Frederick Weston
"Blue Bathroom Blues", 1999
Mixed media collage
11 x 8 1/2 inches (24.94 x 21.59 cm)
Courtesy of Gordon Robichaux, New York and The Estate of Frederick Weston

Selected by Valérie Rousseau

Frederick Weston (1946–2020) was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, where he participated in the club scene before moving to New York City in the mid-1970s. A self-taught, multidisciplinary artist, he worked in a variety of media, including collage, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and creative writing. Over the course of his time in New York, he developed a vast encyclopedic archive of images and ephemera related to fashion, the body, advertising, AIDS, race, and queer subjects. Weston’s Estate is represented by Gordon Robichaux, where he presented his first solo exhibition in 2019. In 2020, Ortuzar Projects, in collaboration with Gordon Robichaux, presented a forty-year survey of Weston’s work, which was celebrated by Hilton Als in The New Yorker; his site-specific installation at the Ace Hotel gallery in New York was lauded in The New York Times; and he received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Roy Lichtenstein Award. In 2021, Visual AIDS published Frederick Weston and Samuel R. Delany, a book dedicated to Weston’s work through a long-form interview between Weston and Delany. Profiles on Weston and his work have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula magazine. Weston’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Hessel Museum of Art, New York; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Weston was a longstanding artist-member of Visual AIDS.