One was a Russian-born aristocrat who studied butterflies, painted visionary watercolors, and spent two decades as head of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The other was the trans daughter of a Presbyterian minister in Michigan who became a star of the East Village art scene of the 1980s with her hand-sewn dolls.
Andrey Avinoff died years before Greer Lankton was born. But they’ll have a conversation, of sorts, at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Art Gallery in a twinned set of exhibits opening Thu., Oct. 20.
Of the two, Lankton – despite lacking any longstanding Pittsburgh connections in her lifetime – is likely better known to local audiences. That’s because her final and largest installation, “It’s All About ME, not you,” is on permanent display at the Mattress Factory museum.
Lankton died in 1996, at age 38, shortly after completing the stunning piece reimagining her studio as a commission for the museum. Her archives are also housed at the North Side museum, and that’s where University of Pittsburgh graduate student Isaiah Bertagnolli served as a research fellow, in 2020.
Lankton’s dolls, some of which depicted celebrities like Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and Warhol superstar Candy Darling, explored the strangeness of the human body and a fascination with how gender is represented, constructed, and performed. New York Times critic Holland Cotter called her work “art of a superbly disciplined and unusually distressing beauty.”
The new exhibit “Greer Lankton: Science Fictions” grew from Bertagnolli’s archival work, during which he noted how often Lankton used science-fiction imagery. “I was really struck by how often she was drawing and representing aliens and creatures and robots,” said Bertagnolli, a Ph.D. student in the history of art and architecture.
The exhibit includes about 50 works and objects, some previously unexhibited. They range from a doll named “Sissy Satan,” and multiple drawings, to Lankton’s day planners, make-up palette, and handbag.
Avinoff was a similarly singular force. The immigrant from czarist Russia was a trained lepidopterist, but in the U.S. also worked as a commercial artist before taking the post at the Carnegie, in 1926.
Avinoff shaped the museum by helping expand its collection of insects (including moths and butterflies), said Pitt art professor Alex Taylor. That collection is among the largest in the world, but much of Avinoff’s art is comparably striking, with its visionary blend of religious and mythological imagery and meticulously rendered flowers and insects.
“His practice would kind of dart extraordinarily between these almost surrealist watercolors then to botanical illustration with a very scientific approach, and everything in between,” said Taylor, who guided the students in Pitt’s undergraduate museum-studies program who curated the new exhibit “Andrey Avinoff: Fantastic Visions.”
The exhibit, a co-presentation with the University Library System, includes about 60 drawings and ephemera from Avinoff’s personal papers, recently acquired by the ULS. Some are previously unseen by the public. Half will be exhibited alongside the Lankton show, the other half in Hillman Library, said Taylor.
Avinoff was gay, Taylor said, and “his sexuality was something of an open secret” in Pittsburgh cultural circles. While Avinoff apparently destroyed much of his homoerotic art, many of his images of beautiful, even ethereal young men survive.
Therein lies a link with the Lankton show. “Thinking about the different ways in which these two figures navigated the kind of public understanding of their sexuality and the way they presented their identity is something of both shows do in different ways,” said Taylor.
Or, as Bertagnolli put it, “Both shows are in conversation with one another to think about fantastical worlds and speculative futures around gender and sexuality.”
“Greer Lankton: Science Fictions” and “Andrey Avinoff: Fantastic Visions” open with a reception Thu., Oct. 20, and both run through Dec. 9.
