Ricki Dwyer. Shred and Re-weave the American Flag, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 27, 2017, at Open Windows Cooperative in San Francisco, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of the Artist.

Roula Seikaly: Kenneth, you’re leading the social media charge for 100 Days Action. Have you noticed a change in the proposals? Are they responsive to proposed or realized executive orders, such as the Muslim travel ban, or defunding Planned Parenthood? Or are proposals more consistent in the sense that a general protest is mounted?

Kenneth Lo: I’d say both. Even before the travel ban was executed, there was the idea that Trump would do it. It happened to be timed almost perfectly that when the first travel ban was proposed, we featured Lizania Cruz’s project My Immigrant Route. That was a popular project that saw a lot of participation. But I’d say that for the first month, the submissions were more concerned with self-care.

RS: Self-care for the artists themselves, or self-care as a collective action?

KL: Both. Like, “We’re tired, we’re screaming. Let’s do some yoga. Let’s have some food.”

RS: Have you noticed people coming to interventions on a repeat basis? Or is it more of a one-off experience?

KL: I think people’s habits are based around the art spaces. We’ve been at Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Southern Exposure, and now Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Each space has slightly different communities of patrons. I don’t know if there is a lot of overlap, but it’s possible. There was an urgency on Inauguration Day, when a lot of people showed up at Royal Nonesuch Gallery for the first time. People pop in and out. On social media, people are keeping track of events and deciding what works for them.

Ricki Dwyer: Can I ask where you got your conviction about actions?

KL: My convictions?

RD: Yeah! I mean, being involved in 100 Days Action, and your way of speaking about it, I sense that you’re passionate about this effort. Do you believe marches have an impact? What led you there?

KL: I don’t know if it’s having an impact, to be honest. But I’m heartened to see marches, to see people in the streets expressing outrage, and I want to see more of that engagement. I want to see more people writing postcards and calling elected officials and voicing concerns. I don’t know what else we can do. But we must do something.

RS: How are you feeling as we get close to the end of 100 Days Action and the overall intervention? Is there anxiety, or hopefulness?

KL: I feel like, what, he’s still here? After all that?

Ricki Dwyer. Shred and Re-weave the American Flag, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 27, 2017, at Open Windows Cooperative in San Francisco, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of the Artist.

RS: It’s been a concentrated effort for you and everyone associated with 100 Days Action. I’m curious if there’s a sense of what you want to do next, or questions of how momentum for resistance is sustained.

KL: We’re going to rent an Airbnb with a hot tub, and we’re going to have a drink, and not fight over which projects make it onto the calendar. In terms of 100 Days, we’re talking about how we continue. How do we proceed as an organization? Do we sponsor more curated or direct projects, or create more projects ourselves, or go back to being individual artists making political work on our own? I don’t know. Right now, we’re just trying to get through the last month, which has been stressful.

RS: Stressful how?

KL: It feels like we’re in a durational performance piece, and all of us have other jobs and art careers to mind. This feels like a third job. We’re seeing each other almost exclusively, not our other friends. We’ve been meeting since November 20, and it’s been all-consuming. It will be good to reconnect with life outside of this effort.

RS: Shifting gears for a moment, let’s talk about Ricki’s intervention. Ricki, your intervention involves a sacred national symbol. How did you settle on the project?

RD: It came out of rage. It felt like the only thing to do now. I only had a couple of people express concern about it, either for me or for their own discomfort at cutting a flag. It felt cathartic. I think the intensity of the power for that symbol allowed the project to be more impactful as an action.

RS: Where do you find these flags?

RD: It started when I found a giant, half-burned flag at the corner of 24th and Mission Streets. I knew I had to keep it. I collected two more burned flags from other projects, and I ended up purchasing a few more for the event—the weird thing was buying American flags that were made in China.

RS: Flags represent an enforced form of patriotism, but in shorthand. The flag takes the place of discussion or engagement with others. Also, flags are a contested space. How do you relate to that?

RD: A lot of those ideas I agree with. The most patriotic thing we can do is to question authority. It was beautiful, the cutting and weaving intervention. The floor was covered in giant flags, and people were cutting into them from different angles all at once. We were walking all over them, too. It was a night of cathartic coming together.

RS: Who makes the first cut? Is it you, or a participant? Does that matter?

RD: It didn’t matter. Some people wanted to sit and cut, and some people wanted to weave.

RS: As the cutting commenced, did you notice any hesitation in the participants?

RD: If there was a moment of anxiety, I didn’t notice it. I was surprised by how many people attended whom I’ve never met. The space, Open Windows Cooperative, was packed. That so many people showed up just to cut into a flag was powerful.

Ricki Dwyer. Shred and Re-weave the American Flag, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 27, 2017, at Open Windows Cooperative in San Francisco, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of the Artist.

RS: When people were engaged, either cutting or weaving, was it quiet? Were people talking?

RD: People were talking, and it’s one of the things I thought was most successful. There was a lot of active conversation about what we were doing.

KL: What do you think it meant for the participants?

RD: There was a lot of talk about how this is the time for change, a time for action, a time to take steps forward. I felt like that was what people were generally talking about. There was a sense of having or exerting power. On top of that, nearly everyone was trying to learn to weave for the first time. So that contributed to the experience as well.

KL: Was the flag project a departure from your usual practice?

RD: Yes and no. I’m a weaver, and most of my work involves craft and social practice. I also teach weaving, so it was a great way to bring my pedagogic style into my art practice.

RS: I’ve been reading criticism that suggests that people who weren’t alive during the Vietnam War, who are protesting now, aren’t personally invested enough. Will today’s protests be as effective? Are we burdened by a history of protest?

KL: I think it’s a different game, speaking in sports terms. It’s not unfair to compare the different eras, but they are radically different. I don’t think it’s fair to blame youth today. I’m sure middle-aged people in that era made similar complaints. Painting millennials with a single negative stroke isn’t fair.

RD: I think there is some truth to the criticism. Everyone is watching a horrific train wreck, and I think a justifiable paralysis sets in.

Ricki Dwyer. Shred and Re-weave the American Flag, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 27, 2017, at Open Windows Cooperative in San Francisco, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of the Artist.

KL: I have a question for you two: What do you think is the role of art workers in times of crisis?

RS: I want my writing practice to support the artists. The feeling of “what do I do at this point, what skills can I offer, who can I talk to” set in. What will be a historical record of this moment? I want the conversations I have with artists to live somewhere, and if, fifty years from now, someone is curious to know how we responded to this crisis, they’ll be able to read about it.

RD: I don’t think there is a general obligation for an artist to be an activist. I tend to pay attention to what an artist’s practice is doing or talking about, and find value in that. I also think that if you are approaching a place where you’re reaching a larger audience, then there’s an obligation to contribute to these conversations.

KL: I don’t think people with art or writing skills have to use those skills in service of resistance, but I wonder: What can they, or we, do with those skills in this context? I’ve been thinking about how we boost morale, what arts organizations can do.

RS: How do you answer that question?

KL: I think it’s about small ripples right now. It’s a question I ask myself and others, but I don’t have an answer.

RS: Will that come in hindsight, after 100 Days Action comes to an end? Does it come with historical perspective?

KL: I think there are some things that can be answered immediately, but that most of it will come with reflection. And that is frustrating, but it has to be okay for now.

Jenifer K Wofford. No Scrubs, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 21, 2017, at the Women’s Marches in San Francisco and Oakland, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of 100 Days Action.

Roula Seikaly: How are interventions vetted and selected? Have you received proposed gestures that haven’t aligned with the 100 Days Action mission?

Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Our curatorial team sits together in pairs to review each proposal. We look at each gesture and decide if it is within our mission, and if it is, we ask which dates are appropriate or workable, and then situate them within the calendar. We received a proposal that was physically violent, where the gesture crossed a line we don’t want to violate. We’re trying to be inclusive and to reach out, but there have to be hard limits to what we support. We’ve published actions that are edgy, but not too extreme. We don’t want it to go that far. We’ve also received suggestions that we wouldn’t feature in the calendar. For example, people getting together to write postcards and sending them to senators and representatives. Since that isn’t an artistic gesture, we agreed to signal-boost the effort through social media, but not add it to the calendar.

Dana Hemenway: I wanted to add that even though there are some gestures that were not included, the 100 Days Action project is still monumental. It’s a huge undertaking. As anyone who plans events knows, lead time before an event is crucial for preparing and promoting it. There’s something to do every day—from an administrative perspective, it can be overwhelming. That said, it’s also what makes it such a powerful project.

Zoë Taleporos: The organization was built in such a small amount of time. To mobilize that many people and to settle on decision-making modalities and set the mission—Ingrid and company just jumped right into it. I think sometimes a narrow response time can prompt the most creative and organic things.

Lizania Cruz. My Immigrant Route, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 21, 2017, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of 100 Days Action.

RS: What responsibility—if any—do arts institutions have in times of political crisis?

IRC:  In Colombia, we are so accustomed to artists and poets responding to politics and political crisis. That’s the norm. If there is something that happens politically that’s troubling everyone, the next day in the news, artists will be interviewed for their perspectives. Growing up in that context was such a positive experience. Writers are also more political, and I think it’s because the wider context can’t be escaped. I grew up thinking that in times of crisis, the first people that I want to hear from are the artists, and then from the politicians. I’m more interested in hearing from artists, poets in particular, because they tend to be so focused on tiny and important details. Their command of nuance in otherwise un-nuanced situations is incredible. It gives a person oxygen. There is a responsibility for public institutions to respond, to create events. I think it makes sense to sustain flexible space, if not the whole institution, in which quick responses can be realized.

Stephanie Syjuco. Reap What You Sew: Banner Making Workshop, 2017; participatory action, performed on January 8, 2017, at Royal Nonesuch Gallery, as part of 100 Days Action. Courtesy of 100 Days Action.

ZT: The 100 Days Action residency at Royal Nonesuch Gallery ends on February 15. I think it’s interesting that the first responders are the small, alternative art spaces. We are the most nimble ones, for sure. That said, it’s hard as a small institution to host an event or residency for 100 days. I’m glad to know the project moves on to Southern Exposure next.

DH: I agree that there is a nimbleness to being a smaller institution. It allows us to incubate projects, as word about it gets out and ideas for gestures or interventions solidify. The temporal aspect—the 100 days—means that projects don’t have to solidify all at once. It gives the group a chance to respond quickly as needed and draw in those who couldn’t participate at the beginning. That’s been fascinating to watch.

ZT: Each venue brings its own strengths and resources. It will be exciting to see what each space can provide, and how much bigger and more ambitious 100 Days gestures will be, moving forward.

Continue to Part 2 of this interview, conducted with artist Ricki Dwyer and 100 Days Action‘s social media manager Kenneth Lo.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Protesters take part in a demonstration calling for animal liberation, Tel Aviv, Israel, August 24, 2013.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

It is vital to understand the terminology adopted by Activestills members and contributors. None of the participants accept the title “documentary photographer.” Photojournalists working in the documentary mode—such as Jacob Riis, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, and James Nachtwey—operate by long-standing procedural and ethical codes in journalism that understandably prioritize neutrality when capturing a story. While exposing events to worldwide audiences, photojournalists as a rule do not intervene in the actions that unfold before their cameras.

Beginning in the late 1970s, theorists including Susan Sontag and Martha Rosler turned their critical gaze to the effects of photojournalism and the distanced stance of its practitioners. Elucidating the relationship between liberal politics and social reform, and documentary photography as a tool of both, Rosler argued convincingly that such well-intentioned practices present subjects as victims whose salvation depends on the viewer’s response to their plight. Prioritizing the viewer’s psychological comfort establishes a dynamic in which the person or people touched by tragedy plead their case via the photographic image to those in power and hope for the best. Decades later, Activestills members realized Rosler’s call for photojournalists to engage fully in the social-justice matters they report to prevent the stories they tell from being sanitized by a viewer’s needs. Photographing events ranging from weekly protests of the separation wall that ghettoizes West Bank Palestinians to marches for LGBTQ rights, immigrant and asylum-seeker rights, and fair housing throughout the Israeli state, Activestills members stand with protesters of all stripes to make more visible the struggles that affect both Palestinians and Israelis. In doing so, the group advances the title “activist photographers” to describe its members.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Palestinian protester opposite an Israeli soldier during the weekly demonstration against the occupation, Nabi Saleh, West Bank, January 8, 2010.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

The current volume is an analog account of Activestills’ work. The format is notable because so much of the collective’s work is available online via their steadily growing archive (more than 35,000 images) and alternative media platforms, including Electronic Intifada, +972 magazine and its Hebrew counterpart Local Call, and daily updates to associated Flickr accounts. The ease of online access almost renders a book redundant, but the reading experience offers critical analyses of who and what are shown in the images. Single shots of protesters facing or physically confronting heavily armed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) function in tandem with sequences portraying Israelis protesting state-sanctioned homophobia and visualize a range of social-justice struggles in addition to the nearly seventy-year conflict between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. In capturing this wide range of encounters, Activestills photographers tease out the small yet urgent details of life that do not receive sustained attention.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (The Kadoori, Hamias, and Ashram families sit around an improvised Sabbath table near their demolished homes in the Giv’at Amal neighborhood, Tel Aviv, September 19, 2014.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

Rejecting the documentary photography mantle was perhaps the seed of Activestills’ subversive strategy, the display, dissemination, and overall effect of which is carefully analyzed in essays by the historians Ariella Azoulay, Simon Faulkner, Vered Maimon, and Meir Wigoder. Azoulay, who has long worked through notions of citizenship, photography, and “ethical spectatorship,” addresses the Activestills archive as a direct challenge to those who refuse the breadth of Palestinian human rights and work strenuously toward outright cultural erasure.[1] The online archive is updated with near-real-time frequency, rendering it “operative, and not simply contemplative,” and mirroring the violent interactions between protesters, soldiers, and settlers.[2] Access to and use of the archive thus destabilizes the dominant media construct from within and further exposes the decidedly biased reportage of these events produced by Israeli and international media outlets. Similarly, Simon Faulkner considers in depth Activestills’ exhibition strategy and how such methodology affects audiences who both support and reject what the images report. The collective settled on a presentation tactic in which unframed prints are hung outside of a formal or institutional visual-art context, favoring plein-air installations in or near locations where protests and related skirmishes erupt.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Solidarity protest with African asylum seekers imprisoned in Israeli prisons under the “Infiltrators Law,” Tel Aviv, December 28, 2013.) Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

The effect is striking. In Activestills exhibitions, protesters and their supporters view the actions in which they’ve been involved, an act that bolsters their participation and ongoing resistance. For those in Palestine and Israel who stand against a spectrum of state abuses, the guerilla exhibitions sanction not just their fight but also their existence. Alternately, Activestills exhibitions staged beyond the Green Line are often met with hostility. If the installations are not vandalized (marked with hate speech or torn down), parties opposed to public displays of skirmishes at the separation wall and throughout the Occupied Territories rush to provide political narratives to counter the group’s reportage.

Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel closes with interviews or brief essays by the group’s founders—Oren Ziv, Keren Manor, Yotam Ronen, and Eduardo Soteras—and various members. Responding to questions about what it means to live as an activist photographer and to find community with those who resist occupation and social disenfranchisement, the artists express decidedly somber thoughts. Ziv notes that in the heavily saturated media climate we inhabit, ignoring outright the inequities around us is untenable, if not immoral. As media consumers, we are supplied with more than ample information about the violence our world produces, be that in Palestine/Israel, or the European Union, or the United States. Countering viewers’ sympathy fatigue is not Activestills’ primary motivation; participating in and photographing human struggle is. This extraordinary volume, which is as important for understanding photography’s potential as any critical text thus written, gets to the root of how people pitted against one another will remain locked in conflict as long as the aspirations for peaceable coexistence are thwarted by state actors. Through tired eyes, we have a responsibility to look at what they produce.

Image from “Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel.” (Palestinians climb over the Israeli separation wall on their way to attend Ramadan Friday prayer in Al-Aqsa mosque, A-Ram, West Bank, July 19, 2013). Courtesy of Shiraz Grinbaum.

[1] Vered Maimon and Shiraz Grinbaum, “Introduction,” Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 33.

[2] Ibid, 34.

Fashion show, 50 Years Later: The Art Show, October 7, 2016, SoleSpace, Oakland. Photo: Senay Alkebu-Lan

Over the previous five decades, institutional recognition of BPP accomplishments has proceeded, with slowly increasing attention to the iconic work of artist and former BPP Minister of Culture Emory Douglas in book and exhibition form. Rather than waiting for the Panthers to be celebrated in spaces where Whiteness and the benefactors of its privilege hold sway, Party members and allies have, for years, staged exhibitions and performances in both traditional and unconventional spaces. The Party’s fiftieth anniversary carries forward the legacy that protest, or celebration, can take place anywhere, while demonstrating art’s potential to galvanize and venerating those who have fallen.

One of the two largest exhibitions, All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), comprehensively elucidates the Party’s origin, activities, accomplishments, and the direct influence they have in today’s fight against institutional racism and its agents. While the other regional exhibitions (The Point Is…2.0: Black Panther Party 50th Exhibit at Joyce Gordon Gallery, 50 Years Later: The Art Show at SoleSpace, and ICONIC: Black Panther at American Steel Studios) pay homage to the Party’s rich visual legacy through specific aspects of the Party’s history—including women’s participation and influence throughout the Party or the Ten-Point Plan—All Power to the People provides both a thorough historical overview and contemporary meditations by artists Carrie Mae Weems, David Huffman, Hank Willis Thomas, Sadie Barnette, Trevor Paglen, and William Cordova.

Anonymous. Untitled (Clenched Fist), circa 1965; wood; 3 x 5.5 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Museum Purchase.

Oakland-based archivist and activist Lisbet Tellefsen and curator Ashara Ekundayo drew Melorra and Melonie Green into their collaborative fold to organize the expansive installation Survival Pending Revolution: Black Panther 50. Archival and Contemporary Musings on Love and its conjunct Comrade Sister: We Are the Altar at Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland. Survival Pending Revolution occupies nearly every wall of the Hub with rare and never-before-exhibited photographs, posters, and newspaper articles from Tellefen’s collection. Emphasizing women’s significant and oft underrepresented participation in the Party, its social programs, and international reach, the installation is a powerful reminder that archival exhibitions need not be tedious. Posters are dynamically hung along the walls of the Hub’s internal staircases and evoke a feeling similar to looking at family photos in a friend’s house. The installation presents a visual narrative of Party members engaged in an urgent fight for survival that was waged on multiple fronts and across international boundaries, which starkly contrasts with the dominant and racist media portrayal of Party members as menacing Black men carrying guns. While the space isn’t ideal for viewing objects in aggregate, Survival Pending Revolution encourages one to think about the Party’s focus on work as a collective activity and mirrors the tenets that were and are central to the BPP ethos and the Hub’s business model: inclusivity, creativity, reciprocity, and effectiveness.

Tarika Lewis. What’s on Your Shelf; book collage; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Joyce Gordon Gallery. Photo: Eric Murphy

Comrade Sister: We Are the Altar, as Ekundayo describes, is a “living exhibition” comprising contemporary works and creative responses to Tellefsen’s archival material that grows as visitors add the names of Party members who have been forgotten. Oakland-based artist and educator Joan Tarika Lewis, who was the first woman to join the party and contributed her prodigious talents to the Party newspaper under the name Matilaba, contributed a mural in less than thirty minutes. Other artists, including Karen Seneferu, likewise responded to the archival material by producing pieces that praise women’s work and further define the lineage between social-justice efforts then and now. Co-curator Melorra Green explains, “For Comrade Sister, Melonie and I handpicked Black women artists who we knew could lift, elevate, and echo the women of the Movement. Their stand. Their voice. Their pain. Their courage. All in this one space as a womb.”

After Emory Douglas’s seminal work, photography was the dominant visual medium that captured the Black Panthers and the roiling sociopolitical milieu out of which it burst. At the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the African American Library and Museum at Oakland, two final exhibitions capture what was, and in bittersweet fashion, what could have been. The World of the Black Panthers at UC Berkeley is an installation of twenty-four black-and-white photographs by Stephen Shames that document BPP activity in the East Bay and beyond. Shames met Party co-founder Robert George “Bobby” Seale while photographing Vietnam War protests in Berkeley in 1967. The two formed a tight professional and personal relationship, which allowed Shames insider access to the Party and its members. While Shames turned his camera to a variety of Party activities—rallies and demonstrations most prominently—his unfettered access also enabled him to capture more intimate moments such as teachers and students in the classroom, and senior citizens receiving food or transportation assistance. Shames’ images visualize the Party’s core work, and the display of his photographs in a hallway that is transited by journalists and journalists-in-training reminds us that the media at large cannot, must not, surrender to creeping political or social influence on matters of race.

Suzun Lucia Lamaina. Emory Douglas; photograph; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of Suzun Lucia Lamaina.

Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panthers in Portraits and Stories, an installation of forty-five black-and-white portraits by Bay Area photographer Suzun Lucia Lamaina, greets visitors at the top of central staircase in Oakland’s stately African American Museum and Library. Her subjects—members and associates of the Party who now sport gray hair and laugh lines—were photographed over the course of her five-year journey around the United States. Through photographs and personal statements, Lamaina’s work documents what BPP members accomplished after they left the Party, and reveals both their extraordinary achievements and the mundane details of day-to-day life. What emerges from these heartfelt statements is that for so many individuals, Party membership solidified the meaning of community as African American culture was under attack. Those lived experiences continue to sustain them as the fight for social justice persists. The testimonials of these now-elder members are haunted by the memories of comrades who didn’t live long enough to see the Party’s profound impact, and of the African American men, women, and children whose lives were cut short by the ongoing violent ideology that the Party vowed to fight in 1966. The African American Library and Museum in Oakland is dedicated to sharing the history of Black life in the United States, and though a temporary installation, Revolutionary Grain adds a significant and illustrative chapter to African American history in this place of learning.

Institutions, including the FBI, mainstream media, and the prison industrial complex, form a particular, if not dominant, context for the Black Panther Party. However, those constituents aren’t the only physical or ideological spaces that frame the Party’s history. The seven anniversary exhibitions in Oakland, and those staged nationally and internationally, demonstrate the Party’s critical influence in the fight for social justice and the powerful results of a community that embraces its own story. This is power to, for, and by the People.

The World of the Black Panthers is on view at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism through January 5, 2016.

Survival Pending Revolution: Black Panther 50. Archival and Contemporary Musings on Love and Comrade Sister: We Are the Altar are on view at Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland through January 7, 2016.

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through February 12, 2016.

Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panthers in Portraits and Stories is on view at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland through February 28, 2016.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Joe, N.Y.C., 1978 (from The X Portfolio); selenium toned gelatin silver print mounted on black board; 7 11/16 × 7 11/16 in. Jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; partial gift of yhe Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation, 2011.9.41.6. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

An exhibition divided between museums is an uncommon practice, and braving Los Angeles traffic between Brentwood and Mid-City on the same day is not for the faint of heart. That said, the split format allows each institution to present Mapplethorpe’s work from a perspective that aligns with each of its institutional identities. Getty curator Paul Martineau describes the divide as Apollonian and Dionysian—an apt assessment given Mapplethorpe’s appreciation of classical sculpture and moments of so-called sexual deviance he captured in equal measure. Martineau organized Mapplethorpe’s work by major categories—Floral Studies, the Sculptural Body, Portraits, Studio Practice—all of which are represented by pieces hung in the introductory gallery. From there, the exhibition flows smoothly and is shaped by striking juxtapositions, including portraits of champion bodybuilder Lisa Lyon and Phillip Prioleau. In isolation, these photographs have achieved iconic status. When viewed within the context of the larger studies to which they belong, the photographs demonstrate the artist’s career-long fascination with the monumental and performative potential of the human form.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1981; gelatin silver print; 17 3/4 x 13 3/4 in. Promised Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.2012.88.482. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

In the final gallery, selections from X Portfolio and ephemera from The Perfect Moment, the 1988 exhibition that cemented Mapplethorpe’s notoriety, are presented on opposite walls. Martineau wisely selected the attendant publication and the September 1989 volume of Artforum to accompany a short statement about the exhibition that aroused intense public fervor. Within the sprawling totality of the Getty exhibition, this small installation effectively encapsulates the details of the scandal without giving it too much attention. Given Mapplethorpe’s maligned public persona, that’s no small feat. What’s disheartening, however, is how X Portfolio is treated. Images of admittedly extreme sexual acts are tucked into a vitrine jutting perpendicular from the wall. To see the photographs, viewers must step to the vitrine and look down—a curatorial choice that references a similar display strategy employed during the exhibition’s brief run in Cincinnati. While the choice is understandable, given the more conservative demographic the Getty tends to attract, it reads as a concession designed to minimize potential discontent and further stigmatizes sex between consenting adults.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979; gelatin silver print; 14 x 14 in. Promised gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Across town at LACMA, it’s immediately apparent that curator Britt Salvesen took a more adventurous approach in displaying Mapplethorpe’s work. Rather than highlight the major categories of his work as Martineau did, Salvesen identified major thematic concerns: sex, success, and Mapplethorpe’s reckoning with mortality as AIDS-related illness and death drew close. The installation opens with solo and group portraits of gay men—affectionate, defiant, and altogether human—who were and still are stridently condemned for the aberrant “lifestyle choices” they celebrate. That such a grouping introduces the installation speaks to the small but significant strides Americans have taken to embrace gay identity.

In the same gallery, we see selections from Mapplethorpe’s early career. As a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he worked with found materials from muscle magazines and religious imagery drawn from his Catholic upbringing in Queens, New York, to create two- and three-dimensional pieces. Moving from the accomplished portraits to the nascent work of a striving student artist, a juxtaposition emerges, aligning experimental starts with fully realized projects. That contrast unfolds across successive galleries, encompassing Mapplethorpe’s introduction to photography through Polaroid technology and eventual mastery of studio portrait practices. The LACMA experience culminates in a room dedicated entirely to X Portfolio and related BDSM imagery. Here, we are treated to the fruits of Mapplethorpe’s obsessive interest in form, texture, and the dramatic play of light and shadow, not to mention his fealty to honest representation of how some gay men interact. Perhaps it’s a reflection of LACMA’s demographic, a desire to push boundaries a bit harder, or both. Salvesen’s decision to hang such images, as opposed to hiding them in the relative safety of a vitrine, reinforces the museum’s foundational effort to embrace contemporaneity.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Wrestler, 1989; gelatin silver print; 22 15/16 × 19 in. Promised Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.2012.89.786. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

At the end of these rigorously researched and happily exhausting exhibitions, what emerges is an account of a man who was driven as much by the prospects of wealth as he was by portraying his truth as a gay man, consequences be damned. Neither exhibition overlooks how cruel he could be to family, friends, and lovers, or that he slavishly ingratiated himself to those whom he thought could advance his career. Those all-too-human flaws contribute to a broader portrait of an artist who understood, perhaps more astutely than his peers, the cultural moment in which they were immersed as identity politics and the popularity of the photographic medium shifted to center stage.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art through July 31, 2016.