11/12/2025
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1239311368069384&set=a.663354332331760
In 1967, Patti Smith stepped out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal with a plaid suitcase. “My desire was to become an artist. Perhaps I lacked the necessary skills, but I had the willingness to develop them, for I believed in the truth of my calling,” she writes, in a new essay. “I knew I would be on my own, yet still hoped for a compatriot, and Providence led me to him.” Robert Mapplethorpe was an American boy, raised in a devout Catholic family. He had played the saxophone in the high-school band and won an R.O.T.C. scholarship to study graphic arts at Pratt Institute. At Pratt, he proved himself to be an exceptional draftsman and, for a time, walked the expected path. No one suspected that another self was growing within. “We rescued one another,” Smith writes. “He was the artist and I the storyteller.” Smith reflects on her early days in New York and her relationship with Mapplethorpe: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/q2I9R9
