Pat Oleszko poses beside one other inflatable sculptures at the SculptureCenter in Queens (Credit: Anna Lee)
Pat Oleszko, 78, is well-known for her mastery of the carnivalesque, sexual innuendos, and hyperbole. She has traveled from city streets to public arenas to carry pointed political criticisms shrouded in nylon teats and hundreds of yards of hot-glued fabric.
Oleszko has never confined herself to a singular artistic domain: she has produced wearable and standalone sculptures, inflatables, and self-directed videos. Oleszko has performed at renowned global art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, so she is no stranger to the modern art world. Beneath the artist’s penchant for risqué humor there always lies a knotty sociopolitical problem — whether that be climate change, racial inequity, religious authoritarianism, LGBTQ+ rights, the aftermath of 9/11, or presidential administrations.
From Jan. 29 to Apr. 27, however, Oleszko is taking her costumes off the street and bringing them inside museum walls. The SculptureCenter in Queens is hosting Oleszko’s enormous inflatables, such as the real-estate guzzling dinosaur, “Yupasaurus” and “Quit Draggin’” — an oversized dragon lamenting a sluggish response to climate change. The two-floored exhibition, titled “Fool Disclosure,” traverses the many worlds and artworks brought to life by Oleszko’s creative hand since she began crafting in the 1970s. On March 8, Oleszko will also be among 56 names featured in the 82nd edition of the Whitney Biennial for contemporary art in the U.S.
Caption: The “Fool Disclosure” exhibition takes center stage at the SculptureCenter. (Credit: Anna Lee)
Distinct from Oleszko’s dozens of performances, exhibitions, and installations since 1971, “Fool Disclosure” also marks the launch of the artist’s first academic catalog, with four commissioned essays, and Oleszko’s own contribution — an autobiographical timeline that is chock-full of her witty wordplays and select milestones. The catalog marks the first time the artist has been centrally recognized and considered in an academic publication.
“Humor is a harder battle because people dismiss it, because it’s seemingly ‘easy,’” Oleszko said.
Positioned on the outskirts of what Julia Bryan-Wilson, a Columbia professor of art history, and one of the commissioned authors for “Fool Disclosure,” calls the “conventional movements of the art world,” Oleszko has seldom been included among the ranks of popular, mainstream contemporary artists. A major reason for the artist’s marginalization, according to Sohrab Mohebbi, director of SculptureCenter, is that most tragic art is “very serious,” making Oleszko’s jocular approach an anomaly.
Oleszko’s sculptures, without critical context, could be seen merely as naughty explorations of human anatomy, or an impressive collection of inflatables. Yet many curators and artists who have worked with Oleszko describe her as someone deeply concerned with, and invested in, complex political issues.
Tracy Fitzpatrick, a curatorial assistant for the National Museum of Women in the Arts installation in 1993, described Oleszko as a “living sculpture” in her “Charles Patless” costume — a wearable bodybuilder suit with a tangerine spray tan. As Oleszko strutted with cringey machismo, garnering laughs from the audience while also making a criticism of self-indulgent masculinity, Fitzpatrick recalled “seeing all that contemporary art could be” for the first time: it could be tragic or comedic, stationary or mobile, and both funny and serious.
Caption: Oleszko’s “Charles Patless” costume, installed at the “Fool Disclosure” exhibition. (Credit: Anna Lee)
The early years
The artist usually tells people she hails from Detroit because “it sounds cooler,” though she really spent her childhood in the neighboring suburban area of Dearborn with her brother, sister, and parents. Both of Oleszko’s parents were immigrants — her father, a chemical engineer, was from Poland, and her mother, an enthusiast of the arts, came from Germany. As Oleszko and her siblings diverged into very different fields and interests, her parents encouraged each of them to “be who they are.”
Her vision took shape in the 1960s, while studying art as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. Compelled by the sociopolitical turmoil on college campuses around civil rights and the Vietnam War, and the cultural advancements that emerged with Michigan’s new Ann Arbor Film Festival, Oleszko reached an epiphany: “Everything coalesced — my need to make large sculptures, my predilection of social commentary within a social structure — it became the basis for my work.”
While many artists located their responses on canvas or through photography, Oleszko considered her body as her own creative medium.
“I realized that at about six feet tall, I could hang sculpture on myself,” Oleszko said. She became part of an wearable art movement in the 1960s and 1970s, during which many women artists began using their own bodies as sites of expression. With others such as Yoko Ono and Ana Mendieta helping to shape the exciting new medium, Oleszko hopped onto the movement, adopting a fondness for self-ornamentation as a form of political response.
Oleszko paved her creative path as a queer woman in a male-dominated market, and has had many pivotal experiences transpire not in the gilded halls of an art academy, but in unconventional settings and places.
An artist’s absurdist approach takes shape
Gyula Muskovics, a researcher, is using his “Fool Disclosure” essay to trace how Oleszko — along with other performance artists in the late 1970s to the early 1990s — responded to urban crises down to the very fabric of her costumes, many of which are comprised of recycled textiles or “throwaway” materials. “The way Pat started creating different costumes from seemingly garbage,” Muskovics said, “was a really interesting response to what was going on in society at large.”
When she first came to New York City in the 1970s, she cosplayed New York women archetypes during her waitressing job, such as her “Little Old Lady” and “Sally Sex-retary” — a costume with a hyperbolic chest and pubic bush, draped in a transparent nightie. And in Toledo, Ohio, Oleszko learned the art of stage performance as a dancer in the burlesque scene. In one of the essays for “Fool Disclosure,” Marie Catalano, a researcher, wrote about how Oleszko’s experience in burlesque helped prime Oleszko for the performances that came later in her career.
Flyers, illustrations, and newspaper clippings of Oleszko’s early performance art adorn the lower level of the SculptureCenter. (Credit: Anna Lee)
Oleszko can’t imagine any approach to her art that doesn’t include absurdism. “By working through humor, you’re able to say things … that opens people’s minds. They laugh, and then they go, ‘Oh!’ — and have a second thought,” Oleszko said.
When asked how she learned about the legacies of costume performance and sculpture, Oleszko replied with a shrug, “I dunno. I guess I was born with that information.” She remembered an anecdote from kindergarten when she was asked to draw a self-portrait. She assessed the works her five-year-old colleagues created; she realized her portrait “was obviously the best.”
Wordplay plays a role
As Oleszko honed her craft over decades of performances and exhibitions, she developed a unique style of wordplay. While Oleszko doesn’t have a monogram, her literary jests are guaranteed signatures — ones that can be found all throughout her website and her exhibition titles, which include witticisms like “Womb with a View,” a huge pelvic inflatable that visitors can climb inside and a multi-layered homage to artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1966 sculpture, “She-A Cathedral.”
Oleszko’s wordplay also demands that viewers try to understand what she’s really saying. Carri Skoczek, a longtime friend, saves Oleszko’s emails as souvenirs. “The worldplay — it’s constant,” Skoczek chuckled over the phone. “It’s like wait a minute, what does this mean? Others, it’s an eye roll. But sometimes, it’s, ‘Brilliant, Pat, Brilliant!’”
In person, Oleszko’s wordplays can be remarkably difficult to detect, save for her occasional air quote. Unlike her costumes, which offer punchy responses to whatever Oleszko finds absurd, troubling, or downright strange, the artist has a concentrated and sometimes serious disposition at work.
In preparation for “Fool Disclosure,” Oleszko has spent hours in meetings at the SculptureCenter or filing through paperwork. Other times, she might be hunkered down in her Tribeca apartment, sewing and hot gluing together her next big feat.
Performance art takes stage
One unique logistic that Oleszko always considers is not just how to create her pieces, but where to present them. Oleszko often embodies the itinerant performance of the court jester and uses the public domain to educate, ridicule, and criticize, approaching “the whole world as [her] stooge, not [her] stage.”
Some of these public performances only garner attention from passerby, as was the case when Oleszko dressed up in a tall evergreen made from hundreds of yards of tulle and decked with ornaments, to go “Christmas shopping” throughout Central Park. She has costumes that have bodies or show genitalia, but, she said, “of all things, the Christmas tree was the one thing people couldn’t look away from.”
These performances come at a cost: arrests, exiles, and banishments. Oleszko’s 1999 performance, “Roamin’ Holiday,” landed her in a Roman jail for several hours. The production consisted of several street performances where Pat transformed into the costumed characters of Saint Agatha, Saint Lucy, the Nincompope, a gladiator, and her carb-composed masterpiece, the Pasta Madonna. Oleszko was kicked off every premise she embarked upon, including, to her surprise, the churches. After she strutted her “Nincompope” number at the Vatican without authorization, she was thrown in jail under the watch of an armed guard, she said.
When Oleszko recalls her time in the Roman jail, or her ousting from other events like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, when she was thrown out for intercepting as a costumed turkey, she is attuned to the reactions of law enforcement. By wearing a costume, Oleszko said, “you can attract people, or repel people, or frighten people, particularly authority. Because that means that person is a free agent.” Inciting a reaction from police, for Oleszko, becomes as much a part of the performance art as the costume itself.
During a “No Kings” rally in New York City in October, Oleszko crowned herself with a hat resembling a potty, and labeled it “Trump Elon Eau de Toilette.” At another, she championed herself as the queen of the “Resist Ants,” flanked by her colony of fellow marchers, a performance that inspired Bryan-Wilson’s essay in “Fool Disclosure.”
“Silly me,” Oleszko said. “I didn’t think things could get worse after George Bush.”
Through New York City’s near bankruptcy in 1975, the aftermath of 9/11, and contentious political landscapes, Oleszko has tried to build alternative worlds through fashion, costume, and artistry. Gyula Muskovics, a researcher, is using his “Fool Disclosure” essay to trace how Oleszko — along with other performance artists in the late 1970s to the early 1990s — responded to urban crises down to the very fabric of her costumes, many of which are comprised of recycled textiles or “throwaway” materials. “The way Pat started creating different costumes from seemingly garbage,” Muskovics said, “was a really interesting response to what was going on in society at large.”
Oleszko’s unique take on what to make of ruin, crises, tragedy, or authoritarianism is meant to crystallize in the visual and textual presentation of “Fool Disclosure.” In cultural and artistic movements that art historians have long recognized, Oleszko recurs as one of the principal but overlooked pioneers. “Fool Disclosure” marks a long-delayed contextualization of Oleszko as an essential part of that modern art history, but also gestures towards her dozens of performances and creations that have not yet been recognized.
Taking after the hallowed tradition of the showman, shaman, and fool, Oleszko takes her role as a performance artist with solemn responsibility.
“You have a certain power when you take the responsibility of being a public persona,” Oleszko said. “It’s powerful, challenging, difficult, overwhelming, and there’s no hiding once you’re in it.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify Tracy Fitzpatrick role at the National Museum of Women in the Arts installation in 1993.
About the author(s)
Anna Lee is a general assignments reporter based in New York and Boston. They are currently reporting on environmental legislation and criminal justice reform.