Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

One of few surviving participants of the Stonewall uprising, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is a significant figure to both gay and American art history. He was described in BOMB magazine as "a doggedly peripheral figure in an historic and cultural narrative in which he’s actually played a central role," a position that has baffled some. Lanigan-Schmidt began creating collage and assemblage works in the 1960s, using pipe cleaners, Mylar, foil, and other materials to exuberant and deliberately kitsch effect, often incorporating the Catholic iconography of his upbringing. His embrace of the kitsch and "tacky" has marked him to many as a precursor to Jeff Koons, and his works have retroactively been considered as part of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s (though Lanigan-Schmidt himself has disputed this categorization). "The basic thing my art is about is the idea of native being their own anthropologist," Lanigan-Schmidt has offered, "It’s an ideal and a paradox, but it’s about knowing what your culture is and articulating it, rather than having the analysis come from the outside."