Art@Floyd

Current Exhibit: We Are Multitudes Portraits of LGBTQ Community

Opens June 7

“Every image [she] sees, every photograph [she] takes, becomes in a sense a self-portrait

Dorothea Lange

For Greenport-based photographer Joyce Culver (b. 1947, New York City), the camera has been an integral means of self-discovery and of finding community. We Are Multitudes traces this journey over a career that has spanned nearly fifty years. While Culver’s work is extensive and various, with examples held in such permanent collections as the Amon Carter Museum and MoMA, this exhibition focuses on her depictions of the LGBTQ community. The cabinet in the adjacent corridor contains inscribed photos from the early series Thoughts & Feelings (1976–1977). Rarely exhibited, these acutely personal works were created while she was studying for a graduate degree in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

They offer a profound glimpse into Culver’s own experience of coming out. After Culver moved to New York City, she began to explore “what love might look like in a photograph.”This resulted in the Diptychs (1983–1990). Each of these works consists of two carefully selected images of a couple, suggesting a story of their relationship. In the 1990s, Culver continued to take portraits, both of couples and single figures, but she began to use a 4×5 large format camera and Polaroid instant film. The nature of this photography allowed for an intimacy and trust betweenCulver and her subject, which is clear in the warmth of her LGBTQ Portraits.

To kick off North Fork Pride weekend, an Artist's Reception
will be held on Friday, June 20, 6-8 pm.

The photographic experience was also immediate and inclusive: the sitter received the positive Polaroid print at the end of the shoot while Cullers subsequently printed the negatives. The latter are the photos on view here; they are notable for their wide diversity, depicting disabled and non-disabled people, and people of different colors, ethnicities, and body sizes. A similar celebration of human multiplicity can be seen in Culver’s images of Gay Pride, which she began documenting in NYC in the 1980s. Included amongthese works are more recent photos of North Fork Pride, which launched in Greenport in 2023. At this year’s parade and festival, on June 22, Culver will again photograph Pride attendees. No doubt, like the joyful, powerful works on view here, Culver’s new portraits of LGBTQ community will continue to express the hopeful belief that We Are Multitudes.