You Have Until 8/23 to See This Massive ‘Tom of Finland’ Art Exhibit in SoHO

Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, better known to most of the world as Tom of Finland, is at the center of a new exhibit at Artists Space in SoHo running now through August 23. This means you've got plenty of time to make plans to travel to New York City and see the exhibit before it closes up shop.

Laaksonen's journey from mild mannered graphic designer to gay icon began when World War II ended and he took a job with famed advertising house McCann Erickson where he stayed until his retirement in 1973.

"Working from 1956 to 1973 as senior art director at one of the first global advertising agencies, it is likely that Tom of Finland had access to a range of global mainstream publications as well as illegally published early gay magazines—both from which he would meticulously cut out details and compose on single pages to later use as studies, or as he called them, reference pages," the exhibition description on the Artists Space website reads. "It is telling that many of these cutouts are taken from global print campaigns; Tom of Finland seemingly studying and taking apart the representations of maleness and gender-assigned attributes in mainstream media, and fusing them with cutouts from gay periodicals. Originally separated into binders, the majority of these collages were sorted by distinct taxonomies: leather jackets, motorcycles, uniforms, beards, hairdos and so forth. On rare occasions he also drew directly onto these cutouts, to either amplify or reduce the existing attributes."

They also go on to compare him to a famous television character, which isn't as much of a stretch as one might initially think...

"He was a Don Draper," said Artists Space executive director and curator Stefan Kalmár. "In the daytime he projected the suburban ideal of the happy family, while at night he was doing the opposite."

Indeed; Laaksonen's artwork was so groundbreaking in so many ways that the Finnish government last year issued a set of Tom of Finland postage stamps. Laaksonen died in 1991.

You only have until August 23 to see the exhibit, so go get on that.

Via AVN