A couple of year ago I was browsing an online auction—a pastime outmatched by considerations of my bank account—when a drawing caught my eye.
It depicted two rows of nude women in synchronized burlesque among little blue plumes that might have been fountains or ornamental clouds. The figures were highly stylized, posed in a rhythmic contrapposto: upright, hips cocked, limbs simplified. Though faceless, with arms reduced to stumps like ancient statuary, they seemed gloriously unburdened.
The drawing, from 1966, was by an artist named Robert Gordy. When I searched for him, most of the results pointed instead to another Robert Gordy—the Motown impresario and younger brother of Berry Gordy. With a bit more digging, I unearthed a brief obituary in The New York Times: “Robert Gordy Is Dead at 52; Artist With a Whimsical Style.” I learned that he had been a prominent painter in New Orleans, with work in several major collections. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1986.
I consider myself reasonably well-versed in dead American artists, especially queer artists, but Gordy was a deep cut. He was nowhere to be found on Wikipedia and was absent from the database of Visual AIDS, a nonprofit that catalogs artists with HIV/AIDS. Neither was his work on view at any of the museums I consulted. The Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans was the only website that maintained fuller documentation of his career. I scrolled through their archive of paintings and drawings—as well as the monotypes Gordy turned to almost exclusively in 1982—with a kind of startled fascination. Here was an artist with a hypnotic style and an obsessive vision, at once erotic and enigmatic. Why wasn’t he better known?
As online auctions affirm, renown during one’s lifetime guarantees nothing in the long run. Tastes change, politics and culture wars intervene, markets fizzle. In 1977, the New Orleans painter and critic Alberta Collier hailed Gordy as “the strongest artist [Louisiana] has yet produced,” with the accolades to prove it. But Louisiana might as well have been the dark side of the moon. Working in the pre-digital Deep South, he was “regional” by default and individualistic by nature. He acknowledged as much, once describing his art as so “un-mainstream . . . that there was really not much point in my being in a place like New York.”
Blue Bathers, 1973, acrylic on canvas by Robert Gordy © The Estate of Robert Gordy
And it’s true: his paintings and drawings synthesize disparate movements and periods into bewitching fever dreams. As I sifted through expired auction listings, I pieced together an inventory of his motifs: roving dogs, jagged fauna, faceless bathers, and embellished landscapes. His imagery is “whimsical” without being trite, sexual without being lewd. In one painting, an angular Dalmatian is camouflaged against the sky, its penis a fluorescent red cone; in another, concrete blocks and fruit are threaded with glistening tubers in a still life that’s squirmingly alive. Traces of Surrealism’s hallucinatory discordance coexist with Pop Art’s candy colors and repetition, Art Deco’s sleek contours, Pattern and Decoration’s ecstatic designs, and the hard edges of African masks—all of it fused and refracted through Gordy’s private symbolism.
Further confounding is the fact that, in 1982, he abandoned the style that made his name and began producing monotypes, taking as his subject the human head. The faces he drew during this final period are almost uniformly anguished or stricken—eyes hollowed, mouths contorted, features cramped. Although Gordy insisted they weren’t responses to AIDS, the timing and fervor of the series shadow that claim. If his earlier figures evoke a world of play—amorous, buoyant, somehow melodic—the heads indicate rupture: the body no longer decorous but visceral and besieged. Seen in this light, the monotypes are a late-career reckoning, a blunting of his visual language into vulnerable immediacy. They remain among the more haunting—and underrecognized—visual legacies of the AIDS crisis.
I was intrigued enough to track down the catalog of Gordy’s 1981 mid-career survey at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Only three thousand were printed, and the price, if you can find a copy, ranges from affordable to extortionate. (I paid about forty bucks.) The catalog and the auction listings solidified—for me, anyway—Gordy’s importance. As arguably the most distinctive artist to come out of New Orleans, he ushered in a strain of Southern modernism that reverberated across the country. He demonstrated that formally inventive and thematically adventurous art could happen anywhere, even miles from the lofts and white cubes of New York. That lesson is obvious now, but in the 1960s it was still a bit of a revelation. Maybe most daring, he infused a queer sensibility into a place and era often hostile to queerness, and he channeled his otherness into an inimitable style.
The question is what to make of that style now, forty years after his death. This spring, the New Orleans Museum of Art opened Robert Gordy: Outside the Mainstream, a commemorative survey that embraces his nonconformity. To understand Gordy’s work is to place it within a queer bohemian lineage that stretched from a bayou town in midcentury southern Louisiana to the French Quarter of the 1970s and ’80s. It’s to see how he anticipated a local scene steeped in mysticism, ritual, jazz, and folklore, where art often took on fantastical extravagance. And it’s to follow how his own restlessness carried him across the world, from European capitals to Mexico City, before finally settling about 150 miles from where he was born. Asked once why he remained in New Orleans, Gordy answered, “[It] might be the right distance between the world and the womb.”
By the Sea #2, 1979, acrylic on canvas by Robert Gordy. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Gift of Dr. James Michael and Carolyn Fortino, 2012.26.1
That womb, so to speak, was anchored in salt. Jefferson Island in southern Louisiana, where Gordy was born, is a geological salt dome rising out of low-lying swampland, underlain by massive deposits of salt five miles or more deep. Local legend holds that the French pirate Jean Lafitte buried stolen loot somewhere on the island in the early nineteenth century, and that he planted cypress trees whose descendants still stand. In 1870, the revered stage actor Joseph Jefferson used some of this timber to build a mansion, thus lending the site its name: Jefferson Island. Gordy was born in that very house on October 14, 1933.
His father, John Collins Gordy (known as J. C.), managed the island’s salt mine. In 1940, he and two younger brothers discovered a huge salt reserve in nearby Anse la Butte and struck out on their own, establishing the Gordy Salt Company. J. C. bought a tidy brick house at 306 Edgewater Drive in New Iberia and the family became a fixture of small-town life: members of the local garden club, the Rotary Club, and the Episcopal church. One of Gordy’s older brothers, William, became a lawyer. The other, John, was a Marine.
In an interview years later, Gordy recalled how one of his brothers (he didn‘t specify which) first seeded the idea of becoming an artist when Gordy was around eleven by introducing him to a painter friend—the eccentric “town artist . . . who seems funny to everybody else.” To my ear, that description has a certain queer flavor: the painter, Gordy notes, lived with his mother and made money by decorating shop windows. Even then Gordy may have recognized a kindred spirit in this unnamed bachelor, though any such recognition would have gone unspoken. This was the South in the 1940s, after all. Whatever the possible subtext, Gordy was inspired enough to begin pursuing art during his freshman year of high school.
Around that time, a more overt queer influence entered his life in the form of Weeks Hall, a mentor to aspiring artists around town. A painter trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts who had also lived in Paris, Hall—then in his early fifties—was “a character,” as his neighbors might have quipped. A car accident years earlier had “smashed” one arm, which he blamed for his waning productivity. A more likely cause was his all-consuming obsession with Shadows-on-the-Teche, his ancestral plantation, which he worked tirelessly to restore to its antebellum grandeur. It became a destination for visiting luminaries like Walt Disney, William Faulkner, and Cecil B. DeMille. Yet Hall also guarded his privacy in peculiar ways. In his book Rainbow Fleur de Lis, the historian Frank Perez, quoting the essayist John Shelton Reed, notes that Hall would disperse interlopers “by impersonating a (nonexistent) idiot twin brother. Other times, he just rushed at them in his underwear, shaking his cane and shouting, ‘Get out of here, you goddamn silly women!’”
Hall was a conduit to both serious modern art and furtive queer enclaves. He exposed Gordy to French and American painting, including, perhaps, his own canvases, which often drew on the atmospheric landscapes and architecture of his native Louisiana. He’d also been active in what was later dubbed the “Dixie Bohemia” of New Orleans in the early 1920s—a revitalization of the French Quarter largely shepherded by queer artists and writers such as William Spratling, Pops Whitesell, and Lyle Saxon. As with the anonymous small-town artist of Gordy’s youth, any coded signaling between him and Hall would likely have gone unacknowledged and unrecorded given the era, but it’s tempting to see his influence nonetheless. Hall’s sensual treatment of landscapes, for example, reads like a precursor to Gordy’s more frankly carnal terrains. Like Grant Wood, Gordy could imbue natural forms with sexual insinuation. In Study for Desert Nights (1973), for example, a nude woman—her hand in her crotch—lounges amid a field of girthy cacti that read as unmistakably phallic.
By his sophomore year, Gordy was painting every day, a practice he continued for the rest of his life. In 1951, a photo of him at the easel appeared on the front page of his hometown newspaper. “The 17-year-old . . . has won top honors in the National Scholastic Art Awards exhibition,” the caption reported, noting that he bested 170,000 other students nationwide. Altogether, thirteen of his submissions were selected for exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. A little more than two weeks later, another story ran in the same paper, again with a photo of Gordy, this time posed beside a painting titled Winter Desert. The image quality is too murky to make out details, though the work appears abstract: a pane of jagged lines and skewed angles. The reporter’s tone conveys the mild bemusement of someone encountering “modern art” as a novelty:
Robert’s folks can recall no one on either side of the family who was talented with brushes and paints. . . . Robert says his style is hard to explain but classifies his style as expressionistic with emphasis on child-like fantasy—primitive elements combined with strong color and good design. . . . The young artist takes a lot of ribbing from his teen-aged friends (who call him Bobby), mostly because his paintings just don’t make much sense to them.
Gordy later attributed his becoming an artist to the sense of otherness he felt in New Iberia. “I knew I was different,” he said, and that conviction urged him to leave town and explore the world.
After high school, he enrolled at Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), and in the summer of 1953 he traveled to Provincetown to study with the artist Hans Hofmann. A German émigré who had resettled in New York and served as a link between European avant-garde traditions such as Cubism and Fauvism and American abstraction, Hofmann encouraged experimentation and emotional intensity. Students like Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Larry Rivers absorbed these lessons as they went on to reshape postwar American painting. Hofmann was also a great connoisseur and theorist of color. In a 1957 essay, he defined his approach to painting as “a process of metabolism, whereby color transubstantiates into vital forces that become the real sources of painterly life.” While Gordy’s work was never fully abstract, his electrified palettes and lush patterning coalesce into compositions driven as much by expressive design as by representation.
Take By the Sea #2 (1979). On a literal level, it’s a wide-angled view of four figures on a beach—two standing, two crouching. But the allover patterning harmonizes figure, sea, and sky, pushing the image past naturalism into high poetic formalism. Other paintings, like Blue Bathers (1973), are less about the women wading than the arrangement of lines and shapes that denote the river and give the whole the fluency of wallpaper. Image and form are inextricable.
In September 1953, Gordy transferred to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. With the support of a Yale-Norfolk Fellowship, he again studied with an influential teacher, the painter Nicholas Marsicano in Connecticut. Marsicano’s primary subject—the female form—became a motif for Gordy as well. Gordy’s women are iconographic: curvilinear lines, puffed pennants of hair, bulbous breasts and buttocks. In his later work, they’re often streamlined into featureless mannequins with ovoid faces. Gordy’s queerness tinges these representations. Rarely seductresses, his women are more like ciphers enacting ritualized choreographies: squatting, huddling, sprinting, cavorting. For Gordy, women may have been proxies for his own erotic desires, as well as more conventional signifiers of decorativeness. “I think of the female image as essentially an autobiographical image,” he once confessed.
Gordy began graduate studies at the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) in Iowa City in 1955. The school was more celebrated for its creative writing program than its art department, and Gordy befriended many students in the Writers’ Workshop. His interest in literature surfaced in later paintings such as Rimbaud’s Dream #1 (1970) and Rimbaud’s Dream #2 (1971), named after the incendiary French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The actual meaning of the paintings is more oblique; in both, tubular figures rest amid blocks of iridescent noodle forms. Gordy described the image as “a dream of treasure, a dream of worldly goods,” alluding to the years Rimbaud spent as an adventurer-for-hire in Africa after renouncing poetry. Gordy also visited the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955, where he saw Matisse’s monumental painting Bathers by a River (1909–1917). The abstracted landscape and pared-down figuration would have a lasting impact on his own style, including his serial imagery of river bathers.
In the fall of 1955, Gordy left Iowa and returned to Louisiana State University. That January, his brother William was killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-seven, a loss Gordy rarely addressed in later interviews and whose impact can only be traced implicitly, if at all. What can be said is how quickly it was followed by motion. Four months later, Gordy’s photograph appeared again in the Daily Iberian: he had been selected as one of 150 students nationwide for a United States Information Agency exhibition that would travel through Europe and Latin America. By summer, he was abroad himself, moving from country to country, painting as he went. Whether this restlessness was simply ambition or something harder to name, it became a defining condition of his early career.
When he returned stateside, he accepted a job as an art instructor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, leaving the position about a year later. Gordy’s wanderlust was deepening, both in his life and his art. Between 1957 and 1964, he posted mailing addresses in Mexico City, San Francisco, New York, Kansas, Vermont, and Ibiza. He supported himself variously—teaching adult education classes, substituting in public schools. In Manhattan he worked for a textile designer, a job that reflected his interest in patterning. Throughout these years, he continued to exhibit and win awards while also articulating an insular aesthetic philosophy. “Verbal statements about the individual paintings are irrelevant,” he told a reporter, “because the completeness or ambiguity of the statement is entirely visual.”
He moved to New Orleans in the winter of 1964, partly to be closer to his now widowed mother (J. C. had died in 1960). He told himself he’d stay for only three years; he remained for the rest of his life. He found the city a comfortable place to work and soon had his first solo show, at the A. L. Lowe Gallery. His drawings and paintings of flowers, melons, and other plant forms were favorably reviewed by local critics, one of whom praised Gordy as “a highly individual painter who can produce works of significance and impact.” These early works show him still heeding the thunderclap influence of Matisse and Cézanne, though his mature style was emerging—as in Little Round Cowering (1964), a drawing of a fleshy woman squashed unnaturally against a bed of kelp-like tendrils.
Talking to critic Alberta Collier, he enumerated the “very human” intentions behind his work: “having cake and eating it,” “inventing my own shaggy dogs,” “sweeping dirt under carpets,” and “keeping busy.” The list reads like playful deflection, but it also conveys the mood of his paintings, which operate on the nerves like visual serotonin—exuberant and beguiling, yet faintly agitating in their strangeness. His landscapes are elliptical or pushed into bonked-head unreality. Geometric debris litter the surfaces. Many of his figures have the blank avidity of sex dolls; you can almost imagine their vinyl flesh squeaking as they scurry or loll. A sourceless dynamism runs through the images—a fluidity that makes their stillness feel provisional.
Gordy’s breakthrough year was 1967. In addition to another acclaimed show—this time at the Glade Gallery—he earned a trio of major honors. In October, he was named a winner in the Artists of the Southeast and Texas exhibition at the Delgado Museum, as the New Orleans Museum of Art was then called; the following month, he received a $5,000 grant from the National Council on the Arts; and in December, he was included in the Whitney’s annual exhibition of contemporary American painting. His entry, The Blue Robe, was described as “neo-surrealist” by curator Robert M. Doty. A work of dreamlike ambiguity rather than outright illogic, the painting shows a nude woman striding out of an empty room, the robe itself a disintegrating tangle on the carpet. The wallpaper—a riot of leafy botanicals—and a stark frame-within-a-frame that defines the space are more intriguing still. “All the images I’d been working with for eight years or so . . . fell into place,” Gordy later said of this period.
His career was gaining momentum. In 1968, he signed with the Simonne Stern Gallery, New Orleans’s premier showcase for contemporary artists. Then the Whitney purchased Boxville Tangle, Number 1 (1968), a scene of stylized figures romping amid shadowy cubes and errant yellow ribbons. The painting demonstrates Gordy’s precision with color—neon pink outlines nearly every element—and his ability to insinuate narrative without constructing conventional “story” paintings. Le Parc (1968), a kind of companion piece, features similar figures capering before arcane pyramids that could be smokehouses, crypts, or half-submerged warheads.
Gordy traveled to London in the summer of 1969 to work on a suite of screenprints. While there he met an English dancer named Frank Kennett, two years his senior. Kennett came from a working-class background and is described by those who knew him as “charming,” “flamboyant,” and “over-the-top.” Details of their early relationship are sparse, but Kennett eventually moved in with Gordy at 813 Barracks Street in the French Quarter and took a job teaching at the local Arthur Murray School of Dancing. By 1973, the couple had purchased a stately Victorian house in the Bayou St. John neighborhood. Kennett converted the double parlor downstairs into a dance studio, while Gordy worked upstairs, regularly logging ten- or twelve-hour days. His collection of African masks adorned the walls.
Even as his career boomed through the ’70s, Gordy was sometimes disillusioned by the vagaries of the art world. After attending the 1973 Whitney Biennial, which included his painting Still Life with Bricks, he dismissed it as an “awful show” and came to believe that the respect of his peers (not institutions) is what mattered most. Collectors didn’t satisfy him either—if they understood his work at all. Touring their homes, he noticed that his paintings were seemingly chosen to match a “terribly expensive rug.” Though he imagined his audience to be “awfully small,” it was widespread and voracious enough to sustain a busy exhibition schedule and frequent travel to France, Switzerland, Italy, Scotland, and elsewhere. By the end of the decade, Gordy was regarded, at least locally, as the greatest painter in New Orleans.
The city’s art scene had matured in tandem. Ida Kohlmeyer and George Febres had achieved national notice, even as they remained peripheral to the epicenters of art. Febres—a queer Ecuadorian expat and friend of Andy Warhol—was a scenemaker whose gallery, Jules Laforgue, inaugurated a loose band of artists christened the “Visionary Imagists.” Their work was irreverent and uncanny, a distinctly New Orleans stew of Cajun culture, voodoo, and Mardi Gras. With their humid colors and oddball narratives, the paintings were closer in spirit to folk art than to the then-dominant modes of minimalism or conceptualism. Although the Visionary Imagists coalesced after Gordy’s death, his spirit hovered over their psychologically charged work and offered an example of a local artist whose success was bound to his nonconformity.
For a moment, it seemed possible that New Orleans would follow in the wake of Sacramento, Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and other cities that had positioned themselves as art outposts in the 1970s and ’80s. A story about the Visionary Imagists that ran in the Los Angeles Times in 1990 crowed, “Over the last decade, the growth of vital art centers outside New York has been so extraordinary that it will likely be deemed the New American Regionalism by future historians.” What actually happened was less clear-cut. Even as local networks formed, they were rarely consolidated into a stable critical or curatorial framework. George Dureau, a New Orleans artist best known for his photos of amputees and men with dwarfism, exerted a covert influence beyond the city, including on Robert Mapplethorpe, but such lines of transmission were intermittent rather than structural. Gordy’s career fit uneasily within this pattern: neither obscure nor fully assimilated into an alternative canon, he was simultaneously insider and outsider.
An example of such dual citizenship occurred in 1981 when his mid-career survey opened at the New Orleans Museum of Art and then traveled to four other cities—all of them in the South. The implication was that Gordy belonged to (and was most legible within) his native region. At the show’s opening, he confessed to museum director John Bullard, “I don’t want to paint like this ever again.” The same qualities that made his earlier work so seductive—pattern, control, stylization—had hardened into constraint. He was bored by the arduous labor required: sketch the composition, transfer it to canvas, then meticulously fill in the colors. He compared it to the “busy work” of needlepoint or knitting. Sometimes he enlisted Kennett to help paint designated areas, but nothing could shake his worry that, as he said later, his work essentially dried up after 1976.
An unfinished canvas from the early ’80s—a landscape—was still on the easel back in his studio, but Gordy was burned out. He quit painting for six months. In the summer of 1981, a fellow artist in Santa Fe invited him to try monotypes, a process that involves creating an image on a smooth surface and then transferring it to paper to produce a single print. Gordy was enthralled by the results and claimed he did the best work of his life during those four days. Since he had only six or seven hours to complete a print before the ink became unusable, monotypes imposed a method of working that was instinctive and improvisatory. It offered Gordy “a feeling of surprise in myself and occasionally having a small miracle.”
Where his earlier paintings are tightly orchestrated, the monotypes are rougher, harsher, and less immediately likeable. The isolated heads look like witnesses to some catastrophe just out of frame. Some are more extraterrestrial than human; others have the celluloid complexions and bombed-out stares of refugees; still others emanate an ineffable sorrow, as if born bereaved. “[Gordy] exposes our fear that we are ultimately alone in what is essentially an indifferent universe,” the critic David Connelly wrote, and the heads do present like avatars of a grief that’s more existential than personal.
Shortly after Gordy commenced the monotypes, black wreaths began appearing on doors throughout the French Quarter, marking houses where someone had died of a new and little-understood plague. HIV/AIDS struck New Orleans as it did many American cities—unevenly, and with devastating force. In contrast to the hardest-hit metropolitan areas, New Orleans had fewer research hospitals, fewer doctors, and a smaller network of activists. Information was fragmented and delayed; clinical trials were scarce. Gordy was an early supporter of the NO/AIDS Task Force, a volunteer organization founded in 1983.
The proximity of this crisis to Gordy’s final body of work inevitably invites comparison. “It screams AIDS,” one critic noted of a particularly bleak monotype. Whether or not Gordy’s intentions were explicit, his late practice unfolded within a historical moment in which paranoia, isolation, and mourning shellshocked the gay community. Nearly everyone was afraid, or an exhausted caretaker, or a shattered survivor searching themselves for signs of infection. The epidemic finally entered Gordy’s home in 1984: Frank Kennett tested positive for HIV and died that August at age fifty-two.
As with the earlier death of his brother, Gordy rarely spoke in print about losing Kennett. His monotypes instead register grief through solitude and depletion: nude men in austere landscapes, elongated and unmoored. In a Smithsonian interview in February 1986, he reflected on his daily studio practice as “essentially a moral act,” a process of continuous decision-making that he described as “a paraphrase of your own life.” He seemed to mean that artmaking, for him, was synonymous with repetition, risk, and the possibility of failure, which were the sudden, tragic realities of his ravaged city. In that same interview, he admitted that he didn’t know how much longer he had to live; he, too, had been diagnosed with AIDS.
At some point in the summer of 1986, Gordy was admitted to Southern Baptist Hospital. Visitors were required to wear full protective gear in accordance with the period’s fear of contagion. One acquaintance, a professor who was pregnant, chose not to see him to avoid exposure. A dermatologist who knew Gordy and collected his work was the first hospital staffer to remove her protective gear and touch him; those present recall breaking down in tears at the sight.
In the end, Gordy returned home, among his collection of masks and Frank’s now silent ballroom. His final painting, a mountainous landscape said to be titled “To the North,” remained unfinished in his studio. He died on the morning of September 24, 1986, accompanied not by his friends, who were asked to wait downstairs out of precaution, but by a nurse who came down shortly afterward to deliver the news. He is buried near Frank in New Iberia, closer, at last, to the womb than to the world he left behind.
I came across Gordy’s work by chance, in the churn of an online auction where objects surface untethered from the histories that once gave them meaning. That such an artist could circulate this way—mixed in with Currier and Ives prints and cheap Chinoiserie, barely described, half-obscured by a more famous counterpart who shared his name—underscores just how precarious any artist’s legacy is. Gordy’s career, once buoyed by critical raves and institutional anointment, dissipated rather than collapsed. Its remnants are scattered across regional collections, private homes, and the memories of those who knew him. To look at his work now is to reconstruct, imperfectly, the conditions that shaped it: a life lived on the outskirts of cultural authority, a visual language that was part-phantasmagoria and part-elegy, and a plague that narrowed the field of visibility for artists like him.
And yet the work persists—vivid, insistent, thrilling. The stylized landscapes and afflicted heads don’t resolve into a neat narrative of either desire or loss; they hold themselves at a distance, even now. Gordy remains outside the mainstream both because he’s been omitted from it and because his art evades the terms of inclusion. Last year, for example, the Whitney mounted Sixties Surreal, a panoramic exhibition that reinterpreted that decade through its subliminal Surrealist genealogies. Gordy wasn’t included, even though the Whitney keeps a superb example of his work in storage. He would have bolstered the show’s thesis while also providing a queer, Southern spin on Surrealism. And there’s something bittersweet about his hometown museum carrying the burden of recognition largely on its own.
Recovering Gordy now isn’t about correcting an oversight but confronting a broader historical thinning. His career belongs to a generation of queer artists whose trajectories were interrupted or never fully absorbed into the canon in the first place—people like Jerome Caja, Jack Brusca, and William Schwedler, among scores more. Institutions have done some recuperation work, but it’s haphazard and often centered on already canonical figures. The result is a distorted art history where the middle tier is patchy or gone. Working artists like Gordy, who exhibited, influenced peers, and sustained local scenes, fall from view. Without that layer, the story of American art in the late twentieth century becomes cleaner but less true, less surprising.
Gordy will continue to surface this way—unexpectedly and at the edges. His work keeps its nervous beauty, its spellcasting charge. “You kind of pull in the audience with the visual pleasures,” he told an interviewer in 1983. “You pull them in with exciting color and a sharp, clean technique, and then you give them some fairly ambiguous and sometimes even rather frightening information.” The effect still holds: images that beckon you in, then never let you go.
