The recently published Fire Island Art: 100 Years, edited by John Dempsey, is the first comprehensive survey of art-making on Fire Island over the last century, assembling extensive never-before published archival materials, essays and interviews with artists and scholars.

In the newly released The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, written by Andrew Durbin, we follow the intertwined stories and work of Paul Thek and Peter Hujar, who spent an extensive amount of time on Fire Island, unraveling how the two boundary burning, paradigm-tilting, never more relevant American artists and their decades long entanglement in artmaking, sex, love, competition, and reconciliation came to redefine queer art.

Join us for a dialogue with artist Pamela Sneed, BOFFO Director Faris Al-Shathir, and Andrew Durbin, moderated by John Dempsey, taking place within the context of Pamela Sneed and Carlos Martiel’s Sacred and Profane, BOFFO & Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s current exhibition. Together, they excavate occluded queer histories, reflect on the conditions of making art on Fire Island, and consider how queer communities have fostered artistic innovation and transformed American art over the past century from the shoreline. Books will be available for purchase.

Presented in partnership with Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.