Arch Connelly’s tenure was made more poignant by our loss of his presence, along with so many other similarly enchanting voices, way too early from AIDS, that traumatic break of mass cultural erasure. In Connelly’s most immediate past, the context for his ebullient ornamentation may be the society of pickers that arose out of thrift culture, creating an amateur aesthetic distinct from our current fetish for vintage.
Largely self-taught and wholly DIY, pickers employed the particularities and peculiarities of taste over consensus value to predict or even predicate shifts in mainstream fashion by virtue of recognizing worth in what others deem worthless.
More transformative than transactional, Connelly wasn’t concerned with the buy low/sell high dynamic. He was personalizing and internalizing that finding-treasure-in-trash dynamic to reimagine glamor in the abject. His refuse—rhinestones, sequins, faux pearls, and all—was an act of refusal that spun out of his reassessment of our material past, from the secondhand shops of Elizabethan England and the late nineteenth-century rag pickers subsequently excised from the body politic by antisemitic biases through the rise of Christian charities like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, which acted as a more spiritual capitalism. It is likely that some of the mystical materialism that attached itself to retro style may have imbued the advent of the antique found-object in Connelly and other artists repurposing the debris of disposable consumerism, but for certain it is not accidental that Arch inherited the same sensibilities as pickers at the same time when thrift stores entered mainstream consciousness.
Perhaps still too déclassé for the uptight consumers of High Culture of his time, Connelly’s slyly subversive visual come-ons followed closely in the wake of that monumental taste disruptor of the seventies, the Pattern & Decoration movement. In many ways a reaction against the puritanical austerity of Minimalism, P&D engaged a mode of maximalism that has long been aesthetically suspect in Western art (less so in other cultures), from the Baroque through psychedelia, rupturing the bounds of decorum with the decorative, the excessive, the libidinous, the ecstatic, the incessant. P&D was art of inversion, where the tawdry embodied the holy, the distractive invoked the mesmeric, and the artist’s touch was a sleight of hand with butch women and fey men playing at a politicized gender dysmorphia.
The appeal of Pattern and Decoration as a mode of radical ornamentation, particularly in its more effervescent, ethereal, and enigmatic design deliriums, held obvious sway on Arch as he filtered it through the funky, raw, idiosyncratic punk glamor of the East Village, a neighborhood with over-the-top divas navigating perilous slums, where the grandeur of the ballroom met the energy of the street. His work found its home at Patti Astor and Bill Stelling’s FUN Gallery, where the masters of graffiti art showed alongside a less-hyped but equally relevant queer contingent of Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Dan Friedman, and Nicolas Moufarrege. Meant to be ad hoc and improvisatory, Astor intended that each artist would name the gallery as they saw fit, but after Scharf led off by calling it FUN Gallery, and the next artist, Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), could think of no better, the name stuck—as did its imperative, which we can still read in the wicked whimsy of Connelly today. It is perhaps no wonder why, after his brilliant run with FUN Gallery, that seminal bastion of urban extravagance that Connelly joined Holly Solomon Gallery’s stable, where his work equally fit in so well among that of legendary P&D artists Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Judy Pfaff, Miriam Schapiro, and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.
Mischievous and magical, Arch Connelly was a raconteur, rebel, radical, irascible, and ironic. He was also always elegant in everything he did, including breaking the rules, and never shed that politeness that we always assumed came along with being from the Midwest. He was as fun and funny as his art, and when he described himself as “mannered, homosexual, effete, base, snobbish, selfish, and egotistical,” he elided the great humanism that defined him as a person and an artist.
He was never afraid of the degenerate qualities of his art because he invested it all with his remarkable grace. His assemblages, paintings, and sculptures alike, as glorious as disheveled drag queens in the wee hours after a night on the town, feet aching, wigs askew, and makeup running, seduce you by showing that you can’t make anything without make-believe. They are so utterly real in their artifice that I don’t know whether to swoon or to cry when I see them.
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Carlo McCormick is a critic and curator based in New York City.
Arch Connelly: Straighten Your Wig and Pray is on view at the Aspen Art Museum from June 12 to October 11, 2026.