Must be this Old to Ride: Reconciling Queer Desire and Age

By Hilary Hagen

Photo: Samantha Nye. All images courtesy of the artist.

“My grandmother always laughed and joked that we were making lesbian porn,” said artist Samantha Nye while quarantining in her Philadelphia home.

Nye’s work celebrates queer bodies, specifically of those who have aged and no longer fit the youthful paradigm of pleasure and desire.

Born in South Florida, Nye started to paint seriously when she was 25 years old. She received a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (2010) and later an MFA in painting from Columbia University (2018). Nye currently resides in Philadelphia where she teaches and continues to paint vigilantly.

Nye’s work first graced my radar during her solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2021.

“My Heart’s in a Whirl” was a contemporary rendition of the scopitone’s of the 1950s and ’60s – think the grandparent of a Tik Tok or MTV music video. This time, it doesn’t feature a nondescript white man surrounded by youthful women; instead, Nye focuses on queer elders, including her mother and grandmother.

In both “My Heart’s In A Whirl” and Nye’s first solo exhibition piece, “Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places,” she reconstructs and reinvents the aesthetics of scopitone films, Slim Aaron’s photography, vintage playboy, and vintage porn. The historicity in this series reduces, reuses, and recycles cultural references and aesthetics of the past. This quality of her work serves to further the intergenerational kinship and dialogue that the material aesthetics and composition of her work maintain.

When I asked her about this kind of matrilineage referenced in her work, Nye said, “I liked that imagery of their bodies reflected on my body… this becoming.”

Nye’s elders (her grandmother and mother), who together raised her in South Florida, are prevalent subjects across her work. Although sometimes reluctant to participate in something so unconventional and risque, her mother supports Nye and has always been thrilled by her daughter's passion and ultimate success. Her grandmother “was integral to the work for a really long time,” too, according to Nye.

This not only provides a visual mediation on the aging body (when presented linearly from grandmother to mother to daughter) but also grants Nye the ability to honor someone so fundamental to her development as both an artist and an individual: “It’s amazing, [my grandmother] is still a part of the work and still brings that energy and openness.”

Ageism is certainly a prevailing subject in Nye’s work. When was the last time you saw a model under the age of 35? Middle-aged women also buy clothes, don't they? Can’t they be desired?

“I noticed that people are constantly saying ‘these old people’ derogatorily and although each person means something a bit different,” said Nye.

There is sometimes a lack of concern for the experience of the elderly and their status as individuals, especially as sexual beings with wants and needs which often elicits discomfort from

their younger counterparts. This dynamic is a bit unique in the queer community.

In recent decades there has been an unprecedented level of appropriation (for better or worse) of queer culture into hetero and mainstream culture and society and subsequently brings forth a narrative that being queer is contemporary or trendy.

Nye’s work contests that narrative and affirms the existence of these individuals and their existence in both the past and present.

“While for example, the term *nonbinary is relatively new, the people themselves most certainly are not. The experiences of nonbinary, trans, and queer people aren’t new,” she said.

Despite established conventions, Nye doesn’t want you to avert your eyes when viewing these older bodies. These queer bodies are something to celebrate and by celebrating them in the present she is asserting their experience in the past and granting them a voice in the future. This is to say Nye is granting the opportunity to both be desired and have desire; an active role in one's own pleasure and sexuality.

“I am interested in showing queer women as sexual, but most interested in the conversation around how aging depletes people of their desirability or autonomy… Making clear that people of all ages, women of all ages, queer women of all ages can still participate in desire,” said Nye.

*My Heart’s In A Whirl was the first time the term “nonbinary” had been explicitly detailed in the MFA.