Dear Friends & Colleagues,
Every month is pride month as far as the Alvin Baltrop archive—which so tenderly and unapologetically chronicles the struggles, triumphs, and loves of LGBTQ+ people in 1970s-80s New York—is concerned. Yet we gladly embrace the month of queer celebration to reflect on the legacies of those who fought for liberation before us, like Baltrop and the revolutionary transgender activist Marsha P. Johnson whom he photographed. Pride month also reminds us that we must continue this fight to protect queer health, joy, and art. At Third Streaming, we join the movement by researching, preserving, and sharing the photographs, ideas, and histories that Alvin Baltrop generously gifted us during his lifetime.
Our collection includes hundreds of never-before-seen negatives that Tom Powel Imaging is currently digitizing. This project is crucial for preserving Baltrop’s legacy, and we are raising funds to cover the completion of it. Launched this winter, our collaboration with Joseph Altuzarra’s genderful brand, ALTU, supported the Alvin Baltrop legacy projects. We are delighted to team up with the ALTU again this Pride month and offer you an exclusive first look at the 50% off sale on this limited-edition collection.
Each purchase funds our work to tell queer history, celebrate queer art, and honor Alvin Baltrop and his communities.
Thank you for your continuous support. As always, we welcome scholars, curators, artists, and writers to visit our archive and library in Brooklyn to join us in our mission of bringing Baltrop’s work to life today. Contact us at info@thirdstreaming.com to schedule a time to view the materials.
With Heart,
Yona Backer
Upcoming Exhibitions
The First Finger (chapter II)
June 23, 2023 – September 24, 2023 | Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
“Tolia Astakhishvili (*1974 in Tbilisi, Georgia) transforms the Haus am Waldsee with an expansive installation that constitutes her solo exhibition The First Finger (chapter II). In addition to structural interventions, drawings, paintings, text, and videos, the exhibition includes new collaborative works with Zurab Astakhishvili, Dylan Peirce, and James Richards, as well as contributions by Antonin Artaud, Alvin Baltrop, Kirsty Bell, Nat Marcus, Vera Palme, Andreas Rousounelis, Judith Scott, Ser Serpas, and Giorgi Zhorzholiani."
Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry and Ecology Along the Hudson River
October 2024 – January 2025 | Wallach Art Gallery, New York
“Shifting Shorelines brings together historic and contemporary art, visual culture, and
environmental science to engage the history of human existence, commerce, and industry along the Hudson estuary. Focusing on the river’s edges from Albany southward to its flow into the Atlantic Ocean, the exhibition foregrounds the impact of local industry on the natural environment, highlighting the history of the river's distinctive ecological features such as brackish and salt marshes, mudflats, and beaches, along with the docks, factories, and buildings that crowded them out. Through visual and material evidence, Shifting Shorelines demonstrates the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation.”
In the News
Why art, design—and even body image—are deflating, Fast Company
“The work of Alvin Baltrop can be read, Halberstam argues, as an eroticization of ‘unbuilding.’ In images of ruin and sex, Baltrop presents a new form of masculinity and a new type of beauty, one that resists the capitalist model of boom or bust, rise and fall. ‘One of the things I was trying to say about Alvin Baltrop is that he was offering another side to masculinity that wasn’t about erection, but deflation,’ Halberstam adds.”
LAST ACT: Every Ocean Hughes’s art of dying, ArtForum
“In the foyer outside the theater, a series of Hughes’s black-and-white photographs showed the rotting pilings in the Hudson. Its piers once acted as a gathering place for queer people, particularly during the 1980s, when many of those gatherers died from AIDS, deaths neglected by the state. As sites like Little Island develop the old waterfront into tourist-friendly real estate, Hughes draws our attention to the remaining wooden pilings, makeshift burial markers for vanished communities that some would prefer stay forgotten.”
ANOHNI and the Johnsons Are Back With a New Video Starring Munroe Bergdorf, Them
“The forthcoming album cover features an Alvin Baltrop photo of LGBTQ+ activist and New York City icon Marsha P. Johnson, a fitting choice given that ANOHNI herself co-founded the radical East Village queer art collective Blacklips Performance Cult in the 1990s.”
New York: Queer Love on the West Side Piers, Blind Magazine
“Majestic in scale, the slow destruction of the West Side Piers transformed them into a theatrical space rife with intrigue, mystery, spectacle, and romance. Like his contemporaries, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Alvin Baltrop, Stellar was drawn to the Piers as a space for possibility, freedom, and experimentation — a sensibility that spoke to artists and libertines in equal part.”
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For more information on Alvin Baltrop, please visit our website. Please contact Galerie Buchholz for any sales related inquiries.