“Kind of a Drag” Reveals the Personal Side of the Famed Illustrators Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos

With the mainstream-ification of drag via “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” my generation sometimes has the misguided understanding that our liberated genderbending expression is new to and by us. This exhibition affirms it started generations ago.

The show has been curated by Cooney, and created in partnership with Paul Caranicas, Ramos’s partner of 24 years. “This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for so long, and I’ve had many false starts,” Caranicas told me over the phone. “Antonio and Juan had always been interested in all alternate versions of beauty and different kinds of ways of approaching masculinity, femininity, and vagueness, so we decided to call it ‘Kind of A Drag’ and include portraits of men with long hair and jewelry on, or women who were overly made-up, something that would reflect the idea of drag,” he explained.

From the ’70s, the duo was embraced by the fashion world, working with designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Charles James (who had a big influence on them both, Caranicas says), and making illustrations for Interview and Vogue, where they stood alone or next to editorial photographs by the likes of David Bailey and Peter Lindbergh.