Stonewall at 50

Collier Schorr

May 19th through September 2019 at the Alice Austen House.

The Alice Austen House presents 'Stonewall at 50,' our first commission by artist Collier Schorr. This exhibition is generated by a collaboration between the Alice Austen house and the LGBT Community Center’s Stonewall Forever project. Stonewall Forever is a project to find, preserve and share the untold stories of the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the early years of the LGBTQ rights movement. The LGBT Community Center with support from Google.org is gathering, digitizing and archiving this crucial history. The stories will be included in an interactive monument in honor of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.

The portraits of 15 intergenerational LGBTQ+ activists and artists exhibited at the Alice Austen House celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and its legacy by bringing together participants of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising with activists who have followed in their footsteps.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, gay men, and allies all decided to take a stand. What started out as an all-too-routine police raid of the Stonewall Inn gay bar in New York City turned into a multi-night uprising on the streets of Greenwich Village. It wasn’t the first time LGBTQ people fought back and organized against oppression, but the Stonewall uprising ignited a mass movement that quickly spread across the U.S. and around the globe.

The uprising marks a key turning point and became a catalyst for the explosive growth of the modern gay rights movement in the United States. Prior to the Stonewall uprising there were little more than two dozen gay rights organizations in the nation’s major cities with a modest number of members. In the aftermath of Stonewall organizers founded hundreds of new LGBTQ civil rights organizations across the country and around the world that drew hundreds of thousands of activists into the fight for equal rights.

As of 2017 The Stonewall Inn and the Austen House have been designated as national sites of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) history.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Collier Schorr’s early work mined the vernacular of postmodernism to create photographs that toe the line between documentary and fiction. Often using her subjects allegorically, Schorr’s work navigates the auspices of identity politics to ask beguiling questions about the nomenclature of selfhood. By introducing autobiographical referents and post-appropriation aesthetics into her practice, Schorr’s ongoing body of work negotiates the fluid nature of authorship and performance in relation to portraiture.

Produced in collaboration with the LGBTQ Community Center’s Google.com supported Stonewall Forever project.

Exhibition Produced by Paul Moakley and Victoria Munro

with Shea Spencer, Felix Frith, Jemma Hinkly, and

Lauren Stocker at Artist Commissions

Hair by Bob Recine assisted by Kazuhide Katahira

Makeup by Ayaka Nihei, assisted by Rebecca Arslanian

Photo assistants:  Max Dworkin, Jarrod Turner

This photographic exhibition is funded by the Funded by the  Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Humanities NY, New York Community Trust, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts