Eric Rhein’s recently-published book,
Lifelines, which dedicated to the photographs the artist made between 1989 and 2012, and that is late uncle, the LGBTQ activist, Lige Clarke. When Rhein visited him and his partner, Jack, in New York as a child, little did he know that he’d later also call East Village home, as a student at School of Visual Arts. “While my uncle was murdered in 1975, when I was 14, his influence continued through my discovery of books that he wrote with his partner,” Rhein tells AnOther. He found these books in his mother’s cedar chest at home in Kentucky, which “provided me with an early education and expansive insight into what it might be like live as a liberated gay man”.
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Love, intimacy and HIV history abound in
Eric Rhein: Lifelines. Advertisement
Eric Rhein has roots in Appalachian Kentucky. He moved to New York’s East Village in 1980 and was diagnosed with HIV in 1987. When you look at images of his artwork delicate wire assemblages and photography of tender moments and you read the heartfelt musings collected in the monograph-memoir
Eric Rhein: Lifelines, you can sense his reverence for nature, AIDS history, medical advances, human touch and family (his uncle Lige Clarke was a pioneering gay rights activist who was murdered execution style in 1975).