Art as a saving grace in surviving the pain from AIDS
Even if you don’t recognize Mel Odom’s name, I am utterly certain that you’ve seen his incredible artwork–a portion of it inspired as the artist lived through the devastation of the AIDS crisis in NYC.
His art deco inspired illustrations, which have graced the covers of magazines including Time, Omni, and Playboy, are “imbued with mystery and eroticism,” as the poet Philip F. Clark described. A doll he designed, after a sultry starlet of Hollywood’s golden age, was an award-winning success described as “the most important doll since Barbie.” His art remains iconic, erotic, and unforgettable.
Two filmmakers are hoping to pay homage to Mel Odom’s career and life through a documentary film, with community support. Jörg Fockele, co-director and producer, is an award-winning filmmaker, executive producer, and television director known most recently for his series of documentaries Surviving Voices, which shares the stories of HIV long-term survivors. Michael Economy, a NYC-based artist, illustrator, and creative director, is co-director and producer.
The film Eyes of Mel Odom will feature a virtual trove of Odom’s artwork throughout the decades; intimate footage of Odom, shot in his home and around New York City’s Upper West Side; macro cinematography of Odom’s painstaking drawing technique; motion graphics and an original soundtrack.
“Mel Odom’s art, throughout his career, has been singular, boundary-breaking, and startlingly consistent,” said Fockele. “Living through the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s, art became a lifeline that helped Odom cope with grief. Mel Odom’s story and his exceptional body of artwork deserve placement among canonical American illustrators like J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell, included with Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring as a surviving voice of a much-mythologized era of NYC.”
Born in Richmond VA and raised in the small tobacco town of Ahoskie NC, Odom discovered his passion for art at age three; at seven he took his first drawing class. With a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts in Fashion Illustration (Virginia Commonwealth University, 1972) he studied graphic arts at the Leeds Polytechnic Institute in England for a year before moving to London and immersing himself in the glam-rock era. Upon moving to New York City with an impressive illustration portfolio in 1975, Odom’s rakish, homoerotic work began appearing in editorial work for several magazines, including Time, the New York Times Magazine, Viva, Rolling Stone, Blue Boy, and Playboy. His work has earned him multiple awards from The Society of Illustrators and other graphics and illustration organizations.
“I grew up seeing variations of art deco wherever I looked,” said Odom, when I asked him what drew him to the Art Deco style. “Even though I was born in Richmond Virginia and grew up in a tiny North Carolina town, it was in the backgrounds of many 1930s movies and cartoons that I saw on TV, and in old books and magazines. I loved the slick, glamorous settings and style. When I went to art college during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Art Deco was having a revival in fashion and interiors. It felt exotic and familiar to me at the same time. I loved the clean lines and smooth sexuality of it all. I didn’t ‘set out’ to adapt that style, it just flowed out of me.”
One of Odom’s most significant book cover illustrations was his iconic jacket cover for gay eminence grise Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples. According to Fockele, this one cover “secured his singular aesthetic as representative of the era and Odom’s style as iconographic to gay culture.”
Since Odom had done two cover illustrations for White’s books, the editor of his first American book Dreamer asked Odom if he would like to have White write the introduction to the book. “It seemed like a logical pairing of artist and author,” Odom said. “I had met Ed socially a few times. I would be working in my first-floor window box, and Edmund and his girlfriend Marilyn would walk by and we’d chat, or they’d come in. Ed was a lovely person to me. I took being friends with him as a real privilege. I miss him. We’ve lost an important voice and a sweet man.”
As the AIDS pandemic ravaged New York City in the 1980s and ‘90s, decimating his friends and fellow artists, Odom’s art became a solace, a lifeline, immortalizing many of his loved ones.
“I’d been drawing my boyfriends in my illustrations,” said Odom. “Frequently they were just there at the time when I needed a model. It was afterwards, when they had died, that the drawings became memorials.”
“The past still holds the power to haunt him, but Odom finds solace and hope in a body of work embedded with the idea that those lost will never be forgotten,” said Fockele.
In 1991, trying to cope with overwhelming loss and pain, Odom began designing Gene Marshall, a doll modeled after a Hollywood starlet. From its debut at the 1995 New York Toy Fair, the doll was an instant award-winning success. Collectors voted Gene Marshall the most important doll since Barbie. Other dolls soon followed. Unbeknownst to most, the doll was named after Odom’s then boyfriend, who lay dying of AIDS during the doll’s creation.
“My best friend, designer Brian Scott Carr, had contracted AIDS,” said Odom. “We had been pals since moving to New York City at the same time in 1975 and I knew I was going to need something different and distracting to help me get through his decline and eventual death. I decided to design a doll, something I’d never done and only thought of because a friend of mine had recently done it. I figured it would be a distraction from the grim months ahead tending my friend Brian. I wasn’t planning on my doll being manufactured at all, only designed, just a design project to get me through a bad time. Then it turned out that Brian’s hospital was only three blocks from the studio of the sculptor that I had planned to work with. I took that as a sign that it was meant to happen. I would go to Brian’s hospital first, which was always dreadful. The virus had dramatically affected his mind and made him uncharacteristically fearful. Afterwards I’d walk the three blocks to sculptor Michael Evert’s studio. I would be in a terrible funk when I got there and gradually, working with Michael, I’d come out of it. Working with him on my doll saved me that summer.”
Fifty years after moving to New York City, Mel lives with his husband Charlie in the same apartment he first rented in 1975. He continues to draw, paint and play with dolls.
Production on Eyes of Mel Odom is currently halfway completed and is on schedule to wrap up in time to submit the film to the Berlin International Film Festival in November and other film fests beginning in December. To finance the completion of the film, Jörg and his team have set up a Kickstarter account, seeking $25,000. Per Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing rules, if the appeal fails to meet the $25,000 goal, the Kickstarter account is cancelled, and the film team will receive nothing and production will have to be halted.
