The Exhibition

Louis Fulgoni: Memory + Legacy is a virtual retrospective exhibition of work by a prolific visual artist who was born in 1936 and raised in an Italian-American household in the New York City borough of Staten Island.

Louis came of age as a young gay man in the closeted 1950s and left suburban Staten Island for “the city” in the early 1960s. He went on to live and work on his own terms in the Chelsea section of Manhattan until his death of complications from AIDS in 1989, at fifty-three.

The purpose of this exhibition is to remember and honor Louis’s distinctive legacy. Although he produced hundreds of paintings, prints, drawings, collages and constructions in his thirty-plus years as a working artist, few of these works were exhibited publicly – beyond a handful of group shows and the walls of appreciative friends and relatives, as well as a few patrons.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why Louis’s artwork was seldom exhibited, or why he never had a solo show. Suffice it to say here that he was not particularly adept at promoting his work, nor very motivated to do so. Like many other artists, and most people generally, he sometimes may have been held back by a fear of rejection. In any case, the act of creation was much more interesting to him than the business of self-promotion. Decades later, his art still illuminates the context of his life and times.

By presenting more than two hundred selected pieces spanning Louis’s creative journey from student to mature artist, this exhibition seeks to rectify his omission from the art historical record. By tracing that journey, it also seeks to illuminate the wider but often forgotten legacy of working artists lost to AIDS in New York.

As early as the fall of 1989, Louis’s lover and life partner Michael McKee, along with his friend and business partner Tim Ledwith, discussed the importance of sharing his vast body of work with a wider public by organizing a retrospective exhibition.

In September of that year, there was a pop-up exhibit of sorts, but it was brief and limited. The setting was the Governor’s House at Snug Harbor, Staten Island, an arts and cultural center that was once a home for retired seafarers. About a hundred of Louis’s friends and relatives gathered there for an afternoon of remembrance. A handful of his prints, paintings and drawings were displayed in the front parlor of the Italianate, nineteenth-century building. Guests wandered in from the tented lawn outside to appreciate the art and remember the artist, as Louis’s friends eulogized him under the tent that day.

Plans for a retrospective exhibition remained amorphous after the memorial at Snug Harbor, but Louis’s work was not entirely invisible. Early on, Michael and Tim managed to place several of his masks in two group shows – one at a gallery in Hastings, New York, and another at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. And in the early 1990s, Michael took a crucial step to document Louis’s oeuvre, commissioning a photographer to shoot slides of some two hundred important pieces.

Later on, Michael also contacted Visual AIDS, a nonprofit venture that – as explained succinctly on its website – “utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.” The organization is home to an archive of the work of artists with AIDS, both living and deceased. Known as the Visual AIDS Artist Registry, the archive emerged from its founders’ stated concern about “not only losing so many artists during the AIDS crisis, but also losing a visual record of all the work created by artists with HIV.”

The online archive subsequently added a Louis Fulgoni webpage featuring twenty-eight prints and drawings. A brief biographical note on the page says Louis’s “elegant and loose works … incorporated many themes, from landscapes to political and social commentary to erotic portraiture.” Until now, this digital tribute has remained the most extensive presentation of his oeuvre , online or off.

That changes with the comprehensive virtual exhibition presented here. The retrospective begins with Louis’s student pieces from the late 1950s, when he was still living with his mother and father on Staten Island and commuting to the School of Visual Arts. It follows through to the final work he created in the early part of 1989, when illness prevented him from continuing.

Of course, Louis was only one of several thousand New Yorkers, including a seemingly disproportionate number of artists, who died during the height of the AIDS crisis. In New York and around the world, AIDS raged on unchecked until effective antiretroviral treatment arrived in the mid-1990s – at least, for those who had access to it. Treatment probably would not have arrived as quickly as it did without the work of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and others who relentlessly pressured the public health bureaucracy and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate drug research and clinical trials.

Louis was too much of an iconoclast to be, in any real sense, a joiner. There is no record of him joining in any direct action with ACT UP, though he certainly supported its aims, and he had participated in the Chelsea Gay Association, the first neighborhood-based gay and lesbian group in New York City, after its founding in 1977.

But Louis expressed his politics primarily through his commitment to creativity and autonomy. The product of an insular, deeply conservative community in mid-century America, he went on to live a full life as a serious artist and an out gay man in an era of aesthetic experimentation and sexual liberation – the latter of which lasted until AIDS largely shut it down. In that place and time, choosing to be himself, fully and unapologetically, was itself an act of rebellion against a social order that punished difference and devalued free creative expression. In fact, it was a radical choice, which produced an exceptional artistic legacy. This exhibition aims to remember and honor that legacy.

Acknowledgements

This exhibition has been produced with invaluable support from web designer Elaine Ahn, photographers Rick Bajornas and Matthias Boettrich, and Staten Island Arts, which provided initial grant funding. It has also received support and encouragement from Eric Stenshoel and from students and faculty in the biography and memoir program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, including Sarah Covington, Bridgett M. Davis, Sarah Schulman and Annalyn Swan. Thanks also to Andy Humm and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network – including staffers Leon Taylor, Richard Speziale and Cory Brice – for their support of the retrospective’s virtual opening; to the many other colleagues and friends who helped shape this project; and to members of the extended Fulgoni family who shared their memories of Louis.