Pier Talk: Remembering the New York Waterfront June 14, 2012

Artist Talk with the well known bisexual photographer Efrain John Gonzalez and the exhibition curator Jonathan Weinberg on Thursday, 14 June at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art 26 Wooster Street, Soho NYC.

This event is being held in conjunction with The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront, the curator of the exhibition, Jonathan Weinberg, will host a conversation with local Brooklyn photographer Efrain John Gonzalez whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York and who is author of Ink & Steel: The Body Modification Photography of Efrain John Gonzalez; who will present a sideshow of his work depicting the life and culture along the old West Side Highway, the abandoned piers, and the Meat Packing district of New York City during the 80s and 90s.

Recalling Sexual Politics on the Piers -- By Michael Luongo for Gay City News May 25th 2012 For young New Yorkers knowing only a sanitized, seemingly well ordered, affluent Manhattan, the overtly sexual gay life on the Hudson River piers in Lower Manhattan in the 1970s seems another world. All the more reason the period needs to be catalogued and remembered.

“The Piers: Art and Sex along the New York Waterfront,” an exhibition at the Leslie/ Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, does exactly that. The exhibit, co-curated by Jonathan Weinberg and Darren Jones, opened in April and has been extended through July 7.

“The Piers” presents more than 70 works, largely photographs, but also film and even recovered pieces of artwork that adorned concrete on the Lower Hudson piers.

Gay life had a modicum of visibility in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, but after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, gay expression exploded. Attached to Greenwich Village, the piers, a crumbling, largely abandoned vestige of New York’s days as a shipping powerhouse, became one of the major social and political centers of the gay movement.

Leslie/ Lohman board president Jonathan David Katz — the director of the Visual Studies doctoral program at SUNY, Buffalo and the co-curator of the recent “Hide/ Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum — said for young people coming of age now, it is especially important to see “The Piers” to understand how different things were and how gay sexuality is now often overlooked. Click here to read full article

Official Website: http://www.meetup.com/bisexual-nyc/events/66613802/