Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love

Lankton's iconic and striking doll sculptures as we've never seen them before: through her own eyes.

This is the first monograph on visionary trans artist Greer Lankton (1958-96), whose realistic doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton's dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means of exploring her conflicted relationship with the human body. In the book's 100 photographs, all taken by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own: complaining at a party, strolling along the beach, or resting on a step in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of eccentrics—mostly female, often grotesque, always radiating glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton's own invention alongside familiar icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol, and even Lankton herself.

Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star on the downtown scene. There, her offbeat elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong, and her close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as “one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild, and hysterically funny.” Lankton's work was a fixture in the neighborhood, featured in exhibitions at the Civilian Warfare gallery and regular window displays at Einstein's boutique, and was also celebrated beyond, in defining group exhibitions of the era at PS1 and the Venice Biennale. Her last work, an immersive installation created for the Mattress Factory in 1996, remains on permanent display.