BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
Hunter Reynolds and Maxine Henryson
I-Dea The Goddess Within
Gay Pride 1994
June 18 to September 6, 2015
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division
@The LGBT Community Center
208 West 13th Street, Room 210
New York, NY 10011
Opening Reception on Friday, June 26, 7 to 10 PM
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is pleased to present a selection of iconic photographs from I-DEA, The Goddess Within, a historic collaboration of the performance artist Hunter Reynolds, aka Patina du Prey, and documentary photographer Maxine Henryson. From 1993 to 2000, Henryson and Reynolds traveled to Berlin, Antwerp, Los Angeles, New York and other cities, creating guerrilla-like street performances and interventions. Spinning in a large white dress, Patina existed as a mythical dervish figure that deliberately disrupted gender norms in order to relate to the viewer as a shamanistic transgendered embodiment of fantasy and healing. I-DEA, The Goddess Within challenged notions of queer identity, performance art, and the social landscape of the 1990’s.
For this exhibition, the artists will present a selection of photographs from Gay Pride in New York on the 25th anniversary of Stonewall and the Gay Games in 1994. The years of 1993 and 1994 were two of the most devastating years of the AIDS epidemic. During this anniversary year there was a dispute between the organizers of the Pride Parade (Heritage of Pride), Mayor Giuliani, and the political activists participating in the annual parade, such as ACT UP, the Dykes on Bikes, and the Radical Faeries, who did not want to participate in the commercial marketing of the Gay Games or the changing of the Parade route to pass by the United Nations. The LGBTQ parade, for the first time, split into two parades: the official parade and the Radical Queers parade. The Dykes on Bikes led some 60,000 Radical Queers and Faeries from the Stonewall Inn up 5th Ave to Central Park. Many of the participants were naked and queers jerked off in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. The community was fractured; the oppression of Giuliani era was beginning, and our parade was split.
Since 1992, Reynolds had been living in Berlin and returned to perform the Memorial Dress for Creative Time’s official Gay Games Art Event. Reynolds recalls that “I wanted to do a healing dervish dance on the steps of the NYPL under the pink triangle of the banner Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall, The New York Public Library’s groundbreaking 1994 exhibition, which was the largest and most extensive display of lesbian and gay history ever mounted in a museum or gallery space. It was spontaneous combustion. The parade stopped and thousands cheered. The naked Radical Faeries spun with me. It was a truly spectacular and moving moment in my life. I was so grateful to be alive and proud to be Queer.”
Hunter Reynolds has been using photography, performance and installation for over thirty years to express his experience as an HIV-positive gay man. He was an early member of ACT UP, and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT UP, to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. His work addresses issues of gender, identity, socio-politics, sexual histories, mourning, loss, survival, hope and healing. Hunter Reynolds was born in 1959 in Rochester, Minnesota. Reynolds is an AIDS activist and a Visual AIDS artist member and has been the recipient of grants and residencies, including several Pollock Krasner awards. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including: Iceberg Projects, IL; P.P.O.W Gallery, NY; Participant Inc., NY; Hallwalls, NY; White Columns, NY; Artist Space, NY; Simon Watson Gallery, NY; Creative Time, NY; Momenta, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, MA; ICA Boston, MA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA; NGBK, Germany; and DOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany. His work is numerous public and private collections including The Society for Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA and The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, MD. The Fales Library and Special Collections/New York University houses the archives of Hunter Reynolds in its Downtown Collection. Hunter Reynolds is represented by P.P.O.W. For more information about the artist please contact: info@ppowgallery.com
Maxine Henryson is an artist and bookmaker who creates sensual, poetic photographs of the seemingly every day. She explores perceptions of the feminine in the world, examining the differences and similarities between cultures. Her work traces evidence of divinity, rituals, place, memory and history in the West and East.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, she lives and works in New York. She studied sociology at Simmons College (B.S.) and University of London (Masters of Philosophy) and has an M.A.T. from the University of Chicago in studio arts and M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in photography. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and are in numerous public and private collections including the Celanese Photography Collection, the Russian Museum, Norton Museum of Art, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Selected group exhibitions include ARC Gallery, Chicago (The Body in Revue), Gallery Espace, New Delhi (Marvelous Reality/Lo Real Maravilloso), Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York (Lives of the Hudson), Unscharf (out of focus), after Gerhard Richter at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg Germany and O.K. Harris Gallery, New York (Illuminators). Her most recent solo exhibitions were at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn in 2014 (Ujjayi’s Journey.) and Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs, Wiesbaden, Germany. (Calculated Coincidence). Maxine Henryson taught photography at the International Center of Photography, New York, and Bennington College (1996-2006). Henryson’s artist books are Ujjayai’s Journey (Kehrer, 2012), Red Leaves and Golden Curtains (Kehrer, 2007) and Presence (Artist Publications, 2003). Henryson is represented by A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn.