today my feelings of sadness have anchored themselves on halloween, so i'm going to do a thread of past halloween costumes to cheer myself up

i'm glad that the kids' halloween of outdoor trick-or-treating can more or less go ahead, but i am very sad that the grown-up halloween of parties and costumed mayhem is canceled. do you know how long i wait for the 31st to fall on a saturday!!!

one of the best parts of halloween in new york isn't even the parties, it's doing normal things dressed up. i love walking around the city on halloween night. i love riding the subway or stopping by a bodega in costume. a nice pirate took this photo on the downtown A

i always make an art history-inspired costume. i don't really have a reason for this; i just know i started doing halloween this way in 2009, when i made a costume based on the rené magritte painting "the collective invention." i went out to a a warehouse party in williamsburg

a few years later, i went as a renaissance madonna. this one wasn't inspired by a particular work, but i was thinking about hortus conclusus paintings where mary is surrounded by flowers and plants, like this one by pisanello. i was also v inspired by lacroix's last couture show

that evening i made out with a dear friend whom i won't tag here (unless she would like to take credit for her part in this holy bisexual catholic tableau)

skipping forward again to my first year of grad school in iowa city...and a costume inspired by picasso's 1937 portrait of dora maar. my first attempt at a real makeup-dependent costume; i didn't realize till i was done that it was mirror-flipped cus that's how mirrors work

the makeup took HOURS more than i had allotted and i missed a reading by eliot weinberger to finish it

next year: roy lichtenstein. this costume was also not inspired by a single painting — i thought of this as more of a character from lichtenstein's work. i used the speech bubble and the blonde hair from "oh, jeff..." and the boxy suit energy of his guy characters

btw the secret to an accurate matrix of ben day dots? use binder hole reinforcement stickers as a stencil

one year i went as a warhol portrait of debbie harry. i'll be honest i did this one mostly because i already had pink hair. i wore a posterboard like a polaroid frame. not my most effortful halloween, but at the time i was channeling every milligram of my energy towards my thesis

and for halloween last year, i went as a keith haring. it was a lot of fun. i went to the greenwich village halloween parade for the first time ever and cheered till i was hoarse. one guy made my night when he asked if i was the AOL logo

by the way, haring happens to have a truly excellent group costume idea that i cannot do because i'm not pregnant. if you and three friends are pregnant, this one's up for grabs. just putting it out there

this year i had so many halloween ideas. was 2020 the year i was finally gonna do a bosch? or kusama? or goya! i'm pretty sad that tomorrow i won't get to walk down the street as a pumpkin, as saturn, or as a terrifying human-sized ear holding a knife

but like so so many other rituals and celebrations that have gone (appropriately) unmarked this year, i'm filing halloween away for another day. halloween 2021 is going to be EPIC