The color of fall is fun.

Encounters with new and older artists--and sharp street fashion.

Ancestor Dreams, by Jacks McNamara (2022)

It’s September, a month when life swings back into gear. Kids go back to school; people return from vacation with Instagram pictures to envy. A few days ago, I noticed the air was almost crisp in Brooklyn. Now it’s official: summer is over. That means we’ve entered the month when New York culture explodes with new offerings. Part of the fun is planning what you want to see or hear—or wear. You don’t have to go to Fashion Week, which just happened. You just step out into the street and it’s everywhere you turn. It’s fall, and everyone is out and about.

On my list are movies from three film festivals: a contemporary Arab film festival at BAM; the New York Film Festival, now a multisite event; and the New Festival, a guaranteed LGBTQ party. Then there are new gallery and museum show openings. Oh, and of course, The Woman King, which I saw. I xoxo Viola Davis.

Harry and his outfits at Madison Sq. Garden, Sept. 2022. Photo: NY Post.

Last Thursday, I caught two events that involved friends and art. But first, I got out of the subway at 34th and 8th street and immediately encountered what was shaping up to be a giant future conga dance line of people wearing boas. They were mostly women, young and older, but also men, including elderly men, sporting pearls. Ah, I thought, Harry must be in town. He was, and I wish I had tickets. I love Harry Styles, metrosexual fashionista that he is with his high waist pants and flouncy shirts. I love that he’s inspired policemen and Wall Street banker types in three-piece suits to daringly slip on their mother’s or wives pearls for an evening out when it’s not just Halloween. Thank you, Harry!

 The more die-hard Harry Styles fans had been camped out all day; they preened for each other and passersby. The sidewalk party stretched the length of Madison Square Garden. Later, I read, Harry did them right. He put on a thrilling show. A lot of stripes and dots for his 15-day Love on Tour rocking outfits. He looks like a big circus clown ringmaster in a few of them. The man is fun.

Harry Styles fan, Madison Sq. Garden. Photo: Lucia Buricelli, Buzzfeed News, Aug. 20, 2022.

I was headed for a small retrospective art show in Chelsea by James Bidgood, a gay photographer-artist and former drag performer who many consider the father of gay pulp. He died this past January from complications of Covid. He was 88 and lived in New York for over 70 years. He was a talented costume and set designer. In his last years, he became very close to one of my best friends. The show, Unseen Bidgood—A Memorial Exhibition, is up at Clamp gallery (247 W 29th, ground fl.) and coincided with a weekend memorial where many friends and fans celebrated his life.

Bidgood came to New York from Wisconsin and studied at Parsons School of Art and Design. He worked as a window dresser and photographer for men’s physique magazines. We’re talking 1960’s. He also directed the cult 1971 film Pink Narcissus, which starred the amazing Charles Ludlam, another fabulous downtown star lost to us too soon. Bidgood’s work at CLAMP might be called high-camp or baroque pornography featuring colorful sets and largely naked pretty young men. Think pink and orange, feathers and sequins. An exhibit press release notes that Bidgood ‘translated the city surrounding him into a flamboyant queer utopia, driven by his love for everything kitsch.’

I thought, oh Harry would have loved James. All that pink….

James Bidgood, CLAMP gallery.

Further downtown, more fabulousness was happening at the George Berges gallery at 462 West Broadway. There, a friend, the photographer David Gamble, was showing his big interior pictures of Andy Warhol’s house and objets. The show is titled “East 66th St.” David is a Brit who relocated to New Orleans; his wife is my friend and realtor, Rachel Perkoff. The opening had a fancy club rope feel, with a well-dressed crowd smoking on the sidewalk, a seen-and-be-seen crowd. Inside I overheard snippets of gossip about when so-and-so met Andy or did drugs at Andy’s studio.

Warhol Wig and Glasses, David Gamble. 1987.

I immediately said hello and asked to take a picture of a young man, Wills, and his friend. They’d been invited last minute and came for the Warhol connection. Wills was wearing my new insti-favorite fall party look, a cut-up woman’s stocking, with holes for the eyes and lips, paired with an ivory leather vest and strings of pearls. Now, Harry, that’s a look, too.  I immediately wanted to copy it for my next fancy party. Wills was feeling a little bummed that he hadn’t worn his Warhol white wig. It woulda been perfect, he told me. I hesitated and now I wish I hadn’t.

Now that’s some fashion. Wills rocking a torn stocking and his pearls, with his friend in pink, at the David Gamble exhibit. Photo: Anne-christine d’Adesky, 2022.

I later caught Wills and his friend clapping loudly for the other big fashionistas: The Dragon Ladies, a duo of talented hip hop singer-performer-dancers. The DL’s, as I jokingly called them (on the down low), wowed everyone. The Dragon Ladies, Issa and Odessa, are childhood best friends who’ve taken the stage at drag and music shows around New York for a while. They had a spotlight at NYC Pride 2021. They have amazing energy, dance moves, a bold fashion presence, long legs to die for, and serious drag ballroom star power. The Warhol-Gamble crowd ate it up. I loved seeing other queens in the show, snapping their approval, mouthing the words. It was definitely a NY cultural moment. I thought, oh Andy woulda loved this, too.

The Dragon Sisters at Berges Gallery. Photo: Anne-christine d’Adesky, 2022.

My third art dip was over Zoom, with Jacks McNamara, who identifies as a queer, trans, neurodivergent artist and lives in New Mexico. I spotted one of Jacks’ new pieces in my Facebook feed and had to know more. It was a color wheel, as I saw it, pretty and pastel. It was somewhat transparent, fluid, and reminded me of a number of things: a target, first. A pretty, watercolor target, slightly abstracted. I started thinking about the eye, then, and the iris, and of the pastel color wheels as the eyes of a day. Then, pinwheels, pallid, and fluid, like paint that gets more and more diluted as drops of water are mixed with the pigment. You put watercolor down on paper and see a bold color; a second later, it’s a paler version of itself, the color leached into the paper. When you mix in other colors, the boundaries of each collapse, and are transformed. The effect can be dreamy. Jacks’ paintings have that quality, though, it turns out, they aren’t watercolors. They’re layers of acrylic ink.

I decided to call them up, talk about the work. Before we spoke, I did a little online research and found out that Jacks is a pomo renaissance person, with a finger in so many pies: art, poetry, queer activism and healing. They’re also co-founder of The Icarus Project, ‘a participatory adventure in radical mental health and mutual aid’ now known as The Fireweed Collective. They have a book-length poetry collection and zines out and are co-author of Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness. They also teach The Big Queer Poetry Class, write a regular column for the Santa Fe Reporter, and host the podcast So Many Wings. (see below for links and more.)

The neurodivergent self-identification stems from Jacks’ forever feeling of being different from others, not only in a sense of gender, but how they see the world. Synesthesia is a term that relates to a mental experience that veers from the norm. It’s not an illness; it’s a way of processing visual stimuli. I remember reading about it in an article about Oliver Sacks, the famous gay brain researcher and writer. He was fascinated with synesthesia, which can take many forms.  Some people hear a sound and see a color. Jacks is one of them. When they listen to music, colors and patterns flood their mind, and always have.  I tend to paint listening to music, Jacks told me. The sounds flow as images into their art and poetry.

Inbolc, by Jacks McNamara, 2022.

On the broadest level, my brain doesn’t work like others, Jacks told me, explaining their way of seeing. I have a bipolar diagnosis. Synesthesia is about sensory processes. It manifested from a very young age. Letters have colors… A red, B blue, C yellow. It informs my favorite numbers… it can create textures. Listening to different people sing, each person’s voice is, well…her voice is a ribbon…a cord…a rope…I see specific visual images.

As a child, Jacks assumed everyone saw the way they did. It’s just always the way they’ve experienced the world. I immediately asked myself, what sound would lead to pink? I didn’t ask Jacks that, but they did tell me more about what’s behind their color wheels, which often reflect the colors of New Mexico landscapes—washes of pink, orange, umber. The slices are made of raw wood.

I wondered if painting, drawn from music, was meditative. Definitely, said Jacks. Most of my works are real improvisations. The initial layers are washes that follow the structures of the tree rings… I tend to add layers of increasing detail from there. I like giving myself a lot of space to feel into what comes next in terms of composition. I told Jacks I like the almost watercolor quality of the work, as see-through as an old curtain.  I work primarily in transparent media, they noted; you can’t fuck it up, it’s not forgiving.

 I asked about what artists inspire them and Jacks ticked off three names, all of whom evoke a fluid sense of memory, of dreams. Darren Waterson, Susan Seddon-Boulet, and Anselm Kiefer. He taught me a lot about the way he uses abstraction, Jacks said of Waterson. I like to evoke an atmosphere or season or memory, and he does that really well. Boulet’s goddesses do the same, Jacks feels; so do Keifer’s paintings. There are elements of his work that are quite abstract and some quite figurative in the same piece. That’s something Jacks is after, too.

Devotion, by Jacks McNamara, 2022.

A few days after we talked, I was unpacking and found a treasured item. It’s a 78 rpm record of a radio interview done with my mother, then in her 20s and an artist, talking about her earlier life in Paris. This was before she and my father married and moved to flat, freezing-in-winter Michigan, when she was working at the Dior counter in Paris and wore couture. Her clothes hung for years in sealed bags in our house and smelled of mothballs, and faint perfume.

I hadn’t heard my mother’s voice in over 40 years when I first found the record. Last week I listened to it for the second time, then again with my children. I had to close my eyes to re-see the mother who spoke with a heavy French accent, thicker than I recalled. As I did, a flood of images spilled forward like a private cinema of my earliest childhood. If I opened my eyes, they disappeared. I wondered if I was experiencing was a mild form of synesthesia. Maybe we all do. 

I saw things that I’d long forgotten: the black dots of the car ceiling fabric of my parent’s white Studebaker, a pattern I studied for hours during a weeklong move from Marquette to Florida to start a new life. I was four, maybe five. I saw the white birch trees that stood outside my bedroom window like sentinels. I saw their close up flaking bark. I remember thinking as a child, it’s their skin.

Looking at Jacks many paintings, I wonder, what were they hearing when they painted that color? What might this composition sound like? What does it spell? Is it a word-poem as well as a song? 

‘Let’s Visit Awhile,’ radio interview with Viviane d’Adesky. Late 1950s?

For more colors and fun, see:

Gamble links: David Gamble – Artist

Dragon Sisters: The Dragon Sisters Are a New Type of Hip-Hop Act | Vogue

McNamara project links:

Website: https://jacksmcnamara.net

The Fireweed Collective: https://fireweedcollective.org

Book: https://jacksmcnamara.net/inbetweenland-book/

Podcast: https://somanywings.org

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