Jeremy Lybarger follows Arch Connelly’s transformation of costume jewelry, fake pearls, eggshells, and glitter into queer art. The occasion is Straighten Your Wig and Pray, an Aspen Art Museum survey spanning the 1980s and early 1990s. Its luxury setting sharpens a question running through Connelly’s work: who gets to decide what counts as valuable?
- San Francisco’s drag theater supplied his materials and methods. Scavenged sets, costumes, and dime-store ornament could become sculpture, furniture, or painting.
- In New York, Connelly showed at Artists Space in 1980 and had his first solo exhibition at FUN Gallery in 1981. He continued working as a cook.
- Taurus (Pearl Homes), from 1984, wraps a miniature house in fake pearls. Lybarger connects its queer domesticity to the extravagant decoration of Midwestern roadside grottoes.
- His 1991 Artforum cover, Local Boy, put a pornographic collage into circulation during the culture wars. Camp carried a direct challenge to the art world’s heterosexual norms.
- As AIDS restricted his stamina, Connelly made smaller glitter-and-sequin smiley faces. Lybarger reads their strained cheer as a spoof of compulsory positive thinking.
Connelly died in 1993, aged forty-three. The museum can now comfortably recognize queer art, craft, and camp as categories, but his refusal of solemnity remains harder to accommodate.
Valentino helped support the Aspen exhibition, which extended into its boutique. Lybarger treats that arrangement as another turn in Connelly’s joke about value: cheap materials become desirable, then institutions and luxury commerce certify the transformation. The glitter keeps its wit even as it acquires a pedigree.