Paths That Cross: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis

Spanning photography, film, sculpture, and works on paper, the exhibition offers insight into how these artists shaped one another, and how those connections continue to resonate across time.

Smith, Mapplethorpe, and Davis are linked together by profound friendships and collaborative work that began in the late 1960s and is still influential, thirty-seven years after Mapplethorpe’s death. The exhibition takes the name of a song that Smith wrote for Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s lover and patron, who died two years before Mapplethorpe did.

Mapplethorpe and Davis photographed each other, they both photographed Smith, and Smith photographed Mapplethorpe and created calligraphic commentary on a unique set of Davis’s pictures. All of this work, including early Polaroids and archival material, will be represented in the Paths That Cross exhibition. The gallery will also screen Still Moving/Patti Smith, a thirteen-minute 16mm film made by Mapplethorpe for an exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1978, and a short video made by Davis of Mapplethorpe in his studio in 1985. The video has never been exhibited publicly before.

Other rare work includes a vintage gelatin silver print of a portrait Davis made of Smith for Esquire in 1974. It was commissioned for the magazine’s series of “Outrageous Ladies” but never ran. Davis and Smith met for the first time at the portrait session. In 1979, the International Center of Photography in New York mounted an exhibition called Trade-Off, a series of portraits by Mapplethorpe and Davis for which they each photographed the same subjects, some at the same place and at the same time. The sets of images were hung side by side. This hanging of a selection of the portraits will be recreated for Paths That Cross.

The most recent work comes from Conspiracy of Word and Image, an exhibition created by Davis and Smith in 2018 for a Baroque church in Alba, Italy. Five large photographs from that exhibition will be shown. On Davis’s photograph of the Blue Nile Falls in Ethiopia, Smith wrote lines from “The Coral Sea,” her epic homage to the dying Mapplethorpe, in delicate, almost invisible, calligraphy. She put text from Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Davis’s son, and Herman Hesse on images of the Colossus of Memnon, an archeological site in Turkey, an iceberg in Greenland, and Kathmandu. These unique works have not been seen since the Alba exhibition.

The archival material in Paths That Cross include items from 1969, early on in Mapplethorpe’s relationship with Smith: a postcard she wrote to him from Paris, an inscribed photograph of them in Coney Island taken by an anonymous photographer. She used the photograph for her memoir of that time, Just Kids.