Artist Statement 

Frederick Weston (1946-2020) was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Detroit, Michigan where he participated in the club scene before moving to New York City in the mid-1970s. He was a graduate of Ferris State University in Michigan—where he was instrumental in founding the Zeta Beta Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the university’s first African-American fraternity—and studied menswear design and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He was a self-taught interdisciplinary artist who worked in varied media: collage, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and creative writing. Over the course of his time in New York, he developed a vast, encyclopedic archive of images and ephemera related to fashion, the body, advertising, AIDS, race, and queer subjects. Weston is represented by Gordon Robichaux, NY where he presented his first New York solo exhibition in 2019. In 2020, Ortuzar Projects (in collaboration with Gordon Robichaux, NY) presented a forty-year survey of Weston’s work. He was a long-standing artist member of Visual AIDS, an organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy; Weston participated in numerous panels and presented his creative writing and poetry. Weston’s work has been included in numerous gallery and museum group exhibitions, in 2021 Visual AIDS published Frederick Weston & Samuel R. Delany, a book dedicated to Weston’s work with an interview between Weston and Delany.