Paths That Cross: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis

Paths That Cross: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis
Sep 18, 2026 – Oct 21, 2026

United States United States — Art Gallery
908 West 46th Street
Minneapolis, MN 55419

Weinstein Hammons Gallery presents Paths That Cross: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis, on view from 18 September through 1 November 2026, bringing together a rare constellation of works that trace decades of artistic exchange between three figures who shaped one another's trajectories. The exhibition takes its title from a song Smith wrote for Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe's lover and patron, who died in 1987, two years before Mapplethorpe himself succumbed to AIDS-related complications.

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met in 1967, both twenty years old and newly arrived in New York. They lived together through the late 1960s and 1970s, supporting each other as they developed their practices—Mapplethorpe moving from collage and jewelry into photography, Smith from poetry into rock and roll. Their bond, romantic at first, evolved into a lifelong platonic partnership that endured even as Mapplethorpe came to terms with his sexuality and Smith married Fred "Sonic" Smith. Mapplethorpe's iconic portrait of Smith appears on the cover of her 1975 album Horses.

Lynn Davis entered this orbit through Mapplethorpe, becoming his close friend and collaborator. In 1979, the International Center of Photography mounted Trade-Off, an exhibition in which Davis and Mapplethorpe each photographed the same subjects, some at the same time and place, their portraits hung side by side. This installation is recreated in Paths That Cross, alongside a vintage gelatin silver print Davis made of Smith for Esquire in 1974, commissioned for a series called "Outrageous Ladies" that never ran.

The exhibition includes early Polaroids, archival material from 1969, and a postcard Smith wrote to Mapplethorpe from Paris. The gallery screens Still Moving/Patti Smith, a thirteen-minute 16mm film Mapplethorpe made for an exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1978, and a short video Davis made of Mapplethorpe in his studio in 1985, never before exhibited publicly.

The most recent work comes from Conspiracy of Word and Image, an exhibition Davis and Smith created in 2018 for a Baroque church in Alba, Italy. Five large photographs from that show appear here, including Davis's image of the Blue Nile Falls in Ethiopia, on which Smith wrote lines from "The Coral Sea," her epic homage to the dying Mapplethorpe, in delicate calligraphy. She added text from Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Davis's son, and Herman Hesse to images of the Colossus of Memnon, an archaeological site in Turkey, an iceberg in Greenland, and Kathmandu.

Davis, born in 1944, trained with Berenice Abbott and became known for large-scale black-and-white photographs of monumental landscapes, particularly icebergs. After her first trip to Greenland in 1986, she gave up photographing the human form. Smith wrote the foreword to her 2015 monograph Ice: 1986-2007. In a 2026 statement, Smith reflected on the friendship that formed around Mapplethorpe's illness: "When Lynn offered me the opportunity to collaborate with her, I experienced the same exhilarating sense of mission that I had once experienced with Robert."

Image: Lynn Davis (American, born 1944) George Bussey, 1978 © Lynn Davis, courtesy of the Weinstein Hammons Gallery.


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