Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was born and raised in Queens, New York. Mapplethorpe attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1963 to 1969, where he majored in Graphic Arts and worked primarily in painting, sculpture, and collage. It was not until the 1970s, when the artist Sandy Daley gave Mapplethorpe a Polaroid camera, that he began to experiment with photography, which he originally used to document his mixed-media artworks and develop his signature style. During his lifetime, Mapplethorpe had impressive solo exhibitions at some of the most acclaimed institutions around the world, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. After his untimely death from AIDS in 1989, Mapplethorpe has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major international museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy; Grand Palais, Paris; Musée Rodin, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Canada; and State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Significant public collections of Mapplethorpe’s work are held by the J. Paul Getty Trust including the museum and research institute in partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Artist Rooms Collection jointly owned by the Tate Modern, London, and the National Galleries of Scotland; at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art; and the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. ↓ Biography ↓ Bibliography