Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront

A landmark study of the abandoned Hudson River piers of 1970s Manhattan, where avant-garde art-making and a newly liberated queer sexual culture converged in the same fire-ravaged structures, written by the painter and art historian Jonathan Weinberg as part art history, part memoir.

Weaving interviews, documentary photographs, literary texts, artworks, and film stills, Weinberg reconstructs how the derelict piers, at the center of the world's busiest shipping port only two decades earlier, became simultaneously makeshift studios and exhibition spaces (Pier 34) and what Delmas Howe called an "arena for sexual theater" (Pier 46) in the years after Stonewall. The book gathers one hundred exemplary works by artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Alvin Baltrop, Gordon Matta-Clark, Shelley Seccombe, and David Wojnarowicz, examining the relationship of avant-garde practice to resistant subcultures and radical sexuality. Published by Penn State University Press in 2019, with 34 color and 66 black-and-white illustrations.

Weinberg is a painter, art historian, and curator of the Maurice Sendak Foundation who teaches at the Yale School of Art and RISD. The author of Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art and Ambition and Love in Modern American Art, he was lead curator of the touring exhibition Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989, organized by the Columbus Museum of Art for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots his paintings are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Montclair Art Museum.