Stranger Selves
7.2022-9.2022
What is the self, other than a collection of disparate elements with which we identify, and that, with some margin of shared meaning, we use to relate to others? This exhibition brings together three late artists who worked primarily in collage, negotiating the concept of self-identity as pastiche in and through their work. For Lee D’Arthur, Aporia Francesco, and Zack Jones, being an artist was itself integral to how they formed their identities, sometimes to extremes. These works particularly find the artists grappling with the complexity of representing themselves through their artwork, and the dichotomy between the opportunity for expression that offers and the simultaneous entrapment within the work it seems to present.
Lee D’Arthur (c. 1889-1977), the most prominent of these artists, and likely inspirational to the other two, was a decidedly enigmatic figure. Her work is often believed to be a codified key to her true identity (D’Arthur was the pseudonym of Harriet Toomer), but scholarship continues to develop and conflict around the exact meaning of many of her pieces. Here, the work functions as a parallel to the artist’s personhood, revealing and obfuscating aspects of her identity while simultaneously serving to shield her true identity while criticizing politics and government.
This exhibition marks the first public showing of the work of Zack Jones (1960-1991), an activist and artist who lived between New York City and San Francisco throughout his tragically short life. His magnum opus, the imposing collage “New York City Do Over,” 1991, a layered and frenetic self-portrait, which Jones produced in a creative burst during the final months of his life, shows him claiming an autobiographical narrative. The work communicates the exhaustion and desperation Jones perhaps felt near the end of a lifetime spent fighting in the AIDS movement, and toiling as an obscure artist.
The style of Aporia Francesco’s (1971-1995) collage work exhibited here is something more akin to re-photographed assemblage. Francesco is better known for her experimental, yet more traditional photography, and here we see early experiments in the study of herself she developed throughout her career. These pieces see her turning her eye on herself – or rather, looking through the social lens at the body of the woman, the artist, and the tension between muse and maker, particularly when they are the same person.
Each of these artists’ collaged self-portraits make a case for the artist as one ever trapped within a frame(work) of their own designs, and for the self as always a cohesive assemblage of disparate fragments – as is the medium of collage itself. One’s self is always a fragmentary entity, always slightly torn between self and stranger. And who is an artist if not their work? But it is through interpretation that an artwork achieves its final form – just as it is through relating to an other that one becomes themselves. This exhibition invites viewers to recognize their active participation in the creative process as they engage with these stranger selves.
Lee D’Arthur (1889-1977)
Lee D’Arthur was the nom de guerre of Harriet Toomer, a ground-breaking collage artist whose beguiling work and mysterious persona made her a figure of great interest and speculation in France and Spain in the 1950s and 60s. Although D’Arthur’s actual lifespan is uncertain, the scholarly consensus of 1889-1977 is based on comments made by her gallerist, Gisbert Spilsbury, who, in a 1982 interview in the French magazine L’Astuce, claimed D’Arthur was “born one year before Man Ray and died one year after.” Almost nothing else is known of Toomer’s biography, aside from the few details given by Spilsbury: she was born in Washington, D.C., to educated, middle-class parents of different ethnic backgrounds and left home as soon as she graduated high school, after which she adopted a new persona and moved to Europe. According to Spilsbury, over the course of Toomer’s life, she had, at various times, been assumed to be Black, Jewish, Native American, and Anglo. In fact, Spilsbury maintains that Toomer never knew her own precise racial makeup. That fluidity of identity may have catalyzed her decision to adopt a gender-neutral persona, enabling her collages to be taken more seriously by the male-dominated gallery world in America and Europe. Her infamous refusal to appear at her own exhibitions – it was speculated that she attended them anonymously or in disguise – preserved her secret until after her death, when Spilsbury revealed what little biographical facts he knew.
Known for her multi-layered collages that include pages of poetry from various European and American poets, D’Arthur is often compared to male collage artists like Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst. However, her style eschewed the playful whimsy that characterized much of Surrealism, skewing toward the cryptic and inscrutable. Though neither woman has named her as an influence, several scholars have noted visual correspondences between D’Arthur and contemporary artists who blend text and image like Nancy Spero and Barbara Kruger.
In 1971, a (then) unknown writer named Benjamin Geheimnis published an influential essay in L’Astuce that completely changed how artists, scholars, and collectors view D’Arthur’s work. Geheimnis claimed insider knowledge that D’Arthur’s collages are actually ciphers, whose hidden messages can be decoded from piecing together lines of poetry the artist intentionally leaves unobscured. These alleged messages range from the location of her studio and archive to her true identity and biography. Fellow artists and art historians debunk this theory, most notably in Unconformity (University Press of Antwerp, 1989), a career retrospective published on the hundredth anniversary of D’Arthur’s birth. The title refers to the uniqueness of D’Arthur’s work but is also a geological term for a boundary where one set of rock layers cuts across another, representing a gap in geological time. Unconformity’s main thesis is that D’Arthur’s multi-layered work should not be read through a cabalistic lens but rather through the lens of her multi-layered identity. One short essay in the book by fellow collage artist Paulina Pravda speculates that Geheimniss is actually D’Arthur/Toomer herself, and that the entire essay is a ruse designed to stir up interest and controversy in her work. Nevertheless, as collectors vie for the limited number of verifiable D’Arthurs on the market, and as competing theories abound, the cryptographical interest in her work only escalates.
The three heretofore unexhibited pieces in this exhibition were originally found in an attic in Brugge in 1978, but have been in a private collection for the past 44 years, having only been seen by a handful of people. These gorgeous works – arguably the most ambitious and impenetrable of her career – were discovered hidden behind three different framed travel posters for Paris, Berlin, and San Francisco, further fueling theories that these cities contain documents or other data that might reveal who D’Arthur/Toomer really is.
Aporia Francesco (1971-1995 )
The legacy of Aporia Francesco is often overshadowed by her suicide at the age of twenty-four, but one historical consensus can be reached: She has been overlooked as a major figure in late-twentieth century photography and collage. Born in Connecticut, Francesco moved to San Francisco at eighteen to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and remained on the West Coast, estranged from her family and maintaining a level of self-isolation that promoted her mysterious persona. Her solitude was also in service of her artistic practice: Francesco produced a staggering body of work between 1992 and 1995, which garnered her a marginal measure of recognition. She exhibited regularly in San Francesco and occasionally in Los Angeles, with a handful of small galleries, but has since faded into obscurity, save for a dedicated, almost cult, appreciation.
This exhibition marks the first time that Francesco’s earliest known experimental works have been exhibited publicly, offering a depth of insight into the artist’s approach to the major, late-career works she produced in her home studio in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. Though many critics drew comparisons to the work of Cindy Sherman during Francesco’s lifetime, Francesco herself, in the single interview she gave, in the July 1993 issue of ArtWest, cited the Surrealists as her principle inspirations. The work included in this exhibition directly showcase the Surrealist influence, as well as traces of Cubism and Dadaism, all filtered through what the art historian Sonya Strathmore, in her 1994 essay “Female Existentialism in Contemporary Photographs,” called Francesco’s “body object feminism.”
Francesco’s primary subject was always herself, casting her body as an object in the way photography does de facto, but also representing her body in such a way as to highlight her own subjective experience of existing within that body, within the world, and within her own photographs. There has been some debate as to whether or not Francesco can be considered a feminist artist – she made no claim to the mantle during her lifetime – but what is clearly present in her work is the importance she placed on a particular female experience: Her own. As the art critic Charles Gershkowitz wrote in his review of her debut solo show at the Maitland Gallery in 1992, “Here we have a young person discovering herself, and doing so through the camera, so that her self and her art might never be conceived of separately.” All three of the pieces included here find Francesco negotiating that constraint both formally and thematically. Each piece contains multiple frames within which her body appears trapped, from doorways, to the frames of photographs-within-photographs. This would become an increasingly prominent theme in her work until the time of her suicide, of which this sense of entrapment is generally considered to be the cause
Zack Jones (1960-1991)
Like most young artists still figuring out what they have to say and how to say it, Zack Jones painted in obscurity. He never sold a painting and never achieved representation in the gallery system – and indeed never sought it, exhibiting his work in a handful of nightclubs and performance spaces in New York and San Francisco between 1983–1991. He produced work right up until his death from AIDS-related illness at the height of the epidemic, known only to a small circle of admirers.
What we know of Jones is thanks to a few intimate friends who outlived him and held onto his work, including the novelist Paul Schmidt and the video artist and cultural critic Raymond Silva, who understood Jones as an artist urgently in synch with the social and political context of a fraught era. Silva’s Martyr in the Mirror: Radical Self Portraits from Artists with AIDS (Printed Matter, 2006), one of the only representations of Jones’s work before this exhibition, links his dominant aesthetic to the 1980s East Village scene, with its overlapping strains of post-modern grit like punk, pop, agitprop, and graffiti. Jones worked professionally as a graphic designer, lending his skills for political posters and t-shirts to the AIDS activist group ACT UP. (He was arrested three times in acts of civil disobedience calling for more funding and research into AIDS treatments.)
Jones’s major work, the mixed media piece “New York City Do Over,” is swathed in rage against homophobia and racism – Jones identified as queer and biracial – and draped in irony, using collage to recontextualize advertising, news, pornography, and the junk of consumerism. Much like David Wojnarowicz, a more established East Village artist whom Jones met through their mutual involvement in ACT UP, Jones makes himself both subject and object.
In the brief time he made art, he absorbed other influences – Rauschenberg’s chaos, Bear- don’s figuration – suggesting he had more to offer. What kind of artist might he have been, had he lived a few years longer and been able to avail himself of new treatments for HIV? The skilled brushwork of his interior, Untitled (Brooklyn Apartment), shows a Romantic, expressionist impulse that might have moved him away from the graphic collage of the enraging 80s and toward something more representational, even beautiful.