Times-featured exhibit on display at FLLAC

Lauren Tennenbaum Assistant Arts Editor

Subterranean Monuments, a temporary exhibit featured at the Francis Lehman Loeb Art Gallery, has been up for just over two months and has already been featured by The New York Times. The exhibit showcases the work of three New York-based artists, Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999), Ray Johnson (1927-1994) and Peter Hujar (1934-1987), known for their eccentricities, reclusive nature, and the way they shunned the fame and glamour associated with mainstream culture.

The exhibit references the larger-than-life influence that these bohemian post-war artists had on future generations, and the underground community in which they worked. Their intertwined, yet individual universes centered around New York City, and the people that formed the essence of everyday life within the community.

The exhibit, arranged by Vassar’s Richard B. Fisher Curator Mary Kay Lombino, was originally the brainchild of retired Vassar curator Joel Smith.

“[Smith] felt as though their work could tell an interesting story about the art world and underground creative movement in post-war New York City,” said Lombino. “The story serves as an alternative that ran parallel to the mainstream artworld.”

Three rooms house the 66 works, in addition to a selection of nine short films by Burckhardt which play in a 98-minute loop on the upper level landing in the Art Center.

The first exhibition room is dedicated to Burckhardt, and showcases his photographs, along with two of his paintings. The photographs are taken with remarkable sensitivity to subject matter, and stand in contrast to the rather crude, blockier nature of the paintings. The text so often photographed alongside people in Burckhardt’s works serves to remind us on more than one occasion of the era in which they were taken.

Burckhardt’s works are often thought-provoking and always casually beautiful, if not tragic. Such is the case in “Drink Barq’s,” where a pensive African American man stands next to a pop art-style advertisement for soda and a decrepit doorway advertising a “Colord Poolroom” which dominates a sizeable third of the composition.

The second exhibition room showcases Ray Johnson’s works, largely collages which make references (some decipherable, many not) to pop culture figures, friends, and personal stories, among others. “The works by Johnson are dense with images and words that might require some patience to really appreciate,” warned Lombino.

The postcards that Johnson sent to his friends are also certainly worth a look, displayed in a glass case at the exhibit. These postcards are particularly indicative of Johnson’s spirit and intent; during his life as an artist, he sold fewer pieces than he gave to friends, and like Burckhardt and Hujar, shunned fame in favor of what might be described as a grittier, more personal form of art.

Hujar’s photographs dominate the last of the rooms, and close the exhibit much as it begins. Like Bruckhardt’s photographs, they seem to capture the essence and movement of life behind the scenes in New York City, particularly society’s less accepted characters. Photographs of drag queens, such as “John Heys in Lana Turner’s Dress #1” (1979) mock mainstream glamour and beauty while dangerously laughing in the face of fame. “Group Picture” (1966-67) and “Ray Johnson” (1975), however, remind us of the strong community which bound these unconventional artists together.

The Art Center will hold a screening of How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary about Johnson, on Friday, Sept. 15 at 6 p.m.