opposite to the Neo-Cubist trend that dominated postwar Italian painting. Settled in Italy, Cagli began a series of experimental works in multiple mediums, including ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, architectural decoration, ballet scenery, and costumes.

Corrado Cagli helped organize the Galleria La Cometa in Rome and, along with poet Libero De Libero, created an artistic circle of musicians, writers, architects, painters and sculptors. He was involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition, “20th Century Italian Art” and facilitated the 1950 opening of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York City. In August of 1972, Cagli was commissioned as the official banner painter for the Palio di Siena, the twice yearly equestrian competition held in Siena, Italy.

Cagli was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in 1946 and, in 1954, the Marzotto Prize, given by the Marzotto fashion company for his contributions to the cultural rebirth of Italy after the war. Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.

Notes: An article on Corrado Cagli’s 1936 mural “The Battle of San Marino”, now housed in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, can be found in a previous posting on this site.

An interview between author Raffaele Bedarida and Alessandro Cassin, Director of Centro Primo Levi, entitled “Corrado Cagli, the American Years” can be found online at Printed_Matter located at: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/corrado-cagli-the-american-years/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli”, Circa 1930s

Second Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “Ritmi Cellulari in Chiave di Giallo, 1949, Mised Media on Canvas on Paper, 90 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Corrado Cagli, “narcissus”, Date Unknown, Silkscreen Print, Edition of 50,, Sheet Size 90 x 85 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Corrado Cagli in His Studio in Rome”, December 1969, Radiocorriere Magazine, Gelatin Silver Print

Justin Chin: “What Measures Eternity?”

Photographers Unknown, What Measures Eternity?

Oh blameless innocent victim
What measures a lifetime?

I used to have this theory about how
much life a human body could hold.
It all had to do with the number
of heartbeats. Each human is assigned a number
determined by an unknown power cascading
over the dark waters of an unformed Earth.

For some, it was a magnificently high number
seen only in Ritchie Rich comics, and for others,
it was frightfully low, like twenty-six.
No bargaining, no coupons,
no White Flower Day sale, no specials. Once
you hit your number, you croak.
I imagined the angels in heaven
and the demons in hell gathering to watch
the counters turn, like how I enjoyed watching
the speedometer line up to a row of similar
numbers, and especially when the row of
nines turned into
the row of zeros.

Oh Blameless innocent victim
What measures eternity?

Justin Chin, Excerpt from the Poem “Grave”, Harmless Medicine, 2001

Born in September of 1969, Justin Chin was a Malaysian-American poet, essayist, and performance artist. In his works, he dealt with identity categories that influenced his life: Asian-American, Gay Writer and Queer. Chin’s work sought to give a voice to marginalized groups of racial, national, and sexual minorities, Acknowledging that everyone one has an individual self-identity, he also questioned the usefulness of categories that dominate the language of today.

Justin Chin was educated in Singapore’s British colonial system where he developed his love for poetry and prose in English literature. In 1991 after graduating, he left home to attend Honolulu’s University of Hawaii at Mānoa where he studied creative writing. Chin trained under poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway, who encouraged his writing and introduced him to poet and playwright R. Zamora Linmark and visual artist and poet Lisa Asagi. These two artists remained important supporters of Chin’s work throughout his life.

In 1990 in San Francisco, Chin attended the first annual Outwrite Conference, which played a pivotal role in encouraging and shaping the LBGTQ literary culture in the United States. Relocating to San Francisco in 1991, he transferred to the journalistic program at San Francisco State University. Feeling restrained by the journalistic format, Chin began to write essays, poems, fiction, and performance pieces to express his views. In 1995 and 1996, Chin was a member of San Francisco’s team for the National Poetry Slam, an annual performance poetry competition.

Justin Chin published his first collection of poetry, the 1997 “Bite Hard”, which received nominations for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. This mix of poems and short performance pieces, done in unflinching, harsh honesty and biting humor, dealt with AIDS, sexual tourism, racial stereotypes, Asian identity and bathroom sex. The prvading sense of loneliness in this volume culminates in its last poem, “Refuging”, where Chin discloses the pain of losing one’s cultural identity and examines the loss of lovers and its subsequent effect on one’s self.

In 1999, Chin published a collection of opinion and biographical essays from 1994 to 1997 in a volume entitled “Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks”, which received positive reviews. A second collection of poetry, “Harmless Medicine” followed in 2001 and received nominations for the Lambda Literary Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. This second collection is different than the first in tone; it is more serious and poignant in its discussion of homophobia, mortality, the American culture and AIDS. Its long and complex poems explore the meanings and effects of illness as well as the hatred of a xenophobic society hiding behind and seeking justification in religion.

Justin Chin published a collection of more personal and revealing essays in 2002 entitled “Burden of Ashes”. The first twelve essays dealt with his childhood family life, the abuse by an aunt, and growing up in a repressive society; the second part of the collection focused on his coming to terms with his sexuality and his mostly unfulfilling love life. Chin’s third volume of poetry, “Gutted” was published in 2006; it became a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, that honors gay male poetry.

Other prose works by Chin include the 2005 “Attack of the Man-Eating Lotus Blossoms”, a collection of documents and scripts from his performance work, and “98 Wounds” published in 2011. In addition to his published work, Chin created eight full-length solo performance works and several shorter works that he performed throughout the United States. An anthology of writings from Chin’s seven published books, entitled “Justin Chin: Selected Works”, was published in 2016.

In his career, Justin Chin enlivened the poetry scenes of both San Francisco’s Paradise Lounge and its spoken word and performance art collective Sister Spit , as well as open microphones at various clubs. He was a respected presence at the Outwrite Conferences and at Litquake, San Francisco’s Bay Area literary festival. Justin Chin’s life ended tragically, at the age of forty-six, with a stroke related to complications from AIDS on December 24th of 2015.

Corrado Cagli: “The Battle of San Marino”

Corrado Cagli, “The battle of San Marino”, 1936, Encaustic Tempera on Hollow-Core Wood, 545 x 651 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Corrado Cagli helped organize the Gallleria La Cometa in Rome and, along with poet Libero De Libero, created an artistic circle of musicians, writers, architects, painters and sculptors. He was involved with New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s 1949 exhibition, “20th Century Italian Art” and facilitated the 1950 opening of the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York City. Cagli was awarded the Guggenheim Prize in 1946 and, in 1954, the Marzotto Prize, given by the Marzotto fashion company for his contributions to the cultural rebirth of Italy after the war. Corrado Cagli died in Rome in 1976.

Corrado Cagli’s “Battle of San Marino” depicts the final battle of the Second War of Independence in which the Piedmont army, directed by King Vittorio Emanuele and supported by the French troops of Napoleon III, defeated in a fierce battle the Austrian forces commanded by Emperor Franz Joseph I. The battle is considered the founding moment of the Italian Risorgimento, the period leading to unification and the formation of the new state of Italy.

The battle scene, depicted from a bird’s eye perspective, with the hectic confusion of weapons, horses, infantry and knights crushed together amid the surrounding hillsides, clearly highlights Cagli’s relationship with traditional painting styles, with influences ranging from Paolo Uccello to Piero della Francesca. Owned by Francesco Muzzi, secretary of the Cagli Foundation, and graciously loaned to the Uffizi in 1978, it was finally donated to the Uffizi Gallery in 2003.

Note: An interview between author Raffaele Bedarida and Alessandro Cassin, Director of Centro Primo Levi, entitled “Corrado Cagli, the American Years” can be found online at Printed_Matter located at: http://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/corrado-cagli-the-american-years/

Don Herron

The Photography of Don Herron

Born in Brenham, Texas in 1941, Don Herron was an American photographer. Upon graduating from high school in 1959, he served four years in the United States Air Force. Herron received his Bachelor of Arts, and later in 1972, his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught studio classes. He moved to San Francisco in the latter part of 1972.

Inspired by medieval sculptures set in niches and largely self-taught, he began a series of portraits of people posed in bathtubs, which became known as the “Tub Shots”. Herron collaborated with his subjects and allowed them to stage the images. Some of his subjects simply sat in their empty bathtubs, while others wore costumes and created tableaux. The tubs were sometimes filled with water or styrofoam peanuts used for packing. Many of the subjects posed nude; others concealed themselves with bubbles or the limbs of mannequins.

In 1978, Don Herron relocated to New York City where he became part of the East Village art scene. He continued his series of black and white images by photographing the members of its underground, bohemian community of artists. The “Tub Shots” series contains such personalities as painter Keith Haring, photographers Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, filmmaker Peter Berlin, playwrights and drag performers Charles Busch and Ethyl Eichelberger, and actress and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, among others. Through this work, Herron captured both the glamour and camp, as well as the joy and tragedy, that the community experienced in the 1970s.

Herron relocated in the middle of the 1980s to Newburgh, New York, where he became an active member of the Historical Society of Newburgh Bay and the Highlands. He settled in a historical 1836 Federal townhouse which had been designed by Thornton McNess Niven, a Scottish-American architect and master stonecutter who gained fame for his Gothic Revival and Italianate styles. Herron created accurate drawings of his and other historical buildings in the Newburgh area for publication in tour booklets. He also provided artwork for non-profit groups including Habitat for Humanity.

Don Herron also wrote newsprint articles for the Times Herald Record and the Mid-Hudson Times; his writings drew on his personal experiences, including his childhood in Texas and his confrontation with cancer. Don Lee Herron died on December 25th of 2012 at the Castle Point Veterans Administration Hospital surrounded by his many friends.

Herron’s “Tub Shots” series has been published in New York’s Village Voice, the New York Magazine and in the art journal, Art Forum. In 2018, the Daniel Cooney Gallery in the Chelsea district of Manhattan held a two month exhibition of Herron’s series which displayed sixty-five black and white photographs dated from 1978 to 1993. Herron’s work is in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia; Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; New York’s Tang Teaching Art Museum in Saratoga Springs; and the museums of the Universities of Texas, Louisiana, and Toronto.

Note: Three articles on “Tub Shots” and Don Herron can be found at New York essayist and television producer Brian Ferrari’s informative blog site located at: https://brianferrarinyc.com

Top Insert Image: Don Herron, “Performer Winston Fong, San Francisco”, circa 1972-78, Tub Shots Series, Gelatin Silver Print

Middle Insert Image: Don Herron, Self Portrait, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Don Herron, “Actor Ethyl Sichelberger, NYC”, 1982, Tub Shot Series, Gelatin Silver Print