The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront

Shelley Seccombe, Sunbathing on the Edge, Pier 52, 1977, contemporary archival digital print, 11x15

"The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront is the first museum exhibition to focus exclusively on the relationship of the uses of the Hudson River docks by artists and a newly emerging gay subculture. Between 1971 and 1983, the piers below Fourteenth Street were the site of an enormous range of works by artists as different in their mediums and intentions as Vito Acconci and Peter Hujar, Selley Seccombe and Tava, Gordon Matta-Clark and David Wojnarowicz. At the same time, the fight for the rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered people, spurred by the 1969 Stonewall riots, was literally transforming the cultural and social landscape of New York City. Stepping out of the closet in droves, gay men suddenly felt free to sunbathe on the piers naked, cruise and have sex in public. Within walking distance of the World Trade Center and the posh brownstones of Greenwich Village, this “arena for sexual theater,” as the painter Delmas Howe put it, became the backdrop for elaborate photographic tableaus, sometimes staged as in Arthur Tress’s picture of two naked figures in almost identical poses in adjoining rooms, or seemingly spontaneous, as in Stanley Stellar’s image taken from the rooftop of a man below giving a hand job to a fellow sunbather.a Other photographers like Alvin Baltrop, Frank Hallam, Shelley Seccombe, Lee Snider, and Rich Wandel, were intent on making a direct record of the collapsing structures, and the people that used them knowing that this strange world on the water’s edge would not last."

April 4 - May 10, 2012 at The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
http://t.co/60yBqe85