Elizabeth Josephson

Sideshow Gallery presents an exhibition of portraits of drag queens, juvenile delinquents, dancers and artists painted by Elizabeth Josephson — from October 26 to November 25, 2002.

For many years, Josephson has, like Diane Arbus, explored the netherworld of sexual identity and crime (not strictly in legal terms), imagination and incarceration. Her portraits are both psychological in a traditional sense — true character studies — imbued with a certain realism, and symbolic in their expressive use of the painted surface to create colorful reflections on her subjects' lives and thoughts. Expression and emotion have only recently come back into fashion, catching up with Josephson who never relinquished passion, even while experimenting with more abstract approaches. It's her deeply felt understanding and dialogue with her subjects that inspires her portraiture.

One of Josephson's paintings portrays Joey Arias, a New York drag performer known for singing like Billie Holiday at Bar d'O in the West Village. Some of her other paintings feature drag performers Mistress Formica, Jem Gender and Ivan Valentine.

"Painting a portrait has to do with the sitter and the sitting," Josephson says. "It's a bit like acting in the it is about me doing the painting and about me being the other person."

Josephson feels a kinship with painters like Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. Her inclusion with Alice Neel and Willem de Kooning in the 2000 exhibition "The Figure: Another Side of Modernism" is another indicator of where she stands, artistically, in the panoply of contemporary art.

Josephson studied art at Sarah Lawrence (B.A.) and Hunter College (M.F.A.). In 1989, she began an extended period of travel, living in London, India, Spain and New Mexico before returning to New York in 1993. New York's Liquid Gallery presented Josephson's first solo exhibition in 1996. Her work was included in a number of group exhibitions, including the Group Portraiture Show at the Painting Center (1997), the Lincoln Center Group Show at Fordham University (1999) and "The Figure: Another side of Modernism" curated by Lili Wei at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Newhouse Museum of Contemporary Art (2000).

She has taught figure drawing and painting as an adjunct professor at Fordham University since 1993. Josephson directed the Art Center at Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island from 1996 to 1999, and currently teaches art to incarcerated youths at the Island Academy on Riker's Island.