'Jack Pierson Is Determined to Bring Old, Gay Antique Shops Back to New York' – Cultured
6 September 2023
Jack Pierson, the Massachusetts-born artist known for his unflinchingly intimate male portraits, is entering fresh territory with a new job title and his first show with Lisson Gallery.
“I’m trying to make this old, gay antique shop. They used to exist by the dozen when I first came to New York,” says Jack Pierson. “It was just a guy with some junk in a store that he’d open when he felt like it. I want that to exist again.”
The artist—who has followed his polychrome persuasions into the realms of video, drawing, and sculptural assemblage over the last three decades—made a name for himself in the ’80s as a student of the diary-as-documentary movement loosely known as the Boston School of photography. Pierson’s vision of a bygone New York is the inspiration for his new Lower East Side gallery, Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, named after a character in an 1844 William Somerset Maugham novel. The space, which opens its doors this fall, will showcase pieces from the photographer’s personal collection, alongside works by artists he admires.
Beyond adding gallerist to his CV this season, Pierson is taking on another new challenge with “Pomegranates,” his first show since joining Lisson Gallery in 2022. The works on view are an attempt to evoke the same intimacy, typically captured au naturel in his unflinchingly homoerotic portraiture practice, under the sparest conditions possible: shooting black-and-white in-studio. Of this momentous occasion, the soft-spoken artist has little to add. “I feel like I’ve succeeded,” he says. “We’ll see if everybody else thinks so.”
Read the full interview via Cultured.
Image: Jack Pierson, Peyton 2021, Pigment Print, 101.6 x 76.2 cm, 40 x 30 in © Jack Pierson, courtesy Lisson Gallery
