As a collaborative artist duo, we have a social engagement, research and site based practice committed to social and environmental equity for all. We often champion the underdog and use absurdity and humor while communicating difficult to hear (but must be faced) truths for the good of the planet and all the living species with whom we share it.
Pulitzer Prize winning Senior Art Critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Knight has written about Sweeney and Laney’s art saying “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.)”
Terry Sweeney (b.1951) is the grandson of Irish immigrants to Queens, NYC where he was born and raised. He was a language and arts major at Middlebury College, Vermont. Lanier Laney (b.1956), has a degree in Art History from the Honors College of South Carolina. Sweeney and Laney began their collaborative art practice as performance artists in New York City on the Lower East Side of New York at venues like PS 122 in the early ‘80’s while attending Parsons School of Design. A laudatory review by the New York Times landed Sweeney on the cast and Laney on the writing staff of the American television show Saturday Night Live where Terry became famous for his satiric impersonation of First Lady Nancy Reagan during the height of the AIDS crisis in the mid 1980’s while becoming the first openly gay performer on American Network Television.
Recent Solo Exhibition NYC 2024-2025:
Queens Botanical Garden Gallery’s 8th annual juried exhibition in New York City; artist duo Lanier Laney and Terry Sweeney were chosen as recipients of a fall/winter solo exhibition in their main gallery entitled Flora Mundi-Sept 26, 2024–March 16, 2025
Laney and Sweeney, Star Flower paintings, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 96.52 cm x 139.7 cm (38”x56”), each panel
From the artists: “Our new surreal series of 12 abstract geometric star flower paintings celebrates the strength found in both nature and human society. By positioning these large plant portraits at eye level, we hope to engage the viewer in an interspecies dialogue between equals and reframe the kinship between human and plant; shifting the perception of the world of flowers from just decorative backdrops for humans to what they actually are–biodiverse warriors on the front lines with us battling climate threats–which is what all the flowers of the world (Flora Mundi) are engaged in right now –with over one million plant and animal species facing extinction at this particularly critical moment in earth’s time.”
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.”
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