Wayne Koestenbaum: You Oughta Be in Pictures

We are very pleased to present a new body of work by Wayne Koestenbaum which uses as springboard a selection of source images based on the gallery's extensive inventory of film and music memorabilia, now transfigured by the artist’s unique sensibility and colorful visual language. "You Oughta Be In Pictures" also displays the original items - posters, photographs, programs, ephemera - and places them in the gallery into conversation with the artworks they helped inspire.

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, performer—has published 23 books, including Stubble Archipelago, Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His next book, a novel, My Lover, the Rabbi, will be published by FSG in March 2026. His most recent solo exhibition, The Shapes a Giggle Makes, was at Gattopardo gallery (Los Angeles) in Spring, 2025. His first solo exhibition of moving-image work, July Synesthesia, took place in summer 2024 at the Millenium Film Workshop. He has exhibited his art work in solo shows at White Columns, 356 Mission, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, as well as in many group shows, including at Air de Paris, Essex Flowers, Wege Center for the Arts, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Gordon Robichaux, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Yossi Milo Gallery, FIERMAN, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017; he has given musical performances of improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, The Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, the Renaissance Society, the Hammer Museum, The Poetry Project, and the Francis Kite Club. His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has acquired his literary archive. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL PURCHASES FROM THIS EXHIBITION WILL BE SHIPPED AFTER THE CLOSING DATE OF 12/20/2025.