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Greer Lankton
Greer Lankton (April 21, 1958 &#x2013; November 18, 1996), was an American artist known for creating lifelike sewn dolls that were often modeled on friends or celebrities and posed in elaborate theatrical settings. She was a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s in New York.

Early life
Greer Lankton was born in Flint, Michigan, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife. It was during her rough childhood as a "feminine boy" that she began creating dolls. "It was when I was about ten years old ... I used to make dolls out of hollyhocks and all types of flowers. Pipe cleaner dolls and things like that. I started taking it seriously by the time I went to college when I was 17." Lankton was often teased by peers, and on more than one occasion experienced physical harassment.

Lankton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later Pratt Institute in New York. She changed her name and had gender affirmation surgery at the age of 21, while she was a student at Pratt. Lankton's father Bill convinced the church's board to cover Greer's surgery under the church's health insurance. She had previously been the subject of a local newspaper article about people transitioning to a new gender.

Work
Lankton said in interviews that the surgery "made me focus on bodies. I was always thinking about bodies, and if you think you have the wrong body, you're always going to think about it."

Gender and sexuality are recurring themes in Lankton's art. Her dolls are created in the likeness of those society calls "freaks", and have often been compared to the surrealist works of Hans Bellmer, who made surreal dolls with interchangeable limbs. She created figures that were simultaneously distressing and glamorous, as if they were both victim and perpetrator of their existence.

In 1981, Lankton was featured in the seminal "New York/New Wave" exhibition at P.S.1 in Long Island City and began to show her work in the East Village at Civilian Warfare, where she had solo shows in 1983, 1984, and 1985. She gained an almost cult following among East Village residents from her highly theatrical window displays she designed for Einstein's, the boutique run by her husband, Paul Monroe, at 96 East Seventh Street.

Besides her more emotionally charged dolls, Lankton also created commissioned portrait dolls. These include a 1989 doll of Diana Vreeland that was commissioned for a window display at Barney's as well as shrines to her icons, such as Candy Darling andDivine. One of Lankton's first dolls was an homage to Divine called DeeDeeLux, transformed from a life-sized figure that Lankton created at twelve years old fashioned out of old, cut up T-shirts and painted with acrylic paints.

Critic Roberta Smith described her works in the New York Times as: "Beautifully sewn, with extravagant clothes, make-up and hairstyles, they were at once glamorous and grotesque and exuded intense, Expressionistic personalities that reminded some observers of Egon Schiele. They presaged many of the concerns of '90s art, including the emphasis on the body, sexuality, fashion and, in their resemblance to puppets, performance."

Photographer Nan Goldin said "Greer was one of the pioneers who blurred the line between folk art and fine art." Goldin continues, describing Lankton and her works as "Beautiful, glamorous, fragile, with a disarming sweetness and an ironic wit...She constantly worked and reworked her dolls, changing their genders, identities, sizes, and clothes. They were beautifully rendered, with complex substructures and movable joints." She appeared in Goldin's 1995 film "I'll Be Your Mirror." She also had work in the prestigious Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, both in 1995, where her busts of Candy Darling, circus fat ladies, and dismembered heads gained her notoriety.

In November 2014, "LOVE ME," a major exhibition of Lankton's work including more than 90 dolls, documentation, and ephemera was mounted at PARTICIPANT INC in New York City. It was organized by Lia Gangitano in cooperation with the Greer Lankton Archives Museum (G.L.A.M.), which was founded by Paul Monroe after Lankton's death.

Critic Holland Cotter writes of her works in the New York Times at PARTICIPANT INC: "As seen at Participant, her stitched and painted soft-sculpture figures, from doll-size to life-size, add up to a kind of club-crowd crush of priapic trolls, hermaphrodites and addicts, joined by portraits of celebrities (Jacqueline Kennedy), fashion stars (Diana Vreeland) and gender-bending luminaries (Candy Darling, Teri Toye). To some extent, every Lankton image was a self-portrait."

In an article within ART PAPERS covering "LOVE ME," Emily Colucci notes the challenges presented in compiling and assembling Lankton's works for the exhibition given "by the extent to which her community and collectors in the [East] Village were affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis, which started during some of Lankton's most critical years."

In October 2022, a solo exhibition at the Company Gallery titled "DOLL PARTY" featured a collection of digital prints and Polaroids that Lankton took of her work, which assembled a group of her dolls and sculptures that had not been seen publicly for years. Alongside dolls that resembled celebrities and icons Lankton chose as subjects, such as that of Jackie Kennedy, the exhibition also features Sissy - which critic Johanna Fateman describes as an "autobiographical doll whose physical transformations and daily life paralleled Lankton's own."

Personal life
Lankton began studying at the Pratt Institute in New York City in 1978. Lankton was friends with photographer Nan Goldin and lived in Goldin's apartment in the early 1980s, often posing for her. She also played muse to photographers including David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar.

Lankton married designer Paul Monroe in 1987 in New York City. Nan Goldin was their wedding photographer. Greer and Paul met in 1981 introduced by Peter Hujar who was later Paul's best man at their wedding. They started dating in 1982 and then lived together from 1984-1992, when Greer went to rehab in the mid west. Paul Monroe opened his shop EINSTEINS at 34 east 7th street NYC in 1981 and in 1983 Greer joined him as a partner. In 1986 Greer opened up her own gallery THE DOLL CLUB in EINSTEINS. Lankton's window installations at Einstein's put the store on the map, but the store closed in 1992.

Lankton struggled with drug addiction and anorexia for many years. She died on November 18, 1996, of a drug overdose in her Chicago apartment, just a month after completing her final and largest work. Titled It's All About Me, Not You, this last work has become a permanent installation at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Within a retrospective of the installation for MAKE Magazine, Denna Jones remarks while noting Lankton's struggle with anorexia: "The ravaged and at the same time glamorous dolls seem both victim and perpetrator. And perhaps that is what Lankton was trying to reveal about herself. Dolls, by their very nature reduced in both size and weight, were the autobiographical representation of the reduction of Lankton's own body, and her personal reductionism was evidence that her body was hers to decorate, destroy or diminish."

Writing about the "LOVE ME" exhibition for Art in America, Jane Ursula Harris concludes with: "Much has been made of Lankton’s drug use, and her overdose at age 38, and this, along with her body dysmorphia, have led some to assume her relationship to gender identity was a tortured and unhappy one. 'LOVE ME' did much to debunk this myth, emphasizing the joie de vivre Lankton so clearly embodied in her expressionistic dolls and prodigious output, and returning the artist to her rightful place as an East Village icon."