Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez

Located just about an hour outside of New York City, Fire Island is best known as a site of sexual liberation and natural escape for New Yorkers over the course of the twentieth century. Although the island has been the subject of scholarship in queer literary studies and anthropology, there has never been a consideration of its centrality to artists or art history. My dissertation explores the practices of four artists who worked on Fire Island during the twentieth century: PaJaMa (the collective of Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoenig French, active 1937–1954), Alfred Leslie (1927–2023), Paul Thek (1933–1988), and Betty Beaumont (1946–). I focus on these artists in order to illustrate a human-environment relationship between the island and their art. Collectively, their work also tells a story about the island’s life and death, with much of the island set to be underwater within the next thirty to fifty years due to climate change. These artists engaged with Fire Island’s complex environmental history in a variety of mediums, including photography, painting, and sculpture. Some worked with ecological forces such as hurricanes and atmospheric change; others responded to social and political events such as federal ocean dumping or the fight to establish a national seashore. In illuminating the relationship between these artists and Fire Island’s unique ecological conditions, this dissertation offers a new model for thinking about the relationship between environmental history and art history. I read these artists’ relationship to Fire Island as one of symbiosis, in which climate, ecological force, and non-human life gain agency over the artist and choreograph—and even collaborate in—their work.

Photo credit Matthew Leifheit