Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love

Lankton''s iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes

This is the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton''s dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book''s 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton''s own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself.
Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong and Lankton''s close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as "one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny." Lankton''s work was a neighborhood fixture, in exhibitions at the gallery Civilian Warfare and in regular window displays at Einstein''s Boutique, and was also celebrated farther afield, in era-defining group shows at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her final work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent view.