Lanier Laney and Terry Sweeney are ethics-based, provocative truth tellers, whose work oscillates between gravitas and absurdism to function as a catalyst for personal and community healing and empowerment.
Terry Sweeney is the grandson of Irish immigrants to Brooklyn. He was a language and arts major at Middlebury College. Lanier Laney attended the Honors College of South Carolina and Parsons School of Design. Their collaboration first began as performance artists on Manhattan’s Lower East Side at P.S.122 where a laudatory review from the New York Times landed them as the first openly gay cast member and writing staff of Saturday Night Live. They live and work in New York City.
Current Exhibition:
‘Flora Mundi’
Laney and Sweeney, Star Flower paintings, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 96.52 cm x 139.7 cm (38”x56”), each panel
For the 2024 Queens Botanical Garden Gallery’s annual juried exhibition in New York City; artist duo Lanier Laney and Terry Sweeney were chosen as recipients of a fall/winter solo exhibition entitled Flora Mundi-Sept 26, 2024–March 16, 2025- Queen’s Botanical Garden Gallery. 43-50 Main Street, Flushing, Queens, NYC. Gallery Open Tues.- Sunday, 8am to 4:30pm.
Artist Talk and Reception Dec. 8, 2024, 2-4 p.m.
Laney and Sweeney, Star Flower paintings, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 96.52 cm x 139.7 cm (38”x56”), each panel
Past Exhibition Review - Los Angeles Times
Artists’ response to brutal institutional homophobia: Sequined unicorns, of course
By Christopher Knight
| Art Critic |
Jun 22, 2019 | 8:00 AM
Lanier Laney and Terry Sweeney, "The Stonewall Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,"
2019,mixed media (Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Somewhere between Albrecht Dürer’s Nuremberg and Barbie’s Dreamtopia, a stampede of Sparkle Unicorns makes up “The Stonewall Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
At Chimento Contemporary, artist duo Lanier Laney and Terry Sweeney have installed a suite of four mixed-media works to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the uprising at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, a pivotal event in the postwar civil rights movement for LGBTQ equality. Four rainbow-hued cutouts of sequin-covered unicorn heads line one wall, their glittery tails of multicolored foil streamers cascading to the floor.
A no-nonsense text unfurls at a viewer’s feet, marking the “fiery Armageddon” at Stonewall, a Mafia-controlled West Village bar periodically raided by police. During one especially brutal intrusion on June 28, 1969, young gay, lesbian and transgender patrons abruptly refused to cooperate with what the text correctly identifies as the “institutionalized harassment and oppression of all queer people.” The combat with the NYPD went on for six days.
That the institutions doing the harassing were the mob and the police — a criminal syndicate on one side, law enforcement on the other, with marginalized people squeezed in between — shows just how enveloping the persecution was. The installation by Laney and “Saturday Night Live” alum Sweeney responds with what is essentially party decor — oddly fitting for the Stonewall Inn as a place of relaxation and refuge, however fragile, from daily strife, as well as for today’s nationwide celebrations of the event.
Colorful party fluff is also an apt rejoinder to embedded assumptions that artistic significance must arise at the expense of fun. (Outlaws can come in a rainbow of colors, and one might say this is art that refuses to assimilate.) Notably these mythic unicorns shake their pompom tails at apocalyptic Armageddon, with its primitive biblical overtones of fundamentalist moral values.
If you’d prefer something more serious — at least, something seemingly more sober — go around back in the gallery and pick up a T-shirt. The artists have emblazoned a selection of sizes hanging on a rack with the august logo “Yale MFA.” Now that’s a sure-fire shortcut to artistic respectability, and one that would have actually fit the much-abused camp fashion theme of the 2019 Met Gala.
Chimento Contemporary, 4480 W. Adams Blvd., L.A. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through July 13. (323) 998-0464, chimentocontemporary.net
Christopher Knight is art critic for the Los Angeles Times. He is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism (1991, 2001 and 2007)which he was awarded in 2020. Knight received the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism from the College Art Assn., becoming the first journalist to win the award in more than 25 years. He has appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” PBS’ “NewsHour,” NPR's “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” and CNN and was featured in the 2009 documentary movie about the controversial relocation of the Barnes Foundation’s art collection, “The Art of the Steal.”
Contact