One night in 1989, Hunter Reynolds, then a 30-year-old artist living in New York City, did her own make-up at home with the help of a friendly drag queen. He was intrigued by the result: his handsome face was embellished and transformed, neither man nor woman, like an androgynous Berlin variety star during the Weimar years. He put on a tweed jacket and went to world art events. Friends didn’t recognize him, so he pretended to be a visiting performer from Los Angeles.
As a gay man and an artist, Mr. Reynolds was interested in exploring the limits and possibilities of gender. As a gay man recently diagnosed with HIV and a member of ACT UP, the grassroots protest group founded by Larry Kramer and others, he is on the front lines of the fight against the disease. will eventually kill him – and fight homophobia. in politics, health care, and the art world make the fight a whole lot more urgent. Making art that focuses on the body will become increasingly important to him.
Before long, he developed another self that he called Patina du Prey. For Patina, Mr. Reynolds designed a wardrobe of gowns – tunics with skirts made of satin, felt and taffeta, with stiff bodies shaped for a very masculine torso. Reynolds, showing off his hairy chest and muscular arms. The gowns are getting more and more sophisticated like Patina’s shows.
In an early work, Patina wears a blue ao dai and hangs in a cage in a gallery for hours at a time. In 1992, in a work called “Party, ” Held at the SoHo Thread Waxing Space gallery, he swings slowly on a pedestal, like a dancer in a music box, in a white satin gown imprinted with drops of his blood. him and the hair of a collaborator, Chrysanne Stathacos – the prints looked like roses and delicate vines – while attendees snacked from the party laid out on top of the naked man, and women dressed as maena read feminist texts aloud. Mr. Reynolds and Mrs. Stathacos pay homage to a 1951 Surrealist work, Meret Oppenheim’s “Spring Festival” – but while that work serves a meal to a naked woman, they only use a man for theirs.
One of Reynolds’ most moving pieces – and the star of Patina – is a black satin gown with the names of 25,000 AIDS victims taken from the AIDS Quilt catalog, which he made in 1993 as a keepsake. living. When Mr. Reynolds first introduced it in a Boston showroom, filming for hours on a pedestal as he practiced, people cried when they discovered the names of friends, family members and lovers.
Reynolds died on June 12 at his home in Manhattan. He is 62 years old. Wendy Olsoff, founder PPOW library on TriBeCa, indicating that it was caused by an aggressive form of squamous cell carcinoma.
Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum and former director of the Creative Time public arts organization, which collaborated with Reynolds in 1994, said: “Hunter carried his pain and suffering, and he did so with honesty and grace. presents Memorial Vestige and other works to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Mr. Reynolds walked around Manhattan in the dress, leaving his bodice on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library.
Ms. Pasternak had met Reynolds years earlier, when she curated his work at a gallery in Hartford, Conn., and appeared as one of the maenads in “The Banquet.”
“He made no secret of his HIV status,” she said in a phone interview. “He wrapped himself in it, especially with the Memorial Costume, concentrating his own virus-infected body in it. I don’t think I could have understood at the time that it was an act of bravery.
“It’s like saying, ‘You dare not look away.’ And you cannot look away. There he was, turning on his podium, saying, ‘This is me. This is us.'”
Hunter Wayne Reynolds was born on July 30, 1959, in Rochester, Minn., to Robert and Danielle (Dusseau) Reynolds.
His parents divorced when Hunter was 7 years old, Hunter grew up in Florida and then, at the age of 15, he moved to California to live with his father, who didn’t work and tried to become an actor.
Hunter worked as a lifeguard, in the mailroom of an insurance and accounting firm, as a disco dancer at parties, and as a telephone sex worker. After earning the equivalent high school diploma, he attended Otis Art Institute’s Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles (now Otis College of Art and Design) and after earning his BFA in 1984, he moved to New York City.
Reynolds is the founder of ART + Positive, a hobby group ACT UP, known as such subsections, of artists who work against homophobia with leaflets, and artworks. Helms AIDS Amendments, sponsored by conservative Republican senator Jesse Helms, banned federal funding of AIDS education.
In addition to Patina’s prison escapes, Reynolds’ performances include a series of films he calls “The Mummy.” For that job, a more challenging exercise, he’s wrapped in plastic wrap and packing tape and towed through locations on trucks, or placed in a showroom or park, then assistants will cut his shell and release him.
He also creates two-dimensional works: His “Survival AIDS” series includes textile photographs, in which he combines articles about AIDS that have been published in The New York Times with photographs. scans of his own work, his blood, and other images.
Among the many honors he has won, Mr. Reynolds is one Colleague Guggenheim in 2017.
Mr. Reynolds is survived by his mother, who is now named Danielle Englander; his brothers, Mark Reynolds and Brian Reynolds; and an older sister, Tasha Reynolds.
Patina has circled the world, from Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach to Berlin Metro Station, from Roman ruins to Gothic churches. She often dances with passersby, wears tulle clouds and looks like a cross between a bride and a bride. These images were taken by photographer Maxine Henryson in a continuous cooperation for eight years they called “I-Dea the Goddess within.”
In 1997, their work was exhibited at the Linda Kirkland Gallery in Manhattan. The show consisted mainly of photographs, but Patina’s white dress was also there, placed in the center of the gallery, “as if frozen halfway and surrounded by a bunch of dried flowers”. Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote in a review. It is “symbolic of a representative but political performance of liberation that is still very much in progress,” he added.
