NICOLA TYSON / Part Fantasy: The Sexual Imagination of Seven Lesbian Artists Explored Through the Medium of Drawing

Ellen Cantor, Elise Dodeies, Nicole Eisenman, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Eliza Jackson, G. B. Jones, and Nicola Tyson
Part Fantasy: The Sexual Imagination of Seven Lesbian Artists Explored Through the Medium of Drawing  1992 
Softcover, 30 pages, 23 x 18.5cm.
Trial Balloon, New York

Forward by Nicola Tyson. Essay by Faye Hirsch.

Condition: Good, with minimal wear. 

A rare thirty-year-old exhibition catalog with Nicole Eisenman cover. The catalogue accompanied a "1992 exhibition at the New York venue Trial Balloon that featured seven young lesbian artists (Eisenman, Nicola Tyson, Ellen Cantor, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Elise Dodeles, Eliza Jackson, and G. B. Jones).

Eisenman’s black-and-white drawing Trash’s Dance brings to life the earlier lesbian leather photo portraits of the artist then known as Della Grace (now Del La Grace Volcano). Del’s were taken in Scott’s Bar, an underground lesbian leather dive in ’80s San Francisco. Eisenman’s version includes the photos’ leather vest over bare breasts and expands to a community scene that is passionate, in thrall, and very individuated.

Trash, a mustached bodybuilder in heels, is dancing on the bar for tips, while the unfazed bartenders keep the beer flowing. Two separated dykes, on barstools, are alone, depressed, and drunk amid the frenzy, while the rest are highly engaged, often in couples. Sex is happening, ass-grabbing, breast-baring, and also convivial conversation. Kissing, fighting, explicating, large, small, butch, femme, happy, sallow. And most important, these lesbians are crowded into a very small space, as was almost always the case in lesbian bars, basically stark and empty rooms to which the women, themselves, brought romance and glamour." -  Sarah Schulman, Artforum