The peculiar appearance of Forrest Bess, the “pseudo-hermaphrodite” painter, at the 2012 Whitney Biennial still stands out in my memory. The eleven paintings were vivid and haunting, and…
On a recent unseasonably warm morning, William J. Simmons, an eager graduate student at City University of New York, was sweating and talking about art theory. It was one of the first humid…
Jimmy DeSana, who died at 40 of AIDs, was one of a generation of artist-photographers—among them Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin and DeSana's close friend Laurie Simmons—who came of age in the 1970s in New…