Richard Gallo: Performance and Studio 1968-1980 was an exhibition presented at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts in Louisville Kentucky. It was the first retrospective of Richard Gallo (1946-2007), a true pioneer in performance artist who was known in 1970s New York as Lemon Boy. Gallo was a theatre director, stage actor, and performance artist who dressed in provocative costumes and performed outside luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Throughout his brief career, which spanned from 1968 to 1980, he was recognized by many of the most prominent artists of his day, including Andy Warhol who claimed that Gallo was “more glamorous than Marlene Dietrich,” and by Robert Wilson who described him as a “theatrical warehouse.” Yet despite such accolades from the art world elite, Gallo’s contributions to art history have been largely overlooked. Comprising over 60 photographs drawn from a number of archives, this exhibition was the first time in 40 years that many of these images had been seen in public.
Richard Gallo: Performance and Studio 1968-1980 was organized by Scott Rollins and Noah Khoshbin. January 18 - February 23, 2019. The exhibition was divided into four sections: studio portraits, street performances, staged productions, and the fashion and nightclub scene of New York City in the 1970s.
Studio. In May 1973, Gallo travelled to Nancy France to headline the Festival Mondial Du Théâtre. Before he left, he modeled his new costumes for the fashion photographer Andres Lander.
Street. Between 1968 and 1973, Gallo performed and posed outside the luxury stores and upscale hotels of Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Stage. Beginning in 1969, Gallo performed onstage in all of Robert Wilson’s early works including: The King of Spain, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Deafman Glance, and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. He also directed and performed in his own staged productions: Squalls, Tip of the Iceberg and A Killer’s Loose But Nobody’s Talking.
Scene. In 1974, Gallo abandoned street performance and theatre, and shifted his attention to couture fashion and New York City nightlife. A regular at runway fashion shows and nightclubs such as Studio 54, he continued his costumed performances, only now in a different setting
In May 1973, Gallo travelled to Nancy France to headline the Festival Mondial Du Théâtre. Before he left, he modeled some new costumes for the fashion photographer Andres Lander. Beginning in 1968, just after graduating from Pratt Institute, Gallo started dressing in costumes daily. He did not wear certain clothes just for his performances. He wore the same outfits onstage, on the street, and in private. Some of the outfits he wore for this photoshoot were inspired by fetish gear while others were created specifically for him by the fashion designers Ronald Kolodzie and Phillip Haight.
While a student at Pratt University in Brooklyn, Gallo slicked his hair back like a Hollywood gangster and dressed in Gucci suits with matching Gucci dress shoes. His classmates at Pratt were Robert Wilson and Robert Mapplethorpe. In this photo, Gallo is wearing one of his leather fetish outfits. He began dressing this way in public after he graduated from Pratt in 1968. In 1973, the year of this photograph, Mapplethorpe started taking photographs of men in bondage and leather, and that same year the film Nights in Black Leather starring Peter Berlin was released.
Inspired by traditional Greek helmets and contemporary trends in fashion, Ronald Kolodzie and Phillip Haight designed and constructed a series of costumes for Gallo to wear at his first major staged production, the 1973 Squalls in Nancy France. “Richie had his own sense of fashion. He had a very classical face so we started doing Roman and Greek outfits for him. It was all draped, there were never really designs done in advance; we were working with his moods and his body and playing up his best parts.” ~ Phillip Haight
"Richie Gallo was more extreme-looking than anybody I had ever seen and although there was this S & M / Tom of Finland sort of thing — he had his own look. It was dark and very nefarious. You couldn’t place it, except for now looking back, you see him as a Mapplethorpe character. But back then it was startling to see him on the street dressed like that — especially in daylight.” ~ Anna Sui
In the fall of 2017, Richard Gallo appeared on the cover of Office magazine. In this photo by the fashion photographer Andres Lander, Gallo is wearing one of his more provocative costumes. He wore this particular outfit onstage and on the street. In 1971, he was arrested in Paris, for wearing this in public and the legendary fashion designer Pierre Cardin had to post bail for his release.
“The way Gallo dressed would have seemed costume-like on anyone else, but on him it appeared completely natural. He transformed the street into a stage with his mere presence.” ~ Fred Kolouch
Gallo wore this costume on the streets of Nancy France when he went there in 1973 for the Festival Mondial du Thèâtre. During the preparation of his production of Squalls, he was seen frequently around Nancy wearing revealing and unusual leather costumes. The French newspapers were critical of his appearance which they described as “Hell’s Angels exhibitionism” and Gallo himself as a “man-fetish”. Unperturbed with the French’s critique of his fashion, Gallo wore this costume, as well as many others, onstage for Squalls. That he chose to dress the same way regardless of the setting or the public’s response suggests that he did not distinguish any boundaries between stage and street, social life and the private self.
Gallo dressed in costumes daily from 1968 to 1981. He did not wear certain clothes just for his performances. He wore the same outfits onstage, on the street, and in private. “When he dressed he was ‘on,’” according to filmmaker Susan Raymond, “and that was the performance.”
At a young age, many gay men begin to construct their own reality as a place of refuge in response to a culture quick to condemn their sexual identity. When this photograph was taken homosexuality was still considered a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. During his time in college, Gallo started calling himself Lemon Boy and began wearing costumes. Through fashion and performance he constructed a new identity that confronted and challenged traditional concepts of masculinity.
When Gallo wore this outfit in Nancy, some French newspapers described him as the “silver cosmonaut.”
Between 1968 and 1973, Gallo performed and posed outside the luxury stores and upscale hotels of Fifth Avenue in New York City. These performances critiqued consumer culture, challenged traditional notion of masculinity, and publicly defied general conventions of social decorum. He accomplished much of this by wearing what he wore every day: skintight costumes with sado-masochist elements, including black leather hoods, harnesses, handcuffs, even steel combat helmets. Looking like this, he always attracted an audience and then the police, who would typically fine or arrest him for the dubious offense of performing without a permit.
For the performance Lemon Heads, Gallo chose a demolished Midtown property lot that was scheduled for construction. Over the course of several days, he staged multiple ensemble performances at this location. His cast included football players from a local high school, several elderly women, a trumpet player, his friend Alan Sigman, who wore a Bold detergent box over his head, and Gallo himself, dressed in an all-white masked costume.
Gallo’s 1969 performance inside Tiffany’s jewelry store was inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s character Holly Golightly in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In that film, Hepburn wore a little black dress complete with black evening gloves. Gallo’s costume for his Tiffany’s performance was a re-interpretation of Hepburn’s iconic dress. The actual performance involved him entering the store and sitting at the counter, as if waiting for a salesperson. Quite quickly, he was forced out onto the street. There, he continued his performance by dancing slowly around a top hat he had placed on the sidewalk. Inside the hat was a handwritten note by Gallo: “no money please.” Before long, a policeman arrived, studied the length of Gallo’s chiffon, attempted to make sense of what was happening and ended the performance, issuing Gallo a summons for performing without an “exhibition permit.”
Almost without exception, his public performances were situated on Fifth Avenue between the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and Grand Army Plaza on 59th Street. Since his teenage years, Gallo had been attracted to Fifth Avenue. He was obsessed with Barbra Streisand and was inspired by her 1965 television special My Name is Barbra, which was filmed inside Bergdorf Goodman. For many, Fifth Avenue represents fantasy, glamour, fashion, luxury, and money. For Gallo, it was the ideal location where he could publicly re-stage, in his own particular way, those scenes he saw on the television as a teenager.
Gallo’s street theatre was both entertaining and disturbing to the public because he never announced what he was doing as performance. Today he would easily be recognized as a performance artist yet back then this was less clearly defined. Arguably part of his appeal then involved determining whether he was crazy or not, which was a valid question and one that he even posed to himself: “I don’t know what I was doing. Maybe I was pretending to be crazy. I wasn’t crazy. Or was I?”
Gallo’s first performance, White Line, in 1968, ended in front of the Atlas statue in Rockefeller Center. In 1969, he returned to that location for another performance. This was more of a photoshoot than a performance and he brought along his friend Robert Ippolito to photograph him posing among various passersby. The impact of these photographs lies in the contrast in what Gallo is wearing compared to those around him. In many of these photographs, Gallo is seen standing with uniformed men — including sailors, policemen, firemen, and in this case a hotel doorman. The unusual pairing of Gallo next to these men begs the question of who is actually wearing a costume.
According to the costume designer, Phillip Haight, Gallo’s intention was to be perceived and desired as an art object. In order to accomplish this, to be a sexualized art object, to be objectified in general, Gallo neither acknowledged nor returned the gaze of his audience. If he were to do otherwise, he would no longer be able to maintain his status as an object. Thus he purposefully masked his eyes throughout his career with wigs, goggles, sunglasses, veils, coifs and helmets. In this photograph, he poses with his head wrapped with chiffon and wearing a pair of “Groucho” sunglasses.
Beginning in 1969, Gallo began performing regularly inside Grand Army Plaza. He often used fruits and vegetables, either as props or as talismans that marked the boundaries of his performance space. Lemons were his favorite and he was known throughout the city as Lemon Boy. After laying out his lemons, he would often assume a pose and remain motionless: “I would hold my position for 40 minutes and then let out a loud scream and the crowd would go wild.” In this photograph we see him following his usual routine — silent posing, then dancing around and yelling and then repeating until the police finally arrive to arrest him or force him to leave.
As Lemon Boy, he would carry a backpack full of lemons and use them as props. Typically, he would end the performance by dumping his backpack out onto the sidewalk, leaving dozens of lemons behind as souvenirs of the event. Notice the white sequined glove on his right hand. He started wearing this onstage in 1969 and later wore something similar at Studio 54 in the late 1970s. Also in attendance at Studio 54 around this time was Michael Jackson, leading many to believe that Gallo was the inspiration for Jackson’s famous glove.
Following in the tradition of Futurism, Dada, and Fluxus, Gallo’s performances were meant to antagonize and provoke the public. In this photograph outside Bergdorf Goodman, he harasses the owner, Andrew Goodman. This performance is atypical of Gallo’s other street work where he usually played a passive role. On most occasions, he would stand immobile for long periods of time or move about as in a trance seemingly indifferent to the spectators who would inevitably gather around him. In this instance, with Goodman, Gallo seems to react aggressively to the elderly man who is either unaware of or attempting to ignore Gallo’s antics. In a press release issued years later, Gallo wrote that he used “theatrical events, spectacle, and controlled aggressivity” as performative strategies.
In the fall of 1971, Gallo began a series of performances he called Image of Women in Spider’s Black Veils. Contrasting with his other work, this performance was repeated multiple times, for over a week, starting at 6:00 a.m. when the streets were almost empty. Dressed as Mr. Bold, with twenty feet of green chiffon trailing behind him, he would shuffle around in semi-circles for two hours at a time on the steps outside the 42nd Street New York Public Library. Also performing was Gallo’s friend from Pratt, Alan Sigman, seen here seated with a Bold Detergent box covering his head.
Lemon Man With Electric Bulbs was typical of many of Gallo’s other street performances. In fact, he even wore the same clothing he had worn in similar events. This photograph records Gallo as he performs outside Van Cleef & Arpels on Fifth Avenue. Here he appears confident and healthy as he poses with a stalk of broccoli.
In this photograph by Christopher Makos, Gallo is approached by a police officer and eventually arrested for performing without an exhibition permit. This was not an unusual occurrence. He was sometimes taken to Bellevue Hospital for psychological evaluations when he refused to break character when questioned by the police. Rather than being dissuaded by this, he anticipated, and even looked forward to the police intervention. He described the stages of a typical street performance like this: “First the crowd would build up and then the traffic would slow to see what was happening. Then the police would show up. When I heard the siren I knew the show was over. It was a good ending.”
Gallo stood on a police barricade outside Tiffany’s and dropped light bulbs, which would make small explosions on hitting the concrete. In this photograph, he poses with an oversized inflatable light bulb that lured passersby to his performance. The costume Gallo wore was relatively modest compared to many of his other outfits, which were characterized by high-fashion bodysuits, and fetish wear. He was arrested because of this performance.
Some scholars consider Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 BCE) as the first performance artist. He lived on the streets and is best known for wandering around Athens carrying a lantern in search of an honest man. In this photograph, Gallo performs on the steps of the 42nd Street Public Library carrying a magnifying glass. Unlike Diogenes, he wasn’t looking for anything in particular but was more interested in being looked at. This is what motivated him to perform. “I got energy from the looks,” he wrote, “It was a game I was playing with the crowd and with myself.”
In this photograph, Gallo moves among the crowd on the steps outside the 42nd Street New York Public Library. According to Makos, Gallo would carefully pick his locations, always looking for a good spot with plenty of foot and vehicle traffic. An extra advantage of the library steps was their similarity to an amphitheater. For several years Gallo had been performing on these steps and recognized their value as both stage and seating for his street theatre. By showing up and performing within the crowd he allows them to be both spectators and participants. From their amused looks in the Makos photographs, it is clear that the audience recognized this is not a legitimate production sponsored by the library, but rather an occupied space that Gallo has taken over.
Beginning in 1969, Gallo performed onstage in all of Robert Wilson’s early works including The King of Spain (1969), The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969), Deafman Glance (1971), and The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973). He also directed and performed in his own staged productions: Squalls, which headlined the IX Festival Mondial du Theatre Festival in Nancy France (1973); Tip of the Iceberg, which was part of the 1979 Pan American Games in Puerto Rico, and finally — A Killer’s Loose But Nobody’s Talking, which was performed at The Kitchen in New York City in 1980.
Gallo is pictured here with theatre director Robert Wilson outside the home of choreographer Jerome Robbins in Princeton, New Jersey. Wilson was Robbins assistant around this time. The lion and zebra props were used in Wilson’s 1969 theatre piece The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud which Gallo performed in.
Richard Gallo sharing the stage with underground filmmaker Jack Smith (seen crawling), sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark (shirtless) and theatre director Robert Wilson (dancing in striped costume.)
Squalls was Gallo’s first time as a theatre director when he headlined the Festival Mondial du Theatre in Nancy France. But his performance and direction was not well received by the French audience. In fact, there was almost a riot on opening night, when the crowd shouted and threw vegetables at him and several members of the audience tried to storm the stage to attack him. Despite the violently negative reaction by the audience, others in attendance, including theatre critic Michael Kirby, were highly impressed with Gallo’s debut: “I have attended quite a lot of theatre, particularly avant-garde theatre, and I have seen only one overt confrontation by the bourgeoisie. Yet according to the model of Ubu Roi, [Squalls] was the only avant-garde performance I have ever seen.”
In this photograph, Gallo is seen performing onstage in Nancy France with several women from a local retirement home. Despite the vociferous crowd, the women had nothing but praise and adoration for Gallo. Most of them had never been on stage before, and they enjoyed the experience in spite of the hostile audience.
Working within the tradition of Dada and Surrealism, Gallo’s theatrical debut of Squalls was in many ways much like his street performances: intentionally obscure, unstructured, and essentially absurd. The actors rarely interacted, much less spoke to each other. One of the performers, the young man in white on the far right, Janos Gat described the entire spectacle as witnessing the “devil putting on a magic show and everybody going ‘wow.’”
Gallo is pictured here backstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. In the past, Wilson had tried to keep Gallo out of his productions because he was “undirectable.” When Gallo made an unscheduled entrance in the second act wearing this black fishnet costume, Wilson stood in the wings and shouted, “Richie, damn you, get off the stage!”
When Gallo returned to performing in 1979 after a five year hiatus, he did not return to street theatre. Instead he went back to the stage. During the summer of 1979, he was invited to perform in San Juan Puerto Rico as part of the cultural contingent for the Pan American Games. Gallo directed and performed in an original production titled Tip of the Iceberg / Suspect on Black Coal. He dramatically ended his performance by appearing in a bright red jumpsuit and flying above the stage on a 20 foot long fork as the classically trained vocalist, Asha Puthli sang “Ave Maria” below.
New York City in the 1970s was overwhelmed with discos, drugs, and urban decay. Wearing a giant rat’s head and a sequined bodysuit, Gallo’s 1979 performance, Hurricane David, captured the glamour and horror of the city at the end of the decade. Unlike his earlier street work, this was performed inside for a private audience of people at the United Cerebral Palsy in New York City. His neighbor, the filmmaker Victor Ginzburg, recorded the performance.
His last performance, A Killer’s Loose But Nobody’s Talking, took place at The Kitchen in May 1980. At the end of the performance he filled the room with smoke, which resulted in the audience, critics included, coughing as they rushed for the exit. For an artist whose art centered on defiant confrontation, it was an appropriate conclusion. Two years later his career came to an untimely end. He had a life-threatening stroke in 1982 that put him in a coma for three days. He recovered, but never fully, and he walked with a limp and had only partial use of one arm thereafter. In this photograph he poses with Miestorm Serpent who Gallo met at Studio 54 in the late 1970s. Back then, Serpent went by the name “Lenny 54” and worked as a busboy/entertainer at the famed Manhattan discotheque.
Art critic Kay Larson compared Gallo’s last stage production — A Killer’s Loose But Nobody’s Talking — to the work of the Austrian avant-garde artist Hermann Nitsch who is most well known for his ritualistic performances involving animal carcasses. In his early 1970s performances, Gallo used fruits and vegetables as props. In A Killer's Loose But Nobody's Talking, he used pig brains, pig carcasses, and in this photograph poses as a tarantula crawls across his face. This is one of the last photographs of Gallo as a performance artist.
In 1974, Gallo abandoned street performance and theatre, and shifted his attention to couture fashion and New York City nightlife. A regular at runway fashion shows and nightclubs such as Mudd Club, Bonds, and Studio 54, he continued his costumed performances, only now in a different setting.The dance floor was his new theatre space and the crowds there his new audience; it was still performance art only with a bigger audience and a bigger stage. As always, he was wearing the costumes that Ronald Kolodzie and Phillip Haight had originally designed for him to wear onstage.
This photograph records Gallo and Delilah Loud backstage at the Dick Cavett Show in New York City. Gallo was friends with her brother Lance Loud who was best known for his 1973 appearances on the pioneer reality television series, An American Family. Through Loud, Gallo met his long-time friends and neighbors, Alan and Susan Raymond, who were the filmmakers behind the series.
This photograph of Gallo and Jimmy Keenan was published in Makos’ book White Trash. In the early 1970s, the pair often traveled around the city together, usually, as is the case in this photograph — shirtless. They were also often seen together in the back room at Max’s Kansas City or posing shirtless in leather jackets on the escalators at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan.
From 1968 to 1981, Gallo wore costumes onstage and on the streets of New York City. With the exception of Halloween, he never went out in public without wearing a costume. Most Halloweens he would stay home for fear the public would mistake the outfits he wore everyday for costumes. When he wasn’t wearing one of his outfits, he often just went shirtless. It was not unusual for him to walk around the city with his chest exposed and clothespins attached to his nipples. Here he is posing with an unidentified street hustler in Greenwich Village. “Richard wore his costumes everyday. He never ever wore normal or street clothes. He once wore a simple shirt and dress pants for Halloween and looked amazingly weird.” ~ Susan Raymond
New York City in those years after the Stonewall Riots and before the AIDS epidemic was an exciting time and place to be young and gay. The 1970s were also described by art historian RoseLee Goldberg as the, “Golden years of performance art,” and so for Gallo this was the ideal time to express himself and develop his practice.
Although Gallo stopped performing on Fifth Avenue in 1973, he could still be seen around the city — posing bare-chested on the escalators at Bloomingdales, or being photographed at parties or nightclubs like Studio 54. He was still dressing up when he went out, but by this time popular culture had embraced his counterculture, transforming Gallo into just another colorful scenester, and, soon just a spectator. Here he is photographed inside Studio 54 by Felice Quinto, who was known as the “king of the paparazzi.”
At the peak of its popularity, Studio 54 was that special place in New York City where everyone converged: straight, gay, black, white, famous, and infamous. It was where Hollywood celebrities, fashion models, and art stars like Andy Warhol mixed together in what many considered the epicenter of 1970s hedonism. Gallo fit in well in this world, and was there almost nightly — observing, watching and waiting for his moment to be the center of attention. Here he is photographed with his friend, the filmmaker Victor Ginzburg.
It would take hours for Gallo to get dressed when he went to Studio 54. After prepping and re-working one of his jumpsuits with the fashion designer Ronald Kolodzie, it would be 2:00 in the morning before they arrived at the club. Once there, Gallo would enter onto the dance floor and just stand. For him, the discotheque was a colossal performance space. In this photograph, Gallo’s costume is adjusted by Kolodzie. To the far left is the art critic Linda Yablonsky.
The building where Studio 54 lives, opened as the Gallo Opera Theatre in 1927; 50 years later it was transformed into the famed disco and then later restored and returned to a legitimate theatre in the late 1990s. Gallo approached Studio 54 as a theatrical space. He spent hours putting together his nightly costumes and when he arrived, scouted out the best lighting on the dance floor and then waited for his moment to step into the spotlight. In the late 1970s, Studio 54 was the place to be seen in New York City and was the perfect stage for someone like Gallo who enjoyed being looked at.
When Gallo performed he was more like an art object rather than an stage actor. Because of his muscled body and provocative costumes, he didn’t have to move or speak to get attention. His costumer designer, Phillip Haight described Gallo’s presence in Studio 45 as, “a performance of stillness and strangeness.” In this photograph, Gallo poses with two flashlights which he often carried with him for dramatic effects.
From the start of his career, he alternated between two characters: Lemon Boy and Mr. Bold. Both were created after he graduated from Pratt Institute in 1968. When Gallo portrayed himself as Mr. Bold, he dressed in multiple layers of black chiffon with strips of chicken wire underneath in order to create an amorphous silhouette. He also covered his face and head with black lace and completed the look with a green scraggly Halloween wig. Because of the cloaking elements, it was difficult to determine Gallo’s identity, including his race or gender. As a result, the public was often either hostile to or intimidated by this character
“Mr. Bold was my revolt against advertising. I wore chicken wire covered with layers of black chiffon. I always left a trail of material wherever I went.” ~ Richard Gallo
This exhibition was held at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts in Louisville Kentucky from January 18 - February 23, 2019 and was made possible with the generous support of the University of Louisville, The Watermill Center and the Robert Wilson Arts Foundation. A special thanks to Professor Chris Reitz and Exhibitions Coordinator Jessica Oberdick for their help.