Sheyla Baykal: Horizontal Thinking

Horizontal Thinking feels more like a reunion than an exhibition. Twenty-four silver gelatin portraits look back at you, each made by someone who loved the person in it.

Baykal photographed her friends: the performers, artists, playwrights, musicians, and dreamers of 1970s and 80s downtown NYC. Together, they made art and theatre that was funny, outrageous, political, and gloriously alive.

You might recognize some names: Jackie Curtis, the Warhol Superstar immortalized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Artist Paul Thek. Photographer Peter Hujar. Performer Penny Arcade. The portraits hang alongside collage, notebooks, sculptures, and video made by the people in them.

As the AIDS epidemic spread, Baykal began making these portraits with renewed urgency, sometimes while the people in them were receiving treatment at St. Vincent’s, the hospital at the center of the crisis.

Read the credit lines. On loan from a friend. Courtesy of an estate. Someone kept these artworks because they understood that communities survive when people look after one another.

Go because these were the people who changed downtown New York. Go because someone refused to let them vanish. And go because, thanks to Baykal, you can still meet them.

Sheyla Baykal (b. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1944; d. 1997) arrived in the East Village in the early 1960s. She modeled, learned photography from Peter Hujar, and produced and directed performances with the Angels of Light and the Palm Casino Revue. Through the 1980s, she ran a photography studio on East Third Street, where she made intimate portraits as HIV/AIDS devastated her community. She left her archive to longtime friend Penny Arcade, who, together with curator Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Soft Network, has brought it back into public view.