Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is an American artist who is also a veteran of the Stonewall riots

Stonewall riots

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City...

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Lanigan-Schmidt's artwork incorporates materials such as tinsel, foil, cellophane, saran wrap and glitter, embracing kitsch

Kitsch

Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...

 and intentionally tacky.
His work has been compared to that of Florine Stettheimer

Florine Stettheimer

Florine Stettheimer was an American artist. She has been described as "a Deco-influenced early Modernist who’s never really gotten her due".-Early life:...

, who used cellophane in her sets for the Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

/Virgil Thomson

Virgil Thomson

Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...

 opera Four Saints in Three Acts

Four Saints in Three Acts

Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera by American composer Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Written in 1927-8, it contains about 20 saints, and is in at least four acts...

; his art was included in an exhibit of artists influenced by Stettheimer.
His work has also been likened to the religious-themed tinfoil-covered thrones of art brut artist
James Hampton

James Hampton (artist)

James Hampton was a janitor who secretly built a large assemblage of religious art from scavenged materials and is considered an outsider artist.-Early life:...

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He is sometimes grouped with the Pattern and Decoration

Pattern and Decoration

Pattern and Decoration was an art movement situated in the United States from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. The movement has sometimes been referred to as "P&D" or as The New Decorativeness.The movement was championed by the gallery owner Holly Solomon....

 art movement.
His art is noted for its incorporation of Catholic iconography.

Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard was an American artist and writer associated with the New York School. His prodigious and innovative body of work included assemblages, collages, drawing, and painting, as well as designs for book and album covers, theatrical sets and costumes...

 is also cited as a forerunner with his use of decorative collage and queer

Queer

Queer is an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT ...

 and religious themes.

Lanigan-Schmidt began by exhibiting his art in his own apartment; an early major exhibit in 1969 was titled The Sacristy of the Hamptons.
Another home exhibit was titled The Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina.
In these early home exhibits, and also in at least one later recreation of an early exhibit, he guided visitors through the exhibit in drag in character as art collector Ethel Dull.

While Lanigan Schmidt's art is not widely known, he has received critical acclaim.

He has been referenced as an antecedent to Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....

 in the intentional use of kitsch in art.

Lanigan-Schmidt's work has been included in major art museum survey exhibits. His art was in the 1984 Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

, and his trip there inspired his 1985 Venetian Glass Series. His foil rats and drag queens produced in the 1970s were included in the 1995 exhibit "In A Different Light" at the Berkeley Art Museum, which was curated by Lawrence Rinder

Lawrence Rinder

Lawrence R. Rinder is the Director of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive , a position to which he was appointed in 2008.Previously, he was the Dean of the College at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco...

 and Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake is an artist whose mixed-media work has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender....

.
His art was included in the 1991 Whitney Biennial

Whitney Biennial

The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...

 as well as the Whitney Museum's survey of 20th century art

20th century art

20th-century art and what it became known as — modern art — really began with modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post Impressionism and Art Nouveau led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke in Germany. Fauvism in Paris...

, "The American century: art & culture 1900-2000."

Lanigan-Schmidt was an associate of the underground filmmaker Jack Smith

Jack Smith (film director)

Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema...

. He participated in at least one of Smith's performances, "Withdrawal from Orchid Lagoon".
He was interviewed in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis is a documentary film that premiered in the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival. It is a collection of interviews and clips by and about the revolutionary artist Jack Smith...

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Another member of Lanigan-Schmidt's circle was Charles Ludlam

Charles Ludlam

Charles Braun Ludlam was an American actor, director, and playwright.-Early life:Ludlam was born in Floral Park, New York, the son of Marjorie and Joseph William Ludlam. He was raised in Greenlawn, New York, on Long Island, and attended Harborfields High School. The fact that he was gay was not a...

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Lanigan-Schmidt, who is openly gay was present at the Stonewall riots, a seminal moment in gay history, and is one of the few recognized veterans still living.
Shortly after the riot started, he was photographed with a group of other young people by photographer Fred W. McDarrah

Fred W. McDarrah

Frederick William "Fred" McDarrah was an American staff photographer for the Village Voice. He became famous for documenting the cultural phenomenon known as the Beat Generation from its inception in the 1950s. In his book The Artist's World in Pictures, co-authored with Thomas B...

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Lanigan-Schmidt appears in the film Stonewall

Stonewall (film)

Stonewall is a 1995 historical comedy-drama film. Inspired by the memoir of the same title by openly gay historian Martin Duberman, Stonewall is a fictionalized account of the weeks leading up to the Stonewall riots, a seminal event in the modern American gay rights movement...

in a documentary segment.
An installation art piece by Lanigan-Schmidt, Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats commemorated the events at the Stonewall Inn

Stonewall Inn

The Stonewall Inn, often shortened to Stonewall is an American bar in New York City and the site of the Stonewall riots of 1969, which are widely considered to be the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for gay and lesbian rights in the United...

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In recognition of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Lanigan-Schmidt was among those invited to the White House to meet with Michelle

Michelle Obama

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is the wife of the 44th and incumbent President of the United States, Barack Obama, and is the first African-American First Lady of the United States...

 and Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

.

He is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts

Exhibitions

• "The True Praxis of Dotty Page, Willy Nilly & the Book of Roof, Read Daily by Savant in the Cathedral of St. Anamnesis, & the Sacred Dentures of Emma Street," The Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2010
• "Tenement Symphony," Pavel Zoubok, September 10-October 10, 2009
• "Placemats and Potholders (Memory & Desire)," Pavel Zoubok, 2006
• "Collage: Signs and Surfaces," Pavel Zoubok, 2005
• "Stapled to the Soul," Pavel Zoubok, 2005
• "The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000", Whitney Museum, 1999
• "Hidden Treasures," Holly Solomon Gallery, 1999
• "Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart," Holly Solomon Gallery, 1996
• "In a Different Light," Berkeley Art Museum, 1995
• "Byzantine Neo-Platonic Rectangles," Holly Solomon Gallery, 1994
• "1969: A Year Revisited," New York University's Grey Art Gallery, 1994
• "The Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina, 1969-70, a reconstruction," Holly Solomon Gallery, 1992
• Whitney Biennial, 1991
• "The Center Show," Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, 1989
• "Halfway to Paradise," Holly Solomon Gallery, 1988
• "Venetian Glass Series," Holly Solomon Gallery, 1985
• Venice Biennale, 1984
• "Religion Into Art", Pratt Manhattan Center, 1981
• "10 artists/artists space," Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase, 1979
• "The Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina", 266 E. 4th Street, 1969-1970
• "The Sacristy of the Hamptons", 266 E. 4th Street, 1969