STATEN ISLAND, NY.- Seminal artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett debut a previously unseen photo series from the early 1990s at the Alice Austen House.

Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett’s collaboration began as members of Gran Fury—the AIDS activist collective and graphic arm of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Public interventions were staged using the language of art and advertising to make visible the catastrophe and political crisis of the AIDS epidemic. It was this collision that inspired McCarty and Moffett to found Bureau—a trans-disciplinary design studio in New York City active in print, film titles, and pedagogy. Bureau existed from 1989 to 2001. ONE DAY in 1992, the partners were asked by Princeton University School of Architecture to design its Lecture Series Calendar. Princeton, founded in 1746 before the American Revolution, is one of the original nine colonial colleges. It was this fact that spurred McCarty and Moffett to a reimagining and queering of that early American History.

In preparation for the project, McCarty and Moffett—dressed as pilgrims and women—headed to the North Fork of Long Island with Bureau colleagues and friends for a photoshoot. The cameras were loaded with an unstable Polaroid 35mm positive film. While two photos were selected for the Princeton project, the hundreds of other slides were packed away. Time has worked its magic of decay. The film emulsion has become an active ingredient and additional participant in the narratives. For the first time since ONE DAY in 1992, newly produced archival pigment prints of ten performative tableaux will be exhibited at the Alice Austen House Museum.

Marlene McCarty is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. McCarty has worked across various media since the 1980s. McCarty’s work probes issues of sexual and social formation. Recent work, Into the Weeds, mines the millennia long plant/human relationship. Into the Weeds projects include drawings with earthworks of deadly, hallucinogenic and abortifacient plants. Such projects have been seen at the University at Buffalo, Kunsthaus Baselland (Basel), Last Tango (Zurich), Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (NYC). A permanent earthwork called AGAIN is located in Silo City, Buffalo. In October 2025, another facet of this work will be at the Tabakalera Art Center in San Sebastian Spain.

Donald Moffett is a New York–based artist known for working across artistic categories and media. His poetic, provocative, and at times humorous paintings and sculptures—from landscape and nature (as in the ongoing NATURE CULT works) to politics and history (as in the “Mr. Gay in the U.S.A.” drawings)—address issues that resonate in our current social and political milieu.