Greer LanktonSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago1978198090

191979

Joyce Randall SenechalDepartment of Film at The Museum of Modern ArtMattress Factory

Sketchbook, September 1977is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artists mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams, and occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the nineteen-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of her days recorded herethe time period leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity, and human behavior.

The book also includes an afterword by Lanktons lifelong friend, Joyce Randall Senechal.Sketchbook, September 1977is one of the earliest of Greer Lanktons journals, sketchbooks, and daybooks to appear in the artists archives housed in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art. The majority of Lanktons papers and archives are housed at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.