6 facts about Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt (born 1948) is an American player who took part in the Stonewall riots.

Lanigan-Schmidt’s artwork incorporates materials such as tinsel, foil, cellophane, saran wrap and glitter, embracing kitsch and with intent tacky. His be active has been compared to that of Florine Stettheimer, who used cellophane in her sets for the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts; his art was included in an exhibit of artists influenced by Stettheimer. His fake has with been likened to the religious-themed tinfoil-covered thrones of art brut artist James Hampton. He is sometimes grouped behind the Pattern and Decoration art movement, though he says that is “retrospective craziness”. His art is noted for its fascination of Catholic iconography.Joe Brainard is next cited as a forerunner following his use of decorative collage and queer and religious themes.

Lanigan-Schmidt attended Pratt Institute in 1965-66, was rejected by Cooper Union, and attended School of Visual Arts.

Lanigan-Schmidt began by exhibiting his art in his own apartment; an before major exhibit in 1969 was titled The Sacristy of the Hamptons. Another home exhibit was titled The Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina. In these early house exhibits, and with in at least one complex recreation of an to the front exhibit, he guided visitors through the exhibit in drag in environment as art miser Ethel Dull.

While Lanigan Schmidt’s art is not widely known, he has received critical acclaim.

He has been referenced as an antecedent to Jeff Koons in the intentional use of kitsch in art.

Lanigan-Schmidt’s bill has been included in major art museum survey exhibits. His art was in the 1984 Venice Biennale, and his vacation there inspired his 1985 Venetian Glass Series. His foil rats and drag queens produced in the 1970s were included in the 1995 exhibit “In A Different Light” at the Berkeley Art Museum, which was curated by Lawrence Rinder and Nayland Blake. His art was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial as capably as the Whitney Museum’s survey of 20th-century art, “The American century: art & culture 1900-2000.”

Lanigan-Schmidt was an link of the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. He participated in at least one of Smith’s performances, “Withdrawal from Orchid Lagoon”. He was interviewed in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. Another supporter of Lanigan-Schmidt’s circle was Charles Ludlam.

Lanigan-Schmidt, who is openly cheerful was present at the Stonewall riots, a seminal moment in cheerful history, and is one of the few recognized veterans yet living. Shortly after the riot started, he was photographed once a society of new young people by photographer Fred W. McDarrah. Lanigan-Schmidt appears in the film Stonewall in a documentary segment. An installation art piece by Lanigan-Schmidt, Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats commemorated the happenings at the Stonewall Inn. In answer of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Lanigan-Schmidt was accompanied by those invited to the White House to meet in imitation of Michelle and Barack Obama.

He is on the gift of the School of Visual Arts

Lanigan-Schmidt worked as a 1960s Linden puberty doing “odd jobs to help maintain his associates and was bullied by tall school thugs,” moving to New York City as a pubescent man. As a child in 1950s Linden, after Lanigan-Schmidt was assigned to garnish the bookish bulletin board in his Catholic elementary school, he built a detailed model of a church altar. The impressive model was featured in a local paper even if Lanigan-Schmidt was a student at St. Elizabeth School at 170 Hussa Street. The hypothetical closed in 2014; it is a allocation of the campus of St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church in Linden.

From November 18, 2012 to April 7, 2013, Lanigan-Schmidt’s art was the subject of a retrospective at MoMA PS1.