Artists Space

Artist Panel Thursday, July 16, 2015, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street $5 Entrance Donation Members Free, Guaranteed Entry This discussion considers Tom of Finland’s influence upon and reception by artists, as preeminent postwar gay icon. Moderator Bob Nickas will be joined by New York artists Collier Schorr, Nayland Blake and Carlos Motta. With the rise of queer theory since Tom of Finland distributed his first drawings in the early 1940s, its assimilation into the art world and the academy, and a growing, though necessarily incomplete, queer awareness within mainstream culture, both queer subject matter and its representation and contestation by artists have shifted radically. Tom of Finland’s drawings established an iconic, deviant masculinity, fundamentally playful and proud. They are formative to many artists’ understanding of the possibilities of representing a body. Yet their joyful projection of, and play upon, identity overlays an instinctive complexity: some of the drawings hand