Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt seems to have dropped off the radar in the past fifteen years, despite a resume that includes two Whitney shows, a piece in the Met’s permanent collection and representation at the 1984 Venice Biennale. If anything, Lanigan-Schmidt seems better known for his participation in the Stonewall Riots (he recently journeyed to the White House to meet the Obamas, marking the Riot’s 40^th anniversary) than for his contribution to the short-lived pattern and decoration movement of the 70’s and mid-80’s and his presence in the New York downtown art scene.

A movement that arose in opposition to minimalism and formalism, pattern and decoration (p&d) was long-championed by SoHo’s Holly Solomon Gallery and in 2008, was the subject of a retrospective at the Hudson River Museum. The exhibit catalogue states: “Critics miss the urgent way these artists sought to push the margins of what was acceptable vocabulary for art. And finally, they miss the ways p&d turns our expectations upside down by appropriating some of the formal qualities of abstraction, not to self-reflect on the abstract, but to raise issues of identity, gender, power, authority and authenticity.”

P&d is about collage, textiles, colors, textures and clutter. Focused on ornamentation as an end unto itself, it blurred lines between decoration and art, high-brow and low, and object and idea, while drawing inspiration from everyday materials and religious imagery—Islamic patterns, Celtic symbols and in the case of Lanigan-Schmidt, Catholic iconography. But rather than attempting to transcend or escape the earthly world (such as the more austere minimalism movement) or self-indulging in erudite emotional lives (abstract expressionism) p&d artists were particularly engaged with the daily, with beautifying the realm of ordinary human experience. Just as a decade earlier, when pop elevated commercial art to fine art, p&d bestowed new respect upon domestic creativity. Gallery shows, cultural pastiche and inclusion of established artists such as Marian Shapiro, Joyce Kolzoff and Robert Kushner helped distinguish p&d from folk art, even though visually, it’s easy to confuse the two.

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s current exhibit makes me think of vernacular art, such as the “decorated” houses one finds in my home state of Mississippi, where the yards vanish beneath staked ornaments, porches glisten with tinsel and plastic beads, and window sills sag beneath stuffed animals and knick-knacks. The work is unschooled and honest, merely people being people, collecting and placing, following an unhewn instinct to make their lives beautiful. But p&d artists were different from folk artists in that they were largely intentional and came from a more institutional place. Maybe they were self-taught, maybe they already dealing with decorative arts as individuals before an entire movement was collectively conceived, but p&d was an urban movement and entailed a  sort of awareness—an overt rebellion against the barren space of minimalism and other overtly intellectual movements.  P&d was also (somewhat simplistically) associated with feminism, because many of the involved artists were women making use of “women’s” crafts.

 But, truth be told, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt merely falls on the fringes of p&d. To really think about Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is to think about the downtown art of they era—a scene which had its heyday over the same 10 year period (1974-84) as the p&d movement. And that downtown scene was decidedly queer, in both broad and narrow contexts—queer in that it was a deviation from the institutionally sanctioned norm (high-brow art) and the established patterns of society which operate under a masculine regime of knowledge (so, gender-queer), and queer in that many of its stars (Keith Harring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Holly Hughes) and prominent art forms (dance, theater) had definitive queer connotations. Lanigan-Schmidt’s work—his privileging of all that glitters, his use of theater gels, throw-away baking pans, condom wrappers, clips of art-porn and pop-icons, his mockery and recreation of Catholic symbolism—is about as subtle as a Provincetown parade. Yet again, to stop here would be reductive, because in his use of kitsch, he nearly falls into place as a pop-artist. Except that his kitsch is not as pronouncedly ironic as those who define the genre, masters such as Jeff Koon and Ron English.

Ultimately, Lanigan-Schmidt’s work is visually accessible but still complicated enough to contemplate. And his current exhibit—at Chelsea’s Pavel Zoubok Gallery for one more week—is as New York-centric as the name, Tenement Symphony, indicates. Gold foil rats, interspersed among an gingerbread house altar-display of beer cans and prune juice, are just a few of the highlights. This is New York and these are our golden calves. Enjoy.