So much has changed and so radically in New York in the 40 years since artist Stephen Tashjian – best known by his drag moniker, Tabboo! — first took up residence in his light-filled hallway in a stately apartment block called the Mildred, which it’s hard to believe was one of only three buildings in its 1982 stretch of East Fifth Street.
Alphabet City was then largely strewn with rubble. Stumbling home from the bars or from one of the many gigs – doorman, line cook, florist, dishwasher, go-go dancer – he took to earn a living, Mr. Tashjian routinely passed boarded-up buildings with holes in the floor. walls hammered to create shooting galleries. Tiptoeing, he tiptoed through vacant lots strewn with glassine envelopes bearing the names of the heroin that hit the market that morning.
But as deserted and dingy as it was, Manhattan, seen through the eyes of a 23-year-old from a one-stop-light town in central Massachusetts and just out of art school, was more dazzling than the Emerald City. “I was like, ‘Take me to Oz!’” Mr. Tashjian said one afternoon this week, referring not just to a city he’s made his home for decades, but a place that has proved to be his enduring subject.
“I’m giving you that ‘I Love New York City’ feeling, in Technicolor and with beautiful lighting,” he said of the bright and dreamy cityscapes that made him unexpected, as one of his dealers, Sam Gordon, said this week, “a hot new up and coming artist.”
The irony is certainly not lost on Mr. Tashjian that, while he was collecting food stamps for the disabled just seven years ago, the art world suddenly discovered him in plain sight at the age of 63. Two exhibitions of his works, in the Karma and Gordon Robichaux galleries, are running concurrently, and a group of collectors has emerged eager to purchase one of his paintings. “I’m pushing the work harder than ever,” he said.
“I live,” he added suddenly in tears, “for all the people who couldn’t.”
By that he meant countless members of his generation who had been lost to the AIDS epidemic. “Everything before it was digital needs to be erased now,” he said. “And I insist I don’t get erased.”
Erasure seems like an unlikely fate for a character as vibrant as Tabboo!, one who embodies a nearly extinct breed of artists whose everyday existence seems to be an organic part of his practice. New York, when Mr. Tashjian was young, was hardly a place for creative strivers to arrive with five-year career plans. For those like him and his artist friends Jack Pierson and Nan Goldin, the purpose of being here was to experience existence as something “beautiful, joyful, intense, colorful and magical”.
Viewed in that light, his varied tasks add up to more than an assortment of random day (and night) jobs. And over the years, his resume has been wonderfully motley. He worked as a drag-go-go dancer at the Pyramid Club, sang a self-penned queer anthem in the 1995 documentary ‘Wigstock: The Movie’, drew album covers, invented the font used by the dance band Deee-Lite, and appeared on Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” with Joan Rivers. He was in drag like Cher. (“Ivanka Trump was with us too,” said Mr. Tashjian. “She asked me if I was Marilyn Manson.”)
In recent years, he collaborated on designs for a Marc Jacobs collection and started posting lip-syncing videos to his irresistibly playful Instagram account (@tabboonyc). “I like quirky,” he said.
He sat on a sofa draped in a malachite-patterned cashmere rug in what had originally been the dining room of his fifth-floor apartment. The room was reached through a hallway and through a one-off drawing room that also serves as his painting studio. The walls were painted canary yellow with hot pink and turquoise sequined saris hung like doorways. A tarnished tuba was leaning in a corner. Bessarabian carpets were densely packed on the floor. The overall aesthetic was one of creative clearing and abundance; in no way can Tabboo! be considered a minimalist.
“Everything is a rescue,” he said of potted plants received as gifts, a tuxedo cat, Lili, who arrived as a stray, a wall of dolls and masks collected at random, starting when Mr. Tashjian was a teenage doll prodigy who hired himself for parties.
“This is lamb chops,” he said, rocking a brittle rubber head that was all that was left of a hand puppet that was the sidekick of television ventriloquist Shari Lewis. “These are Bil Baird’s,” he added, of marionettes depicting biblical figures, carved by the puppeteer best known for the “The Lonely Goatherd” series, made for the film version of “The Sound of Music.” There were “weird” dolls and “pretty” dolls and “scary” dolls, and the meeting gave the three-room apartment the feeling of being super-populated with inanimate creatures waiting for a wizard.
For decades, this apartment and its cast of dummy characters largely described the arc of Mr. Tashjian’s compass, as he explained, because until recently, he earned too little to stray far from home. Now that his paintings are selling for the price of an E-Class Mercedes, he is starting to see the world and makes recent trips to Paris and London, the beaches of Oaxaca and to Los Angeles for an art fair. And he’s unabashedly indulged in a thirst for fashion, he explained, showcasing finery from a wardrobe that relies heavily on Dries Van Noten, tailored Martin Keehn suits and seemingly every floral extravagance Alessandro Michele ever dreamed up at Gucci. .
“I look well-dressed gentleman,” said Mr. Tashjian, who wore Gucci loafers, pinstriped Comme des Garçons pants and a Bottega Veneta sweater. It is undeniably true that in public he strikes an impressive, almost courtly figure, as he did last week when he received guests at the opening of his Gordon Robichaux gallery, dressed in a graphic suit that turned him into an animated piece of Op Art. .
“I’ve been into fashion since elementary school, when I dressed up as a Pilgrim lady,” he said. “People always ask me, ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ Why? Why? Because it’s today.”