Join Mattress Factory for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look into the Greer Lankton Archive with Senior Archivist Sarah Hallett and guest speaker S. Brook Corfman, an acclaimed poet and researcher whose current research explores the relationship between gender transition and artmaking practices. Hallett and Corfman will provide insights into Lankton's installation at the Mattress Factory, her creative practice, and her life as an artist. Participants will also have the unique opportunity to view a selection of dolls, drawings, photographs, and letters from the Archive.

FREE FOR MEMBERS.

$15 FOR NON-MEMBERS.

Drinks and light bites will be provided. Please contact members@mattress.org with any questions.

ABOUT S. BROOK CORFMAN
S. Brook Corfman is the author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, one of The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2020, a finalist for the Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature, and the winner of the Fordham University Press POL Prize, chosen by Cathy Park Hong. She is also the author of the poetry collection Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and several shorter works. In 2024 she received the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America and a PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, where she wrote a dissertation on the relationship between gender transition and artmaking practices.

ABOUT THE GREER LANKTON COLLECTION
The Greer Lankton Collection is an assemblage of materials comprising over 15,000 items in eight series; artwork, ephemera, periodicals, photographs, photo albums, slides and negatives, journals and correspondence documenting the life and work of American artist, Greer Lankton.

The collection highlights how this seminal artist was relating to issues of sexuality, gender-identity, transfeminism, iconography, pop culture and consumerism, alongside battles with abuse, mental health issues, anorexia, drug addiction, and the AIDS crisis which surrounded her.

The collection dates from the artist's birth in 1958 to untimely death in 1996, shortly after her installation, “It’s All About ME, Not You” opened at Mattress Factory. Thanks to the generosity of the Lankton family, both her installation and archive were donated to the Mattress Factory, the former in 2009 and the latter in 2014 – events also detailed in the archive.

ABOUT GREER LANKTON
Greer Lankton (1958 – 1996) was one of the most significant artists to have taken part in the revolutionary art scene of New York City’s East Village during the 1980s. Lankton grew up in Park Forest, IL, where she graduated a year early from high school to attend the Art Institute of Chicago from 1975 to1978. That year she moved to New York City and received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1981. By then Lankton had secured her reputation as a leading figure in the social ferment of NYC in the 1980s through her visceral doll sculpture, and now lesser-known performances and minimalist soft sculpture.

Lankton’s drawings are frequently compared to that of the expressionist Egon Schiele and her dolls and their photographic portraits, to that of surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her experimental and multimedia work are located within a history of transfeminism, avant-garde performance and even pop-art, while at the same time is equally situated within a neo-punk canon and the Trash Trilogy of John Waters films - Pink Flamingos being her favorite.

Lankton’s exhibitions and performances included those at PS1, Club 57, Pyramid Club, Franklyn Furnace, Civilian Warfare Gallery, Hal Bromm and the Whitney Biennale, NYC. She also exhibited across the US and Europe, including the UK, Austria and the Venice Biennale, Italy. She exhibited her first full-scale installation artwork at the Mattress Factory Museum shortly before her untimely death in 1996.