This paper explores queer artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (b. 1948) and his piece titled Allegory of the Stonewall Riot (Statue of Liberty Fighting for Drag Queen, Husband, and Home) (1969). I take a biographical approach to the paper, dissecting Lanigan-Schmidt’s childhood and young adult life living as a queer street kid in the 1960s. I follow him to New York City, where he continued creating his kitsch style art and started getting recognized for it. Outside of his artistic endeavors, Lanigan-Schmidt would catch himself hanging out at The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christopher Street. In the early hours of June 28, 1969, The Stonewall Inn was unexpectedly raided by the police. At a time when being queer was criminalized, the patrons of Stonewall had had enough and fought back against the police, sparking a riot that turned into a weeks-long protest. Lanigan-Schmidt was in attendance that night and joined the fight for gay liberation. It was this night that inspired his creation, Allegory of the Stonewall Riot (Statue of Liberty Fighting for Drag Queen, Husband, and Home). By analyzing the contextual importance of The Stonewall Inn and the riots that ensued, I show how Allegory of the Stonewall Riot reflects queer life in the 1960s. In the art historical canon, queer art is largely underrepresented. However, in this paper I show how Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt and Allegory of the Stonewall Riot deserve a place in the art historical canon
“In my opinion, wherever there is a public, there is a sacred place. When there is no public, there is no performance because there is no dialogue,” claimed Marina Abramović (b. 1946) in conversation with Italian art critic and contemporary art historian Achille Bonito Oliva. For Abramović, the presence of an audience is constitutive to performance. Performance art has frequently been defined by its provocative impulse, functioning as a responsive and unstable form that artists have turned to when engaging with political, cultural, or social pressures, and when seeking to unsettle the conventions of more established artistic disciplines. These sentiments are conveyed by her first performance works, The Rhythm Series (1973-1974). Over the course of two years, she completed five separate performances that explored the physical limits of the body and the relationship between performer and audience. Abramović performed Rhythm 0 (1974), the fifth and final work, at the gallery Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, from 8 pm to 2 am. She placed seventy-two objects on a table that could cause the human body extreme pleasure or pain, including but not limited to objects like a comb, lipstick, paint, a feather, a bone of lamb, cake, and a gun. Instructions posted on the wall declared: “I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.” This experiment used the art space to expose what audiences are capable of when social inhibition is suspended and moral responsibility is left unguided. This paper asks, in her performance Rhythm 0, how does Abramović's deliberate surrender of bodily agency transforms the audience from passive observers into ethically implicated subjects, forcing an intersubjective encounter with the artist that exposes unconventional, if not revolutionary, social conditions governing the art space?
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