The Alice Austen House, nestled on the edge of Staten Island, has long been a site of subtle defiance—a Victorian home turned museum honoring a pioneering female photographer who lived openly with her partner for decades. It is fitting, then, that ONE DAY, the joint exhibition of Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett unfolds here not with extravagance but with an eerie, unfaltering intensity. The show is less an intrusion upon Austen’s legacy than a continuation of its queer radicalism, tenderly reframed through the visual and political diction of McCarty and Moffett.
The exhibition centers on a body of work first conceived in 1992, when Princeton University’s School of Architecture invited McCarty and Moffett to design its Lecture Series Calendar. What began as a graphic design commission transformed, under their hands, into a conceptual exploration of early American identity. Dressed as pilgrims and women, the artists and their collaborators staged a photoshoot on the North Fork of Long Island using unstable 35mm Polaroid positive film.
Only two images were ever published; the rest, hundreds of experimental slides, were packed away. Time, in its slow alchemy, has altered the material. Now newly printed as large archival pigment prints, these photographs are being exhibited for the first time. Just as Austen used photography to document her life with unapologetic specificity, McCarty and Moffett use it to challenge and question the dominant narratives of American identity.
Whether masked, veiled, or shrouded in crude paper sacks, the characters presented to us in the series are all anonymous, unreadable, and deliberately effaced. This recurring gesture, repeated across the series, speaks volumes. It both invokes and resists history’s erasures: women whose names have been lost, queers who were not recorded, lives that vanished into silence or subtext. However, it also suggests performance—these are not “real” colonists or pilgrims, but stand-ins, deliberately theatrical, queering the very notion of authenticity.
