City Life Org – Exhibition at The Met Highlights Position of Photography in Cross-Dressing Group in Nineteen Sixties New York

Andrea Susan (American, 1939–2015). Photo shoot with Lili, Wilma, and buddies, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY, 1964–1968. Chromogenic print, 3 5/16 x 4 1/4 in. (8.4 x 10.8 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015

Exhibition Dates: Now–January 25, 2026
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 852

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Casa Susanna, on view Now–January 25, 2026, brings collectively pictures and publications created by and for a group of cross-dressers who met recurrently in New York City and the Catskills Mountains all through the Nineteen Sixties. Two modest resorts run by Susanna Valenti and her spouse, Marie Tornell, offered protected areas for visitors to collect and freely cross-dress en femme throughout an period of strictly outlined gender roles. At these resorts and at gatherings in New York City, cameras turned a instrument for visitors to create and affirm their femme identities. These snapshots—some candid, others playfully posed—have been exchanged at gatherings and shared by mail, connecting a nation-wide group of cross-dressers. First found at a Manhattan flea market in 2004, they’ve since come to be often called the Casa Susanna pictures.

The exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Les Rencontres d’Arles in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is made attainable by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

“The Casa Susanna photographs tell a powerful story about self-expression,” mentioned Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “These moving images reveal how the photographic medium played an essential role in affirming identity and building community, while underscoring the responsibility of museums to preserve and celebrate stories that are often overlooked.”

Arranged thematically throughout three galleries, the exhibition options roughly 160 works, uniting three collections of pictures created by this community of cross-dressers: from the holdings of the Art Gallery of Ontario; from the private assortment of artist Cindy Sherman; and from the The Met’s assortment, donated by Betsy Wollheim, whose father was a member of the Casa Susanna group. Works embody chromogenic prints, silver gelatin prints, and Polaroids; the Polaroid digicam, first launched within the late Nineteen Fifties, was particularly widespread amongst cross-dressers, who appreciated each the moment outcomes and the privateness afforded by a course of that didn’t require the help of a industrial lab. The exhibition additionally presents problems with the underground journal Transvestia, which printed the pictures together with autobiographical essays by members of the group, make-up and clothes recommendation, fiction, and poetry.

In their day, members of the Casa Susanna group referred to as themselves “transvestites.” Today that phrase is broadly thought of pejorative. The exhibition makes use of the popular time period “cross-dressing” to explain the apply of carrying garments sometimes related to a unique gender than that which a person presents day-to-day.

During the Nineteen Sixties, most cross-dressers lived in isolation and disgrace. The exhibition presents new analysis into the double lives many on this group led as married males with established careers. The pictures additionally convey to mild the kind of lady they aimed to embody—the woman subsequent door, the blissful housewife, the respectable matron—a middle-class perfect of femininity that was each liberating and limiting. Casa Susanna presents perception into a big pre-Stonewall cross-dressing scene, inviting guests to grasp this world and its connection to the lives of transgender folks immediately.

Credits and Related Content

Casa Susanna is curated by Dr. Isabelle Bonnet, Independent Curator and Scholar, and Sophie Hackett, Curator of Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario. The Met presentation is curated by Mia Fineman, Curator, Department of Photographs, The Met.

The Met will host exhibition-related applications, together with a dialog between Casa Susanna group member Diana Merry-Shapiro and a recent novelist on September 12, in addition to a screening of the PBS documentary Casa Susanna on January 13.

The exhibition is featured on The Met website and on social media.

Related