Belonging holds a particular resonance for a liminal artist who travels and inhabits different communities. When that artist can relate to the craft and nuances, the hidden transcripts of a time and place within their sociopolitical context, they become a collage of pieces, creating within themselves an ethos that nurtures collaboration, understanding and empathy, a giving instinct toward culture itself. The Turkish-American artist and photographer Sheyla Baykal (1944–97) was one such observer and carer: for the queer community, for her friends and for the places she moved through, from Turkey to Lower Manhattan. As she put it, her art was “all in a tense linked to the idea of community, of being a part of a whole one could modify, bear witness to, by actively participating in the dynamics of process and change.”

Artists from marginalised backgrounds often struggle to showcase their work or achieve recognition in their lifetimes, leaving many crucial figures sidelined or absent from mainstream narratives. To engage with the work of these artists requires a nuanced approach to the historical record. The artist’s estate, in this context, becomes an opportunity for a thoughtful form of engagement with the artist’s work, one situated more fully in the life they leave behind. Baykal’s archive of photography and ephemera forms the current “archive in residence” at the New York space Soft Network, and the focus of a show, dearly Loved friends, which runs until May 10. Soft Network was established to provide legacy stewardship support for under-resourced artists and those who care for them, to “provide space for shared dialogue around this critical yet overlooked field and to redress exclusions in art history.”

In 1962, when Baykal was 18, she left home to live in New York. Arriving in the city, Baykal quickly became, in her own words, “acquainted with most of the notable artists of the period; poets, painters, writers, photographers, dancers, performers. It was a time of imagination, unhinged from the grip of dogma; shoot to the moon transformation.” She would become one of the downtown scene’s most prolific chroniclers, a photographer and erstwhile model whose work captured a New York that has since been almost completely lost.

Installation view, dearly Loved friends: Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990. Curated by Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Penny Arcade, Soft Network, NYC, 2025. Photography by Alexa Hoyer.

All images courtesy Sheyla Baykal Archive, Penny Arcade, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Soft Network.

Collage made for Sheyla Baykal by members of the Angels of Light, 1972.

“It was a time of imagination, unhinged from the grip of dogma; shoot to the moon transformation.”

Baykal’s first community in the 1960s included the circle around the New York School, specifically her friend Elaine de Kooning,  and Frank Lima (to whom she was briefly married) as well as Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard, Alex Katz and Rudy Burckhardt. She appears like a ghostly presence in the narratives of the downtown scene, captured in Katz’s paintings The Cocktail Party (1965) and One Flight Up (1968). Her relationship to photography began as a model for Ford Agency, where she was photographed by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, before she bought her first camera, a Nikon F, in 1965. Many of her initial subjects were from and adjacent to the New York School, including Joan Mitchell, John Giorno, Katz, O’Hara and Anne Waldman.

In the early-1970s, living in the East Village, where she ran an unofficial commune out of her East Third Street walk-up, Baykal became a close friend of Peter Hujar, Hibiscus and Angel Machado, among many others among the neighbourhood’s queer counterculture. With Hujar, she photographed drag balls and anti-war protests. “I’ve had great teachers,” she wrote. “Early on, as a model, I worked with many of the top photographers and their assistants. I fell in love with photography. I learned set-ups, lighting, printing and editing. The practical application of my education was and is as that of an artist.”

The power of the marginal and those who don’t belong to the structures of the nuclear family, boundaries of countries and cultures, is that they create a world in which everything belongs. The late-1960s in New York was an era of communal living and experimentation through which artists became each other’s support system, family and champions. A multidisciplinary and multicultural art world creates a river of inspiration for a thoughtful observer like Baykal to flourish, to find community and to be part of a subculture that supports itself and carries its own ambitions. Blurred boundaries allowed friendship, art and performance to merge.

Flyer for Jesse Santiago Memorial Service, 1992

In 1968, Baykal travelled on a Portuguese shipping freighter to Turkey, where she had spent much of her childhood. There, her photography explored the Hippie Trail, veering into landscape and wildlife subjects. She would post her negatives back to Hujar and his lover Steve Lawrence in New York where they were published in Newspaper (1968–71), the legendary picture-only magazine the couple co-edited. The Hippie Trail exemplified that era’s rejection of materialism and a hunger for communal, accessible ways of living. On her return to New York in 1971, Baykal encountered the legendary genderfuck drag troupe The Cockettes and their iconic founder, Hibiscus.

Spaces of freedom for queer people have always been rare and hard-won, and Baykal understood their value. Before infighting led her to strike out alone, she followed the Angels of Light, a splinter group founded by Hibiscus and his partner Angel Jack, producing performances in New York and photographing the performers and performances. Later, she formed the Palm Casino Revue, which performed in venues across the city. After one performance, she would write, the theatre’s landlord kicked them out: “fifty pansexual street freaks wandering around in bras, girdles and stockings”; the group moved to the Bouwerie Lane Theatre.

The performative experimentation of the hippie era soon gave
way to a time of devastating loss. The HIV/AIDS crisis devastated urban life as it had been known. With it came an erasure of culture whose consequences are still felt. In Gentrification of the Mind (2012), Sarah Schulman describes how the city changed during those years: “As I watched my neighbourhood transform, it was quickly apparent that the newly rehabbed units attracted a different kind of person than the ones who had been displaced and freshly died. Instead of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Eastern European and Italian immigrants, lesbians, noninstitutionalised artists, gay men and other sexually adventurous and socially marginalised refugees from uncomprehending backgrounds living in economic margins, the replacement tenants were much more identified with the social structures necessary to afford newly inflated mortgages and rents.” As the neighbourhoods of Lower Manhattan changed, the histories
of the queer and marginalised groups who lived there were expunged and rewritten.

Following a period of illness in the mid-1970s, Baykal retired to Fire Island. During these years, she continued to work in landscapes and portraits, photographing friends from her community on Fire Island, residents such as the Grieks, the Wachlins, Sam Green, Ann Wilson, Bill Rafford, Antonio Almeida, Lawrence and Thek; people with whom she shared an intimacy. In the late 1980s and 1990s, her prolific photography found its form as slide shows or photocopies as she became less able to afford the cost of prints. Baykal’s work from this period continued to capture the vanishing world of which she was a part.Baykal’s archive offers a reminder of the need to document and preserve cultural narratives for future generations.

This chain of care she created, a soft network, runs through Baykal’s life: from Lower Manhattan to the Hippie Trail, from the Angels of Light to her friends in Fire Island, and it finds its expression today in Soft Network’s practice

Community legacies and collective memory shape our reality and the perspectives we bring to culture and art. Queer communities have long lacked the resources to build written and documented memories of their own, and that absence continues to shape how we understand their histories. In this context, artist estates and the documentation produced by caring members of those communities provide a vital relief. They are an acknowledgement of histories that came before us, and toward artists who created the spaces of inspiration that still give guidance today.

In 1996, following a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Baykal asked her friend the artist Penny Arcade to play the role of what Arcade has termed a “death mother”: similar to the care Baykal herself had performed for artist friends dying of AIDS during the 1980s. It is through this process that her archive came to Soft Network, and the exhibition dearly Loved friends, in itself an extension of Baykal’s own work in caring for the community to which she belonged. This chain of care she created, a soft network, runs through Baykal’s life: from Lower Manhattan to the Hippie Trail, from the Angels of Light to her friends in Fire Island, and it finds its expression today in Soft Network’s practice.

Soft Network’s approach to artist estates treats preservation as
an active, ongoing practice: exhibiting and contextualising work in ways that build and activate community around it, creating a bridge between artists from the past and the contemporary scene, and bringing each into closer focus through the lens of their cultural context. Soft Network envisions a future where legacy planning is not an overwhelming burden, where the cultural preservation performed by legacy workers is visible, valued and supported, and where a more expansive and pluralistic approach to art history inspires scholars, curators and artists to make meaningful connections across creative cultures and times. Their archive and estate work will culminate in a final exhibition in July-August 2026 at Participant Inc., New York and a publication (edited by Marie Warsh and co-published with Soberscove Press) to complete the two-year long archive residency, projects perhaps best thought of as acts of care for an artist who spent her life caring for others. .