In this essay, Kendal DeBoer explores the chintzy, gilded florist foils and cellophane-wrapped rats of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.

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In 1970, two counter-culture publications proselytize and promote the wonders of a multimedia environment installed in a tenement building at 266 East 4^th Street in New York City. One appears in the newspaper Gay Power; the other is self-published, self-circulated. Both texts center explicitly Catholic and overtly queer content mediated through the working-class, chintzy, gilded florist foils and cellophane-wrapped rats of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, or Tommy, as most who know him call him (and as I will refer to him throughout this essay).

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Tommy installed his glittering, environmental assemblages in his apartment from 1968 through 1973, welcoming in neighbors, friends, and art critics while dressed in various personae, such as a drag iteration of the art collector “Ethel Scull” performing as “Ethel Dull.” The two 1970 texts touch on two different iterations of Tommy’s installs, which took many forms, traversing mediums and methods of display. Perhaps the most well-known, though still scantly documented, is The Gilded Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina [Fig. 1].

This environment is the reference point for the article in the May 1970 issue of Gay Power, written by Charles Ludlam: “Mr. T. or El Pato in the Gilded Summer Palace of Czarina Tatlina: A Fairy Tale” [Fig. 2]. Ludlam, a pioneer in the experimental theater group, “Playhouse of the Ridiculous,” was an early friend, supporter, and mentor to a nineteen-year-old Tommy[i]. Because documentation of these early installations is few and far between, Ludlam’s review is one of the only surviving contemporaneous accounts describing the space. As the title of the article suggests, Ludlam chooses to write a mythology of Tommy’s biography in the style of a fable.

He [Tommy] felt a longing in his heart, a nostalgia to hear the Mass prayed in a language he did not understand. The reforms of the Ecumenical Councils made him feel disinherited. If only he could combine his taste for botanicas, gypsy storefronts and Puerto Rican boys with the grandeur that was Rome … the grandeur that was St. Petersburg. He prayed to St. Catherine for a sign. And the sign came. He would build the Artorama, a genre more queer than Mexican folk art and a thousand times more detailed than Macy’s Christmas windows. The Artorama would be the apotheosis of the Catholic religious holidays–Christmas and Easter rolled into one–an electric train, tinfoil Wonder City where jewel-encrusted rats in ecclesiastical garb murmur novenas in detailed replicas of Faberge Easter Eggs. The heart of Christ bleeds rubies into a levitating grail. Silver stars hang about the head of a life-sized statue of St. Francis from the painted blue sky above your head. Forgeries of the crown jewels of the Imperial Family of Russia serve as harbingers of the new orthodoxy of Queer Catholicism.[ii]

Ludlum’s text foregrounds two themes that inform the entirety of Tommy’s abundant artmaking, identifying “Queer Catholicism” in his glittering tchotchkes. For the artist, the two topics are entwined and inseparable. Both are essential to his lived experience as the queer son of deeply devout immigrant parents in Linden, New Jersey. Tommy frequently recollects his childhood in parochial school, citing specific instances of support—such as the nuns who encouraged him to design school bulletin boards, who “gave [him] the idea that [making art] as a mission in life and said it was a talent that had to be developed for the glory of God and the good of the world”—and moments of material inspiration, like finding glittering discard in church trash can as an altar boy.[iii] Equally common are recollections of violence, exclusion, and alienation. Tommy remembers being asked to leave a school for drawing “dirty pictures” extorted from him through school bullies, segregated school events, and fearing for his life working alongside a hostile and homophobic ditch digging crew.[iv]

Tommy’s work has no shortage of examples of representational iconography, both queer and Catholic. Alongside these legible references, I propose that it is his glistening, flickering, twinkling materials and their atmospheric effects that synthesize Tommy’s sensibilities. Through shimmer, reflectivity, and luminousness, Lanigan-Schmidt’s works alter conditions of visual experience in a manner that not only sidesteps optical clarity, but also sets a hyper-relational affective tone attuned to devotion and adoration.

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These affective qualities inform the second 1970 text described above: a xeroxed, D.I.Y. flyer Lanigan-Schmidt circulated to advertise his apartment exhibition, The Hangups of a 22-Year-Old Catholic Homosexual in the Great Techno + Cyber Judeo Christian Empire [Fig. 3].[v] In characteristic fashion, Tommy covers the surface of his flyer with writing that reflects an almost horor vacui style. He introduces the show with the following lines:

If you’re an avid, religious KULTCHA VULTCHA there’s still a chance for your salvation from eternal tack. The mendicant artisan monks of St. Francis the Sissy in cooperation with Dow Chemical, Reynolds Aluminum, Swingline Staples Inc. and Fairytale Florist Foils Inc. PRESENTS…. From the Gilded Ghetto of Positive Idealism Latent Maxwell-house type sentimentality: Art and Treasures for You Honey, a Sermonic exhibition.

The phrase “Art and Treasures for You, Honey” supports the lengthier exhibition title as an affirming extension to its readers. These words communicate Tommy’s intent to share in communal experiences of beauty and intimacy begotten from pearlescent and diaphanous detritus. “For you”: the words are relational, like a gift, a letter, a Valentine to a friend, to family, or a stranger one wants to get to know; they are an offer, an offering, to “you”—the reader, anyone who would’ve encountered the leaflet. “For you, honey”–you, “the reader,” are interchangeable with “honey” —a darling, a sweetheart, an intimate; sticky and sweet, pleasant and desirable, beloved and welcome—and not to mention, a common queer colloquialism.

The flyer promises  “an ambitious, serious work,” “the rat mummies revenge,” “conceptual queenism,” and “conceptual psychedelic sentimental blowjobs,” and is signed off by “Miss T.” The descriptions and allusions covering this flyer, however, seem in step with qualities present in Czarina Tatlina. Alongside scribbled terms like “tacky,” “Beaux arts,” “luv is a boutique,” and “berry bisual [very visual],” Tommy has drawn ornate chalices, baroque crucifixes, burning sacred hearts, and innumerable stars, sparkles, and hearts [see fig. 4]. These drawings mimic details that exist in the few images documenting the original Czarina Tatlina display [see fig. 5]. One of the drawings bears a striking resemblance to the tin foil monstrance Tommy would later use in his first installation for Holly Solomon at her Greene Street Loft, Panis Angelicus [see figs. 6 and 7].

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The extant photos attest to the difficulty in documenting ephemeral constructions that resist stable vision. Tommy’s surfaces glisten, shine, reflect, and blur. Even photographs of later reconstructions of Tommy’s works, such as 1990s iterations of Czarina Tatlina,are similarly challenging to discern. But one can make out across time a recurrent iconography not unlike the repetition of idols, saints, and sacred symbols. Again and again, the same objects and materials appear: aluminum foil chalices, saran-wrapped holographic tape candies, and of course, gilded rats [see figs. 8-9]. The rat figures especially allows us to undo binary distinctions of abstraction versus representation as a creature that gestures towards the interrelated and inseparable qualities of environment, material, atmosphere, art object, and people.

Tommy began creating the rats just after the police brutality and subsequent riots of Stonewall in 1969, and he continues making them even as I write this article. Tommy’s presence at the riots is documented not only by a well-known set of photographs by Fred W. McDarrah, but also by a tinfoil wrapped lollipop figuring he created that year named Allegory of the Stonewall Riot (Statue of Liberty) Fighting for Drag Queen, Husband and Home [Fig. 10 and Fig. 11]. These photographs and this artwork are a wonderful entry point into historicizing Tommy’s role in queer liberation due to their legible, named connection to a key moment in time. The rats, meanwhile, offer another pathway. Their initial creation is anchored in the turning point of Stonewall, because Tommy has stated outright that the riot inspired him to make the rats. But their ongoing presence, their abundance, and Tommy’s persistent dedication to making more in the following decades also suggests temporal duration exceeding the bounds of any one identifiable moment.

Figure 10. Fred W. McDarrah, Celebration After Riots Outside Stonewall Inn, Nelly (Betsy Mae Koolo), Chris (Drag Queen Chris), Roger Davis, Michelle and Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, 1969.

Twenty years later, he would write their origin story: “Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats” [see fig. 11]. The text outlines Tommy’s conception of street queens as rats, declaring “WE WERE STREET RATS.” and recounts he and his friends’ protection of Stonewall against the violation of police brutality. He ends his tale:

“That Night the Gutter Street Rats shone like the brightest Gold! And like that baby born in a feed-troft (a manger) or found by the pharoahs daughter in a basket floating down the River Nile, the mystery of history happened again in the least likely of places.[…]  Please Xerox a few copies and give to friends.”

Post-Stonewall, Tommy’s rats—indexical of street queens, suggestive of divinity and miracles, gold and glistening—populate his many foil-encrusted, opulent, diaphanous environments with his gilded chalices and iridescent candies, at once referencing people, places, and memories while transcending literalist representation.

Ludlam’s review remarks upon the qualities of these trinkets and their materiality:

“The things that Mr. T. makes are not made to last. His is a transitory art that creates an illusion and then disappears. For this reason it might be called theatrical. The images seem to dissolve before your eyes. Now it is an exquisite piece of jewelry or a relic of the true cross encased in a richness unmatched outside the Vatican. Then suddenly you realize that it is made of Saran Wrap or Wondafoil packaging materials symbolic of the octopus that has us in its clutches, the present regime. The item appears worthless if seen from behind or from its “bad” side. We turn it and it becomes exquisite again.”[vi]

Another attestation to the flicker, the flux, the instability of Tommy’s materials–and their ability to simultaneously conjure mixed allusions, emotional registers, and sensorial experiences for participant viewers moving through his confectionery environments.

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Tommy’s work demonstrates a seamless imbrication of queer and Catholic thematics, but also the crucial nature of atmosphere and environment in creating a glittering setting for relational encounters, theatricality, and intimacy; wrought by materials that challenge the primacy of the gaze and the epistemological reliance on vision, or categorical knowing. But like revered icons of early Christianity, Tommy’s artworks possess a certain animacy and liveliness. And, as if living beings, Tommy’s creations interact with one another and all who enter their webs of encounter through the hyperrelationality of their commingling,  gleaming surfaces. Each element possesses its own sense of presence. These treasures are an offering to all who may encounter them–-an open extension, a gift that encourages communal experience.

Translucent, reflective, textural, and shining, Tommy’s works defy easy identification and optical clarity, but they do not alienate. With tenderness and sincerity, “raw contorted passion, a painstakingly elaborate and embellished gorgeousness,” Tommy adorns, ornaments, trims, gilds, festoons, wraps, bedazzles and illuminates.[vii] Consequently, his art dazzles, enchants, captivates, and invites.

My epigraph shares Tommy’s concept that “Glitter and sparkle have a theological basis. It’s supposed to be the energy of God’s grace,” but a 1987 excerpt by Tommy expands further in its explicit declaration that Glitter is “an affirmation of life source and life force.”[viii] When speaking to Tommy, he has shared with me that “Glitter is always about life,” even when painful—which much early glitter was, being made from crushed Christmas ornaments or glass—because it is suggestive of light, it glows, it affirms[ix].

Tommy’s environments and art objects are hyper-relational, luminous, open, generative, and intimate, and are free from normative conventions of categorical definition, sanitized taxonomies, or easily digestible reductions to the singular. Everything implicates, invites, responds, reflects, refracts–and because these artworks and treasures are “for you,” if you are attuned to their frequency of devotion, and partake in liking these likenesses, you too are part of this glistening web on interconnected intimacies.

I wrap this article with another writing from Tommy titled “On the Art of the Heart.”  [see fig. 12]. I hope that closing with these words will leave readers with the ineffable and divine qualities that Tommy’s glittering creations emanate: affection, adoration, love.

Art, like the bond that exists between the lover and the beloved, should move us above the realities that very often seem and are so crushing. While not solving these realities, like the embrace of love, it should connect us to a deeper reality letting us know that we are at least capable of feeling complete or whole. […]  Like the poverty of the tenement, I try to use poor or inexpensive materials. […] I try to make these still materials sparkle, at least for a little while, while still being themselves. And like the vulnerability of love, the art objects are very fragile, hopefully like those glittering moments when we know that we are because we love.[x]

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[i] Dan Cameron, “A Quality of Faith: Notes on the Art of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,” in Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Placemates & Potholders (Memory & Desire), (New York City: Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 2006). To this day, Tommy will speak of him affectionately, citing Ludlam as one of his most significant influences

[ii] Charles Ludlam, “Mr. T. or El Pato in the Gilded Summer Palace of Czarina-Tatlina,” in Ridiculous Theatre: The Scourge of Human Folly, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 149.

[iii] Terrence Dempsey, “A Theology of Glitter and Poverty: The Art of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,” IMAGE: A Journal of the Arts and Religion 3 (Spring 1993): 72-81.

[iv] Peter Occhiogrosso, “Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Incarnation and Art” in Once A Catholic: Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Discuss the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987): 22-37.

[v] This flyer is reproduced in Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tenemental (With Sighs Too Deep for Words) (New York City: Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, 2018).

[vi] Ludlam, “Mr. T. or El Pato,” 150.

[vii] Nicolas A. Moufarrege, “Lavender: On Homosexuality and Art,” Arts Magazine 57 (October 1982): 81.

[viii] Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, “Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,” in Tangents: Art in Fiber (Baltimore: Maryland Institute, College of Art, 1987.

[ix] Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, speaking with the author,  July 16, 2022.

[x] Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, “ON THE ART OF THE HEART,” unpublished typescript and manuscript, ca. 1982-3. Holly Solomon Gallery Archives, Box 33 Folder 2.

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Bio: Kendall DeBoer is a Providence-based art historian and curator. She works in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at University of Rochester. Her dissertation explores cellophane, tinsel, glitter, and garlands in twentieth-century American art. Find her work at https://www.kendalldeboer.com/ and on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/silkyjuicy/