Back to the summer of 1967, to one of many arrivals. The bus to Port Authority, the subway to Brooklyn, and, finally, the room with the curly-haired boy. As Smith wrote in her award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids, “It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
“I remember almost everything,” Davis says, speaking to Vanity Fair last month about “Paths That Cross,” an exhibition that features work by Davis, Smith, and Mapplethorpe, opening September 18 at Weinstein Hammons Gallery in Minneapolis. The highly personal curation of photographs (gelatin silver prints, many of them vintage, and unique Polaroids), sculptures, drawings, postcards, videos, and other unique works represents direct collaborations among the artists, as well as their friendships. In total, 40 works will be presented in the airy, 2,000-square-foot gallery.
“Those were just very busy years. I had great friends,” Davis recalls. “In those days, even if you didn’t have much money, you had access to a lot of things. One would go to the theater, the ballet, plays…and then out to dinner every night. Plus working. I’d be in the darkroom maybe two, three nights a week, almost all night.”
In the mix, there is Davis’s portrait of Smith from their Esquire shoot, which was supposed to be part of a portfolio called “Outrageous Ladies.” One of the first things she noticed about Smith, who was 27 years old when they met, was “how unique she was from the get-go. She was wearing tight pants, the jacket, essentially kind of what she’s wearing now…I remember shooting her, how open and vulnerable she was, a little guarded at first and then very forthcoming and very interesting.”
Smith is now 79, internationally lauded as the “godmother of punk,” a writer, and a visual artist. When I reach her via phone in early August, she has just returned from meeting with Pope Leo at the Vatican. She recalls Davis’s photo shoot that went unpublished. “The journalist actually left sort of disgruntled because I insisted on folding the laundry of my boyfriend at the time because he was a musician about to go on tour. She didn’t find it very liberated. I thought it was amusing that she would think that. As an artist, I felt no restrictions. As a human being, I was myself, and I chose to fold the laundry because we took care of one another. In the end, she left and didn’t finish the interview. I wasn’t outrageous enough, unfortunately, for her.”
