Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lynn Davis Share a Minneapolis Lens
A Minneapolis gallery exhibition pairs Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lynn Davis, three artists from the same downtown New York orbit with Twin Cities ties.
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A gallery exhibition now on view in Minneapolis brings Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lynn Davis into a single frame, according to Mpls.St.Paul Magazine — a curatorial pairing that returns three intertwined careers to the city where their reputations first crossed paths decades ago.
The premise is deceptively simple: three photographers, one downtown New York milieu, and a shared conviction that the camera could function as an instrument of mythmaking rather than mere record. Each of the three earned early critical attention in Minnesota's Twin Cities, and the exhibition leans on that common origin without reducing the artists to it.
Why put these three photographers together?
The triangle is grounded in biography. Smith and Mapplethorpe met in New York in 1967 and remained each other's muses, collaborators and chroniclers until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989. Smith's memoir Just Kids, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010, remains the most read account of that partnership and of the Chelsea Hotel era that produced it. Davis, meanwhile, moved in the same circles before her large-format work took her toward monumental landscapes and architectural studies in Egypt, Greenland and across the Arctic.
Their practices diverged sharply in subject while converging in method: a disciplined, almost classical formalism applied to subjects — portraits, bodies, ruins, icebergs — that carried symbolic weight far beyond what the frame alone could hold.
Mapplethorpe's contribution is the best documented in the art-historical record. His studio portraits of artists, composers and socialites, and his controversial figure studies, made him one of the most exhibited and most litigated photographers of the late twentieth century. The 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment — cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. that same year — set off a national controversy over arts funding that reached Congress. Today his prints sit in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which received a major bequest from the Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Smith's photographic practice is less widely known than her music and writing, but it is substantial: Polaroid-based works and black-and-white images made on tour, exhibited internationally and collected in volumes including Land 250 and Eighteen Stations, the latter published alongside her 2016 touring exhibition of the same name. Her images trade on the same talismanic intimacy that animates her lyrics.
Davis, the least famous of the three for general audiences, holds the strongest claim to the exhibition's formal through-line. A student of Berenice Abbott's circle of technical rigor, she has worked since the 1970s in large format, producing silver prints of Near Eastern monuments and Arctic icebergs that treat geography as architecture. Her work entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York while she was still in her twenties.
What does the Minneapolis angle add?
The Twin Cities connection gives the show its hook. All three artists passed through Minnesota's institutional and commercial photography scene early in their careers, a fact that local audiences — and Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's readership — will recognize as an under-told chapter in the standard New York-centric narrative of 1970s and 1980s image-making.
For a regional gallery, mounting a three-person exhibition of artists with this institutional weight — Guggenheim collections, a National Book Award, a congressional controversy — is a statement of ambition. It also arrives at a moment when institutions nationwide are re-examining the downtown New York networks that produced this generation, and when Mapplethorpe scholarship in particular is undergoing revision through exhibitions such as the Getty and LACMA's joint 2016 retrospective.
Whether the Minneapolis presentation emphasizes the biographical braid or lets the prints argue on formal terms, it offers a rare chance to see Smith, Mapplethorpe and Davis as peers rather than as legend, scandal and cult figure respectively — and it suggests that the gallery intends further historically grounded programming along these lines.
Key points
- A Minneapolis gallery exhibition presents Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lynn Davis together, per Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.
- Smith and Mapplethorpe met in New York in 1967; Mapplethorpe died in 1989.
- Smith's memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010.
- Mapplethorpe's 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment was cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, igniting a national controversy.
- The Getty and LACMA mounted a joint Mapplethorpe retrospective in 2016.
Source: Google News: photography exhibition
Daniel Okafor
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News editor covering consumer brands and retail at Lens Gazette.
