PRESS RELEASE
BOOK LAUNCH — Portraits and Places by Steve Turtell
On the occasion of the finissage of Bill Rice at Donald Ryan Gallery

December 13, 2025 — 4 to 6 PM
Donald Ryan Gallery · 15 East 71st Street, 2A · New York, NY 10023

Donald Ryan Gallery and Palermo Publishing are pleased to celebrate the finissage
of Bill Rice with the New York launch of Portraits and Places by Steve Turtell — a
luminous memoir of queer life, friendship, and artistic community in New York
during the 1970s.

About the Book

Portraits and Places offers six intimate and sharply observed essays that open onto a
city which, fifty years later, feels as distant as the lost continent of Atlantis. From the
first Gay Pride March to Frank Zappa’s thirtieth birthday party, to the fracture of a
treasured friendship with photographer Peter Hujar during a trip to Mardi Gras,
Turtell’s writing traces a personal cartography of a transformative decade.
These narratives unfold alongside eleven portraits by Peter Hujar, depicting central
figures who inhabit the essays — including Charles Ludlam, Sheyla Baykal, and
performers from the legendary Palm Casino Revue. The selection draws from a
specific moment — the Palm Casino Revue — when a group of performers,
technicians, dreamers, and spectators created a shared space of imagination and
desire. Those nights were small acts of liberation, where bodies told truths that
could not yet be spoken.

Born and raised in New York, Steve Turtell is a poet and writer whose 2012
collection Heroes and Householders was praised by critic Marjorie Perloff for its
“subtle and charming poems.” As director of public programs at the Museum of the
City of New York, the South Street Seaport Museum, and the New-York Historical
Society, he oversaw the public programming for eighteen photography exhibitions
— a role that underscored his deep engagement with the medium and its histories.
Presented in the context of Donald Ryan Gallery’s exhibition Bill Rice, the launch of
Portraits and Places offers a meaningful counterpoint to Rice’s own vision of New
York’s East Village. Whereas Rice rendered the solitude, tenderness, and
melancholic beauty of the city’s streets and their fleeting encounters, Turtell brings
forward the interior life of the same era — tracing the emotional and social
networks that animated queer and artistic communities across downtown.

The pairing of the exhibition and the book illuminates an urban and human
landscape in which private memory, artistic experimentation, and collective
histories are deeply entwined.

Event Details

The evening will include a presentation and book signing with Steve Turtell.
Portraits and Places is published by Palermo Publishing (2025).
For press materials, visuals, or further information, please contact:
info@donaldryangallery.com
info@palermopublishing.com

News

 

In April, 2017 Aperture published Peter Hujar: Speed of Life, the catalog to a traveling retrospective of the work of Peter Hujar. It contains a condensed version of the memoir, “Peter Hujar in New Orleans.”

 

In January, 2017Writing on the Moon: Stories and Poetry from the Creative Unconscious by Psychoanalysts and Others, an anthology in which I have a poem, was published by Karnac Books.

In 2013, I won Pitchapalooza at Workman Publishing and am working on a proposal for them. The Wall Street Journal covered the event:

One-Minute Pitches from Aspiring Authors

Publishing Professionals Hear Book Ideas at Pitchapalooza

    • By
  • DAVID SHAPIRO JR.

“One time, I only held a job for three hours. I hired as a lighting technician at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the early 1970s,” recalled author Steve Turtell. “I nearly killed someone when I lost my grip on a ladder that I was holding up—it just started falling and I froze! Luckily, a lighting cable stopped it from falling all the way over. After that, the guy who hired me asked me to leave.”

Mr. Turtell was in the sunken auditorium at the office of Workman Publishing, an independent publishing house in the West Village on Thursday evening, ready to pitch his book “Fifty Jobs in Fifty Years, a Working Tour of My Life.” (He has also worked as a nude artists’ model; a research assistant at PBS; a janitor at Gimbel Brothers; a fashion coordinator at Joyce Leslie; a butcher; a baker; and the director of public programs at the New-York Historical Society.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324436104578577823513080166.html

I’m now blogging for the Huffington Post. You can follow me there at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-turtell/
HuffPost-Image

Blog Entries by Steve Turtell

Birthday Reflections
(0) Comments | Posted July 18, 2012 | 11:59 PM

Today is my 61st birthday. That’s thirty more than I expected to have. I’m sure many of the gay men my age who lived through the first onslaught of the AIDS pandemic know what I mean. From 1981 to 1990 five of my closest male friends died: Sidney Faulkner, Jeffrey…

Read Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-turtell/birthday-reflections-july_b_1683075.html

The Power of Language
(80) Comments | Posted July 12, 2012 | 8:01 PM

When I entered St. Joe’s, puberty had not begun, but it started soon after. At 13 I was still a virgin and exceptionally naïve. I had yet to kiss anyone. In spite of a sex-education talk in the eighth grade, in which I learned the word “homosexual” (and now had…

Read Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-turtell/the-power-of-language_1_b_1663657.html

I welcome all comments.

News

On Thursday, May 17 at 6pm I will be giving a lecture about the work and influence of the photographer Peter Hujar, for the New York City Photo Club which meets monthly at the Center.

LGBT Center

208 W. 13th Street

New York, NY 10011

For further information check the club’s website.

http://www.nycphotoclub.com/