Through July 14, Guild Hall in East Hampton showcases a small exhibition titled Ted Carey: Queer As Folk. This nine-painting show highlights the importance of Carey’s artwork beyond what audiences may first see as a limited scope. Ted Carey: Queer As Folk displays most of the artist’s entire body of work, which is relatively small due to his early death at just 53 years old from AIDS.
A Deliberate Curation of Carey’s Work
Carey’s work reflects a deliberate intention to highlight the style of American folk art. Still, before this exhibition shed more light on the artist and his body of work, Carey was more of a footnote in the lives of Andy Warhol and Ray Johnson. The latter was revived from the Guild Hall permanent collection in 2018 with a show full of references to Carey.
“Anybody who would read about Warhol’s early life and career would probably encounter the name Ted Carey. For four or five years they were constant companions,” Ted Carey: Queer As Folk curator Matthew Nichols, PhD says. Nichols’ studies of Warhol’s early career eventually led him to learn about Carey.
“I guess that name was in my memory banks, so when I was looking a few years ago at the newly digitized Guild Hall permanent collection, I recognized his name. Otherwise, I was looking at thumbnail images, so I don’t necessarily think I would have spent a lot of time exploring them any further, but because the name rang a bell and I had done that research in my dissertation, I wanted to explore them, which I did,” Nichols shares.
The exhibition has been deliberately curated to highlight Carey’s work and life, pulling it into the light and out of the shadow of Warhol and Johnson. Nichols wanted to create an exhibition that showed appreciation for Carey in his own right.
“It’s a very unique body of work and it’s a very singular creative achievement, and that’s why I wanted to organize this exhibition and bring it to light,” he says, noting, “In the end, it is a limited body of work… He didn’t really start painting in earnest until he was 45 years old. There are a couple of paintings that predate 1977, but most of the works in the show are from 1977 to 1985. So, within less than a decade he created 12 paintings.”
To Nichols’ knowledge, Carey only created a total of 15 paintings in his lifetime, yet, the curator stated, “It’s very cohesive and it’s stylistically consistent, and it hangs together as a group very impressively,” he says, describing Ted Carey: Queer As Folk as a “jewel box of a show.”
According to Nichols, Carey was a trained painter and skilled draftsman who chose to imitate untrained folk artists. Nichols believes this is perhaps what makes Carey’s work so compelling to him: it “is a visual language that’s inspired by folk art, but it is used to depict what was then in the ’70s and ’80s very contemporary scenes in New York City and then portraits of his friends and acquaintances.”
The East Hampton Exhibition
The exhibition’s centerpiece, “Emak Bakia,” depicts Carey’s East Hampton home with his partner, Tito Spiga. The 31-inch-long oil painting shows Carey, Spiga, and Carey’s mother in the garden. It reflects domestic gay life, which is no different from the lives of heterosexual couples.
Three years after Carey passed from AIDS, Spiga committed suicide and left his money and art collection to Guild Hall.
Before the current exhibition, Carey’s work was only shown one other time – in 1985 at East Hampton’s ArtViews Gallery, just one week after the artist’s death.
For Nichols, the Guild Hall exhibition has “become a labor of love for me, researching this material, putting together this exhibition.” He also shared that he intends to continue studying Carey and learning more.
“I’m hoping the exhibition might elicit some responses from viewers who may have known Ted Carey and provide me with more information because this is completely original scholarship I’m trying to pursue here…It’s a life that’s been difficult to piece together.”
Ted Carey: Queer As Folk is on view through July 14th. Visit guildhall.org for more info.
