Ryan Bauer-Walsh's FAGGOT BAGGAGE to Make NYC Solo Debut at Brooklyn's Gallery 198

Gallery 198 in Brooklyn will present FAGGOT BAGGAGE, a new solo exhibition of 50 paintings by Harlem-based multidisciplinary artist Ryan Bauer-Walsh, opening at 6pm August 8 and remaining on display though August 16, 2026. Combining painting, installation, performance, and personal archive, the exhibition features more than fifty new works ranging in size from 5”x7” to 60”x30”, alongside a live performance during which the exhibition itself is constructed before the audience. Ryan's art has been featured in the New York Times and is in the permanent collection of the National Archives.

Developed over the past year following the death of the artist's mother and a period spent living in Mexico, FAGGOT BAGGAGE examines grief, queer identity, trauma, faith, and resilience through surreal imagery rooted in autobiography. Rather than presenting a finished exhibition, Bauer-Walsh transforms the gallery throughout the evening, unpacking paintings, clothing, personal objects, and fragments of lived experience that become part of the installation itself.

The exhibition brings together intimate autobiographical works alongside larger social commentary, reflecting on loss, identity, and contemporary American culture. Painted in a visual language the artist describes as “new-age magical realism,” the works will inhabit the gallery on a web of clothes line as a metaphor for a mothers work creating tension between childhood wonder and psychological excavation.

Several large-scale paintings memorialize friends lost to cancer, suicide, HIV-related illness, and medical malpractice, while other works confront sexual violence, depression, body dysmorphia, religious trauma, and the lasting effects of grief.

Throughout the exhibition, recurring images of Bauer-Walsh's “Banana Ducks”—hybrid non-binary creatures that have become a signature motif in the artist's work—offer moments of playfulness and hope, representing queer joy as an act of resilience. Also; included in many works are images of an apathetic blue spindly figure representing God; watching silently and never interfering. 

A central installation invites visitors into an adult-sized, hand-painted play fort filled with Banana Ducks, creating a place of refuge amid the emotional weight of the surrounding work. As Bauer-Walsh explains, “Our bruises make us sweeter; tempting God's appetite.”

One room in the gallery will hold a large scale installation of clotheslines with hundreds of church sermon programs hung like prayer flags. It accompanies two pieces entitled "Men of Faith" and "Christ with painted nails" which is about how the intersection of faith, race and sexual orientation is a dangerous place to exist for many minority groups today and throughout history. “God has been the reason for so much violence- and that hangs over me everyday.”

The performance culminates with the public presentation of video documentation from the year following the death of Bauer-Walsh's mother, during which the artist wore her clothing as a private ritual of mourning in public view. What began as an intensely personal act becomes, within the exhibition, a meditation on identity, memory, and release.

Known for creating what he describes as “new queer cultural traditions,” Bauer-Walsh's broader practice spans painting, illustration, music, installation, and performance. His projects include The Rainbow Lullaby, the world's first queer family lullaby album, which was shortlisted for Grammy consideration. He is currently writing three new pieces; an opera about God wiping their own memory, a queer Christmas album and a piece entitled QUANTUM MASS which follows the structure of the Catholic mass reinterpreted through the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Ryan's work explores the creation of new Queer traditions and shared cultural narratives through deeply personal storytelling.

The exhibition contains mature subject matter including sexual assault, grief, death, illness, religious trauma, body image, drug use, and partial nudity. A content advisory will accompany the exhibition.

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