Back at Pratt Institute since September 1968, during the winter break he travels to San Francisco, telling his friend Judy Linn that he has to find out once and for all whether he is gay; he stays in a commune and will later call the trip a turning point in his life. On his return he begins to bring homoerotic imagery into his art, making collages from gay pornography and sculptures that explore male sexuality.
July 1969
Move to the Chelsea Hotel
After a neighbour is murdered in the building, Mapplethorpe and Smith flee the Delancey Street loft and check into the Allerton Hotel; he is gravely ill with a high fever and they cannot afford a doctor, and after several days Smith carries him down the fire escape and takes him by taxi to the Chelsea Hotel (by other accounts, the move took place in 1970). There she persuades the manager Stanley Bard to give them room 1017 with her artwork as collateral.
July 1971
Meets John McKendry
Croland introduces Mapplethorpe to John McKendry, curator of photographs and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who becomes his first significant benefactor: through him Mapplethorpe reaches Henry Geldzahler, who introduces him to David Hockney, and the photographer Francesco Scavullo, and later gains access to the museum’s private photography collection, studying works that had never been publicly exhibited.
1972
Meets Sam Wagstaff
Croland introduces Mapplethorpe to the curator and collector Sam Wagstaff, who had grown interested after seeing a Polaroid of him in Croland’s apartment; reserved about the explicit content of the work but impressed by its candour, Wagstaff offers his support, the two become lovers, and Mapplethorpe will later call it love at first sight, after which everything changed for him.
October 1972
A loft at 24 Bond Street
When Patti Smith moves in with her boyfriend, the musician Allen Lanier, Mapplethorpe can no longer afford their apartment, and Wagstaff gives him $15,000 toward a loft at 24 Bond Street, a short distance from his own; a home and studio of his own let him devote himself more fully to his art.
January 1973
First solo exhibition, “Don’t Touch Here”
The first solo exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work opens at the Light Gallery in New York — Polaroids, the title taken from the protective sleeve of a Polaroid print and alluding to Duchamp’s “Prière de toucher”. It follows his growing focus on Polaroid: Wagstaff had given him a Hasselblad with a Polaroid back (by other accounts, the first exhibition, “Polaroid”, took place only in 1976 at the Metropolitan Museum).
