FRANKENSTEIN
by Avram Finkelstein

ABOUT THE WORK

FRANKENSTEIN (2026)

Neon and screen printed acrylic.
46” x 25” x 4.5"
Edition of 5 + 3APs
$15,000

The 2026 Queer|Art Artist Edition was granted to multi-year Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentor Avram Finkelstein.

FRANKENSTEIN, Avram Finkelstein’s new work, is a screen print on acrylic depicting the artist’s own rendering of his neuromuscular disease, backlit by a glowing neon in the shape of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, a traditional visualization of the human soul. The piece reckons with the body as the defining matrix of identity. “The body is also the unavoidable core around which all forms of displacement are organized, from gender to gentrification, from forced migration to racial reckoning,” Finkelstein says. “So how do we represent a thing that’s simultaneously universal yet also specific? Other than reflecting ourselves as objects for consumption, what actually is representation, and who is it for?”

In search of an answer, Finkelstein turns to the classic Frankenstein story, inspired by the older myth of the golem. In Jewish Hermetic Mysticism, the golem is a being formed from clay to provide protection, which becomes an avenger when it misreads its own directive. “The golem is a metaphor for both weakness and power,” Finkelstein explains. “Since my disobedient body is increasingly beyond my control, I wanted to depict this form of uncertainty, to perform disability.” Seen as a whole, FRANKENSTEIN ultimately asks what the soul owes a body that no longer answers to it.

This work is selling for $15,000 ($7,500 of the purchase cost is fully tax deductible). 100% of proceeds benefit Queer|Art and Lite Brite Neon Studio. Only five editions + 3 artist proof’s were created; to inquire about purchasing an edition, contact Río Sofia (rsofia@queer-art.org.)

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn, a 2024 Creative Capital and 2023 Pollock-Krasner Grant recipient, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He is featured in the American Artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images, is available through University of California Press, and was nominated for an International Center of Photography' 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research, and a 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction. He has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the New York Public Library, and his work has shown at the Whitney Museum, The Shed, the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirschhorn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Grey Art Gallery, the Migros Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Leslie Lohman Museum. He has had numerous public commissions and residencies, including the The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Pioneer Works and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.