Nate Lippens shares his Top Ten

PROSPECT COTTAGE

After my London reading in late October, I pilgrimaged with Pilot Press publisher and artist Richard Porter and writer Hesse K. to filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Dungeness outpost. Wandering the grounds and the nearby rocky beach, I was struck by the beauty, the gray, the sea, the plumber’s van parked on the road, and the neighbors hanging out laundry to dry. Each of us grew quiet at some point on the trip, turning inward and back out again. I thought of long-gone old friends; Jarman’s last film, Blue (1993); his 1991 book Modern Nature; and my good fortune to be with new comrades at what felt like the end of the world.
ERIK MOORE

Moore’s work combines Andy Warhol’s dead-eyed glamour with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures–style maximalism. The Milwaukee artist’s scrappy photographs are informed by Pierre et Gilles, James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971), and twink nudies: stylized camp on a dumpster-dive budget. Scrawny street kids, loners, skateboarders, and trade mix, match, and mash with one another. Moore’s art draws on a tradition that stretches back to the pinup illustrations of George Quaintance and Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild—his uneasy con-cock-tions are utterly captivating.
DEREK McCORMACK

McCormack knows fashion, fashion victims, and fashionable victims—his novels have included Elsa Schiaparelli and Cristóbal Balenciaga as characters. He is also the author of Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death (2022), a wily volume of essays that picks over Kathy Acker’s wardrobe while séance-summoning the still-living Martin Margiela. His upcoming book project from San Francisco’s Cushion Works, The Shithole Opry, isabout Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren visiting Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1950. His fixations—classic country music, outré couture, feces—coalesce into the wickedly fun Hillbilly Heaven Collection, a line of jewelry he made for Opry. Think Ozark Jubilee, SEX-and-Seditionaries provocations, and poop puns galore.
JULIA GORTON

She snapped some of the most indelible photographs of New York’s No Wave and punk scenes. No Wave (music for people who thought punk was too tuneful) anti-stars like James Chance, Arto Lindsay, and Lydia Lunch scowled, glared, and smirked for Gorton’s camera. Over the years, she has gone back into her archive, re-creating, montaging, and transforming her stunning collection of images. She’s also put out an anthology of Beat It! (1977–78), the punk zine she created with musician Rick Brown. Gorton’s life is a sly master class on how to turn restlessness into a vital and living practice.
“DARREL ELLIS: REGENERATION” (MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM, 2023–24)

Truth is, my familiarity with Ellis came through other people’s work—specifically, pictures of him taken by Allen Frame, Peter Hujar, and Robert Mapplethorpe—until a resurgent interest in his art led to a spate of recent monographs and exhibitions. (Ellis created a number of ghostly paintings based on those portraits, some of which were included in this presentation.) Scattered pages from his notebooks, spanning his teenage years until his death, appear in the catalogue, including records of questions Ellis posed to the I Ching. One page reads “Do I have AIDS?,” followed by a series of hexagrams—the coins’ answers (Ellis died from the disease in 1992 at thirty-three). After taking in the show, I sat in the museum’s café letting my coffee get cold while staring at Lake Michigan.
THE HUXLEYS

Part Elvis impersonators and part John Sex twins, Will and Garrett Huxley dress as beglittered and bewigged showgirl Sleestaks from Land of the Lost, posing atop stomp stages or against desolate rock formations. The Melbourne-based performance- and visual-art duo are like a fuckable queerdo version of the Kipper Kids. These absurdist creatures mix Folies Bergère, Leigh Bowery, and the Rockettes to create a universe full of sexy sci-fi furries. Garish and garrulous, their art bristles with defiantly weird joy.
THING (PRIMARY INFORMATION, 2025)

The saints at Primary Information recently published all ten issues of Thing—a groundbreaking zine that chronicled the queer Black music and art scenes in Chicago and beyond—into one gorgeous volume (the magazine started in 1989 and ran until 1993, when its founder, Robert Ford, died from AIDS). I used to get it, along with the latest issues of High Performance (the Los Angeles–based performance art journal, not the car mag) and Honcho, at Pic-a-Book in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, where I lived after I’d fled my hometown. Reading this zine made me feel closer to Chicago, which felt like another planet, a seductive one, especially for a teenage queen. I was beguiled by Thing’s tagline: “She knows who she is.”
MARISSA PATERNOSTER

This musician and artist creates downbeat drawings that look like characters out of Leonard Gardner’s Fat City (1969) by way of Raw comics. She created the graphic novel Merriment (2024) with Joe Steinhardt and, after the dissolution of her searing punk band, Screaming Females, turned her attention to her other music project, Noun. She launched a Patreon, the Paternoster Listener Alliance, where more of her aural and visual output can be found. You can also commission her for pet or human portraits.
FROM TED TO TOM: THE ILLUSTRATED ENVELOPES OF EDWARD GOREY (NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS, 2025)

Famed eccentric, balletomane, and my beardspiration Edward Gorey (the kind of man who might be addressed as “Elder” and have brother-wives) wrote fifty letters to an intimate by the name of Tom Fitzharris. Each envelope was illustrated in his signature style—mordant, funny, strange. They’re relics of a friendship that burned bright and brief—the kind of seductive connection that disappears in a flash.
RAY JOHNSON

As I write from Milwaukee, the view this morning seems pasted together, like the water and the sky are from different drawings. Reminds me of Johnson’s found-object agglomerations. He didn’t like the term collage—he called his works moticos, an anagram of osmotic. I like his slippery sluttiness: the cartoon bunnies; the mail art projects with friends; his 1957 cover design for the New Directions paperback edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, using Éti-enne Carjat’s 1871 photograph of the enfant terrible, comically enlarged to reveal Benday dots like giant pores, which later resurfaced as the paper mask in David Wojnarowicz’s 1978–79 photo series “Arthur Rimbaud in New York.” Hundreds more completed moticos remained after he dove off a bridge in Sag Harbor, New York, on January 13, 1995. His body washed up a day later.

NATE LIPPENS

PROSPECT COTTAGE

ERIK MOORE

DEREK McCORMACK

JULIA GORTON

“DARREL ELLIS: REGENERATION” (MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM, 2023–24)

THE HUXLEYS

THING (PRIMARY INFORMATION, 2025)

MARISSA PATERNOSTER

FROM TED TO TOM: THE ILLUSTRATED ENVELOPES OF EDWARD GOREY (NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS, 2025)

RAY JOHNSON

Most Popular

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NATE LIPPENS

PROSPECT COTTAGE

ERIK MOORE

DEREK McCORMACK

JULIA GORTON

“DARREL ELLIS: REGENERATION” (MILWAU­KEE ART MUSEUM, 2023–24)

THE HUXLEYS

THING (PRIMARY INFORMATION, 2025)

MARISSA PATERNOSTER

FROM TED TO TOM: THE ILLUSTRATED ENVELOPES OF EDWARD GOREY (NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS, 2025)

RAY JOHNSON

Most Popular

You may also like

“DARREL ELLIS: REGENERATION” (MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM, 2023–24)