Directed by Lisa Rovner
Commissioned by Aspen Art Museum to accompany the exhibition Straighten Your Wig and Pray, Arch Connelly: Art in Drag offers an intimate encounter with the artist through a body of archival material that has only recently re-emerged. Rather than telling Connelly’s story from the outside, the film allows him to speak for himself, inviting audiences to encounter the wit, generosity, vulnerability, and conviction that animated both his life and his work.
At the heart of the film is a series of audio interviews recorded by David Hirsh in the early 1990s and preserved in the Visual AIDS Archive. Speaking with striking candour, Connelly reflects on his artistic philosophy, his fascination with beauty and ornament, his years in San Francisco’s experimental theatre scene, and the creative communities that surrounded him. These recordings capture an artist who resisted convention, collapsing distinctions between painting and sculpture, craft and fine art, while embracing theatricality as a way of inhabiting the world.
Drawing upon these recordings, Lisa Rovner constructs a lyrical visual essay that animates photographs, artworks, archival documents, ephemera, and moving image. The result is not simply a documentary portrait, but a meditation on artistic voice and on the fragile histories that archives preserve. Art in Drag extends the exhibition’s commitment to expanding Connelly’s legacy within the history of contemporary American art. Hearing the artist narrate his own story transforms our understanding of the works on view at the Museum, revealing the humour, tenderness, and resilience that shaped his character.
Aspen Art Museum and Lisa Rovner extend their sincere gratitude to Roberto Juarez for generously granting permission to feature excerpts from his film, Portrait of A.C., 1975, as part of this production.
Additional thanks to Kyle Croft, David Hirsh and the Visual AIDS Archive, New York; as well as all the generous lenders who shared their archives with us.
Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is made possible by generous support from Maison Valentino.
Lisa Rovner is an award-winning French-American filmmaker and artist whose practice operates at the nexus of cinematic form, epistemological archaeology, and feminist historiography. Working through archival interrogation and a distinctive visual discourse, she excavates marginalized voices and questions the structures that determine what gets remembered and what gets erased, with sound and voice recurring as political tools of resistance. Her critically acclaimed debut feature ‘Sisters with Transistors’ (2021) narrated by Laurie Anderson, constructs a sonic and visual dialectic from archival fragments to unearth the women who pioneered electronic music. Rovner’s studies in political science at McGill University and Sciences Po Paris inform her use of film as a form of cultural intervention.
