Mark Morrisroe

(American, 1959–1989)

Mark Morrisroe was an American artist known both for his performances and photography. His Polaroids of the art and music scenes in both Boston and New York, expressed deeply personal aspects of his life and friendships. The artist Jack Pierson once referred to Morrisroe as, “Caspar David Friedrich in a donut shop.” Born on January 10, 1959 in Malden, MA, he worked as a prostitute as a teenager going by the name of Mark Dirt. He went on to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he befriended fellow students Nan Goldin and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Morrisroe began his photography career upon receiving a Polaroid Land camera, which he used to create the technique of mounting enlarged double negatives on top of one another, a technique he called “sandwich” prints. In the early 1980s, Morrisroe shot a series of Super-8 films entitled The Laziest Girl in Town, Hello from Bertha, and Nymph-O-Maniac. The artist died from AIDS-related complications at the age of 30, on July 24, 1989 in Jersey City, NJ. At the time of his death, more than 2,000 Polaroid pictures were found in his home. Today, Morrisroe’s works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.