Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love
Hilton Als author Nan Goldin editor Jordan Weitzman editor Francis Schichtel editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Magic Hour Press
Published:25th Sep '25
Should be back in stock very soon
Lankton's iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes This is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself. Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton's close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton's work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein's Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.
Lankton channelled her trauma and experience into the work, the dolls becoming repositories of soul that beckon viewers into a strange and curious realm .... The dolls became avatars, not only of the characters they represent, but of the complexities of the human condition where beauty and brokenness co-exist in an endless spiral of remaking ourselves. -- Miss Rosen * Huck magazine *
Could It Be Love' is the first monograph dedicated to Lankton’s art, produced with the Mattress Factory’s archive (not G.L.A.M.). It collects together over one hundred photographs taken by Lankton of her dolls, carefully posed and artfully staged: these aren’t installation photographs, never do we see the white walls of a gallery. -- Louis Shankar * The Brooklyn Rail *
Could It Be Love' is a gift (and imminently giftable), gathering together the artist’s own images—moody vignettes, raucous group portraits, and exquisite close-ups of her dolls—for a thrillingly intimate experience of her glamorous, tormented, and enchanted worlds. -- Johanna Fateman * Cultured *
In a digital era where identity is filtered and flattened, Lankton’s work pulses with something defiantly analog, defiantly alive. The body—hers, ours, theirs—remains both masterpiece and battleground, forever whispering the question: Who made me, and what am I becoming? -- Abby Shewmaker * Flaunt magazine *
As the pace of information and images being thrown at us in our daily lives continues to pick up speed, [Gabriele Munter's] art, and the slow, introspective looking it invites us to do, feels like an antidote. -- Fiorella Valdesolo * Vogue *
For Lankton, dolls were more than just kitschy objects – they were powerful, emotional extensions of herself. -- Summer Moraes * Dazed *
Since Lankton’s death, she’s emerged as an unlikely hero: an endlessly imaginative mind who, like her peers Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz, created a distinct identity for herself as an artist; a transgender woman persevering in a narrow-minded world; a survivor, not just of discrimination or neglect but of history’s attempts to minimize her contributions to contemporary art. Now, Lankton is getting her due... -- Nick Haramis * New York Times: T Magazine *
ISBN: 9781738901364
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
128 pages