ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS

Research, text, film, design: Chris Gylee

Artistic correspondence: Animal J. Smith

In summer 2022 I wrote a series of 40 poems about my Queer ancestors in response to fragments found in the Schwules Museum archive, Berlin. I found a clipping of the 1997 Bay Area Reporter of a performance artist Animal J. Smith and his work Burn the Quilt at the Grasshopper Palace. The short review included a black-and-white portrait of Animal in a leather jacket. I searched for more information online but it seemed Animal — like so many Queer artists in the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic — had simply disappeared. Then, in early 2023, someone called Joe Smith resposted my poem on Instagram with the same black-and-white portrait. Joe (that’s the J of Animal J. Smith) was alive and well aged 60 in San Francisco. He moved to NYC shortly after the performance, lost his personal archive in the aftermath of 9/11, then stopped making artwork altogether. The hiatus lasted 21 years. 

With strange synchronicity, he found my poem online at the time he wished to return to artmaking. I am intrigued by this connection and will use a research stipend to dive deeper into Joe’s story, texts and works, and to facilitate a considered artistic correspondence. I will create diaries and poetic texts and produce a series of visual assemblages layering image, text and experimental performance film to create an artistic archive of an artist and a time and place of Queer artmaking — and thereby contribute to keeping a part of Queer history alive.

The lead and thumbnail image is a re-worked scan of the photograph of Animal J. Smith, originally appearing in the Bay Area Reporter, 14 August 1997 — photographer likely to be Rick Gehrharter. 

Finding Animal is a research project by Chris Gylee, supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.


Special thanks to: Animal J. Smith

Additional thanks to: Aslan; Óscar González; Drew Bourn; the archive of the Schwules Museum, Berlin; the group Stories of SF in the Gay 90’s.