Athey’s work resists formal introduction: he is an artist’s artist, a visionary, a dreamer, a transformer. Ron has blazed a path from the margins into clubs, galleries, and museums around the world; from the Pentecostal churches of his youth to the legendary goth punk and queer venues of the underground; from downtown SRO hotels to Hollywood. He’s even made it into the filthy mouths of evangelical lawmakers looking for ways to defund the NEA. — Zackary Drucker
QUEER COMMUNION—RON ATHEY, the first retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work, is on view in lower Manhattan. Curated by Amelia Jones, the show explores the “generous extension of self into the world through a mode of open embodiment that enacts creativity in the social sphere through collective engagement as art.”*
Through April 4.
Participant Inc
253 East Houston Street, New York City.
See Queer Communion: Ron Athey, ed. Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2020).
Queer Communion: Ron Athey, Participant Inc., New York, February 14, 2021–April 4, 2021, from top: Installation photographs by Daniel Kukla (4); Ron Athey, Acephalous Monster, 2019, MoCA Skopje, photograph by Andreja Kargačin; Queer Communion: Ron Athey, installation photographs by Kukla (3). Images © Ron Athey, courtesy of the artist and Participant Inc.
