Image: Aspen Art Museum
The Aspen Art Museum has commissioned ‘Arch Connelly: Art in Drag’ to accompany the exhibition ‘Straighten Your Wig and Pray’, offering an intimate encounter with the artist through a body of archival material that has only recently re-emerged.
At the heart of the film is a series of audio interviews recorded by David Hirsh in the early 1990s and preserved in the Visual AIDS Archive. Rather than telling Connelly’s story from the outside, the film allows him to speak for himself, inviting audiences to encounter the wit, generosity, vulnerability, and conviction that animated both his life and his work.
Woven together with photographs, artworks, documents, ephemera, and moving image, Connelly’s reflections reveal the wit, vulnerability, and conviction that animated his life and work.
Arch Connelly lived from 1950 to 1993, and charted a very personal terrain in his work, creating what René Ricard called “space-age surrealism.” During his lifetime, Connelly was the subject of solo presentations at Artists Space, Fun Gallery, White Columns, Holly Solomon Gallery, and Castelli Graphics.
