This exhibition brings together the work of two artists connected by their friendship, their shared preoccupations (drapery, plant life, and the play between image and text among them), and their initials (R.M.). Rosemary Mayer’s watercolor drawings of flowers offer a foil to her small coiled-wire and wood sculpture Proserpina (1975), whose spiral form references the Roman goddess of spring but evokes Tatlin’s Tower, or the Monument to the Third International. Ree Morton is represented by cursive text paintings, sculptural bows hung on the wall, and lanky floor sculptures like Devil Chaser (1975), a sinuous scribble bedecked with wee ribbons. Three bureaucratic-looking plaques on its pedestal read:

TO REVEAL THE PRESENCE OF WITCHES

TO WARD OFF DESTRUCTION BY LIGHTNING

TO CURE DEMONIACS

The texts, from the book Wild Flowers Worth Knowing (1917), refer to traditional uses of St. John’s Wort. A copy of the volume is shown alongside archival materials that document the artists’ mutual preoccupation with flowers, as well as earlier permutations of the works shown. This inclusion of items from their personal records and sketchbooks is apt, since both artists prioritized the biographical, language, and memory; as Morton once phrased it, “I am my own picture-word history.” —Lisa Darms

In the summer of 2000, I was part of a feminist collective organizing a music festival in Olympia, Washington. One of my duties was to chauffeur performance artist Penny Arcade from Sea Tac airport to a modest room in a Motel 6. Sitting on her lumpy bed, she said I resembled the photographer and model Sheyla Baykal, “before the nose job.” Flattered, I was rapt as she told me about her underrecognized friend who’d died three years earlier, leaving her archive in Arcade’s care.

More than twenty-five years later, Baykal has found a champion in the legacy nonprofit Soft Network. Horizontal Thinking celebrates the culmination of their two-year collaboration with Penny to reanimate the archive, and Baykal’s reputation as a photographer, with twenty-four freshly printed black-and-white portraits of her coterie. Arcade, Jackie Curtis, Paul Thek, Peter Hujar, Cookie Mueller, Agosto Machado, and other mostly deceased luminaries of off-off Broadway and queer New York form a line around the space. Sprinkled throughout the gallery are artworks on loan from the estates of the sitters.

Baykal committed periods of her life to collective living experiments and housing activism, and nursed friends through HIV/AIDS even while ill herself. For the curators, the “horizontal” references a mode of making that is communal and non-hierarchical—a foil to the cliche of the isolated artist. Something, they describe, like hanging out in bed together. —Lisa Darms