A NICE BREEZE BLOWING ALL THE SMOKE IN OUR FACES
KEVIN LARMEE, NELSON SULLIVAN
SEP 5, 2020 – JUNE 13, 2021

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NELSON SULLIVAN
(1948, Kershaw, South Carolina-1989, New York)

Floorplan #1: selection from Nelson Sullivan's archive of videos which he shot between 1982 and until his sudden death in 1989. Sullivan documented with great skill, personal charm, poise and deadpan humor his close and extended circle of friends, amongst which he counted his childhood friend Dick Richards, drag queens Lahoma, RuPaul, Felecia, Larry Tee; the cityscapes, night life and gay parades of 80s Lower Manhattan; as well as his family visits in South Carolina. Amongst the videos presented here is also one of his friends, RuPaul and Felecia visiting a gallery exhibition by painter Kevin Larmee while being harassed by passersby with homophobic comments. Other videos show Nelson and his friends talking New York and gentrification on a delapidated peer, Nelson at a CSD parade, Andy Warhol at a book signing, Nelson on walks with his dog Blackout, Nelson singing old songs alongside his aunt in South Carolina, Nelson playing the piano, RuPaul teaching Nelson how to be a drag queen, Nelson playing his antique Steinway piano, Nelson's BBC interview on the streets, of New York, as well as Nelson's last video.


KEVIN LARMEE
(born 1946 in New Jersey, lives and works in Chicago)

In the 80s, painter Kevin Larmee moved with his wife Susan Isono to New York, and started pasting large sized acrylic paintings throughout the city, devising a fast and expressive style of painting that mixed pattern-making into a flat figurative representation of cityscapes, male and female city loners, as well as merry gatherings at parties, public pools, exhibition openings. Larmee's paintings depict a world that is at times melancholy, yet hopeful for solidarity.
Floorplan #2-13: oil paintings by Kevin Larmee, sized 51 x 51 cm, 61 × 61 cm, and 71 x 71 cm, and dated between 1999 and 2005. Floorplan #14: Kevin Larmee. Untitled. 1987. oil on canvas. 195 x 148 cm

STATIONS would like to thank Kevin Larmee and the Nelson Sullivan Foundation 5 Ninth Avenue who kindly gave their permission to include Nelson Sullivan’s videos in this exhibition. Nelson Sullivan's video archive is included in the Downtown Collection of the Fales library of the NYU, documenting the downtown arts scene that evolved in SoHo and the Lower East Side from the 1960s through to the present.

Stations