The Queer Artist who created the Most Iconic “Lesbian & Gay New York Historical Landmark”

https://www.bgsqd.com/event/emma-and-the-angel/

Maria Teresa Cometto, author of Emma and the Angel of Central Park, in conversation with Allen Ellenzweig.

The Angel of the Waters was the cover of the Guide to Lesbian & Gay Historical Landmarks New York, published about 25 years ago, and it is featured in the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project‘s website. It is also the “favorite angel” of Prior Walter, the protagonist of Angels in America.

But almost nobody knows the queer artist who created the Angel of the Waters: the New Yorker Emma Stebbins. Maria Teresa will talk with Allen about the fascinating life of Emma: it was in the Rome of the Popes, between 1856 and 1870, that she created the Angel of the Waters, while living as the “wife” of the famous American actress Charlotte Cushman.

Emma was part of the “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock,” as Henry James called the eight American women sculptors working in Rome at that time: four of them lived with a woman companion.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:

youtube.com/@bgsqd

Suggested donation to benefit the Bureau: $10.

All are welcome to attend, with or without a donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @BGSQD

Maria Teresa Cometto, journalist, author, curator, was born in Novara, Italy. In 2000 she moved to New York with her family. She is a regular contributor to the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera. She has written several books including the biography Emma and the Angel of Central Park, La Marchesa Colombi (Life, Novels and Passions of the First Woman Journalist of Corriere della Sera), Brothers of the Mountains (Arturo and Oreste Squinobal from the Alps to the Himalayas), and Tech and the City (the making of New York’s startup community).

Allen Ellenzweig has published arts criticism and cultural commentary in magazines such as Art in America, The Village Voice, and American Photographer. He is a regular Contributing Writer to the bi-monthly Gay & Lesbian Review. His first book, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, was a landmark historical study published by Columbia University Press. His recent biography, George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford University Press), is a life of the 20th Century gay American photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955).