Photo By Gail

For Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar (2010) Gillian Wearing combined elements from two famous photo shoots of artist Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987): a 1981image of the artist in drag by Christopher Makos, and a visceral 1968 shot by Richard Avedon of Warhol displaying the freshly healed wounds to his torso resulting from a recent attempt on his life

The work is part of her Spiritual Family series, in which Wearing slips fluidly between masculine and feminine genders. She also selects artists who notably photographed queer subjects, including themselves.

Furthermore, the artists initially featured in the series — Warhol, Diane Arbus, and Robert Mapplethorpe — all created work that referenced mortality, and all tragically died before their time.

Photographs of these artists, by their own or other’s hands, have yielded them mythic status, transcending their  own unnaturally shortened existences. Based exclusively on people who are no longer alive, all of Wearing’s Spiritual Family self-portraits are commemorative tributes.

Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City