FP at the Rainbow Book Fair 2024: featuring Joseph Modica

On Saturday, April 20, the 2024 edition of the Rainbow Book Fair held sway at the NYC LGBT Community Center at 208 West 13th Street, Manhattan. Ferrandina Books was there with our array of publications and a selection of notecards for sale. The featured artist of our notecard sales was Joseph Modica, one of the founding members of Ferrandina Press.

Joseph’s passing in 2018 was a great emotional and artistic blow for our group. As custodians of much of his artwork, in cooperation with his estate, we have re-elaborated some of his more colorful sketches to be featured on notecards. At present we have more than a dozen designs which we have for sale when we participate in book fairs, etc. In addition, on this occasion, we had an information sheet as an introduction to his work. We also had a catalog of Black and White charcoal pencil sketches which we are interested in showing.

This was the first time that we have put the artwork of Joseph Modica front and center at one of our displays and we were very pleased with the response from fair-goers to these “Sketcher X" works. (His erotic sketches were collectively referred to as Sketcher X drawings by Joseph and we enthusiastially continue that designation.)

Some text from our information sheets:

 Joseph Modica, Nov. 1, 1946 - Aug. 9, 2018

Erotic portraiture, photojournalism.

Joseph Modica was an accomplished artist on the West/East Village gay scene. He left a collection of artwork that spans several decades of the late Twentieth Century. 

He is perhaps best known for the photographs that document the nightlife and performance art of Lower Manhattan during the 1980s. There are posed portraits and live snapshots of various well know habitués of the alternative music clubs, such as Keith Haring, Sylvester, and others. There are representative images of gay sex show performances, such as the Ridiculous Theater Company, “Mr. Leather,” and Straight to Hell. These compelling photographs bring a bygone era to life, in both black and white and color.

His most commercially successful photography is of a more sexually explicit nature. During the 1980s, Joseph Modica contributed often to the covers and photographic pages of such large circulation gay magazines as Honcho, Playguy, In-Touch and Christopher Street. He left an extensive library of male nude photography featuring several dozen different models. 

As an illustrator, he worked for many years at Dell Publishing. He created book covers, did page lay-out and retouched photography for various Dell publications. During the 1990s he concentrated his artistic efforts in life-drawing sketches. His male nude sketches are at once  sexually explicit and lyrical, showing the male body from various angles, both in repose and in action. His charcoal and pastel sketches are colorful, erotic and beautifully composed. They range from fairly large (50cm x 60cm) to small (20cm x 20cm). 

During his later years he worked with Ferrandina Press to restore and reimagine many of his studio sketches for the digital age. It was a massive undertaking, considering the sheer number of artworks to be evaluated, restored and brought up-to-date. Unfortunately, he passed away before this work could be completed. Ferrandina Press, in cooperation with the estate of Joseph Modica is still working on this project as well as we can. 

Some representative work can be viewed at the following websites:

http://visualaids.org/artists/detail/joseph-modica#

https://www.whlreview.com/no-4.4/art/JosephModica.pdf

The Rainbow Book Fair takes place annually. We have participated whenever this has been possible, and in the carousel on the homepage of this website, there is an image of Joseph seated at our Ferrandina Press table at the Fair a couple of years before his death at the age of 71. That was back when the fair was still being held at a midtown hotel. We are very pleased that in recent years, they have moved to the LGBT Community Center, it is a natural fit and is made much more accessible to everyone in our community. No need to bring our own tent to this book fair, the LGBT tent is a big one, with plenty of room for all.

Electra at Drag Story Hour at the Rainbow Book Fair. Now that’s big smile!