Exhibition at The Met Highlights Role of Photography in Cross-Dressing Community in 1960s New York

Exhibition Dates: July 21, 2025–January 25, 2026
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 852

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Casa Susanna, on view July 21, 2025–January 25, 2026, brings together photographs and publications created by and for a community of cross-dressers who met regularly in New York City and the Catskills Mountains throughout the 1960s. Two modest resorts run by Susanna Valenti and her wife, Marie Tornell, provided safe spaces for guests to gather and freely cross-dress en femme during an era of strictly defined gender roles. At these resorts and at gatherings in New York City, cameras became a tool for guests to create and affirm their femme identities. These snapshots—some candid, others playfully posed—were exchanged at gatherings and shared by mail, connecting a nation-wide community of cross-dressers. First discovered at a Manhattan flea market in 2004, they have since come to be known as the Casa Susanna photographs.

The exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Les Rencontres d’Arles in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

“The Casa Susanna photographs tell a powerful story about self-expression,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “These moving images reveal how the photographic medium played an essential role in affirming identity and building community, while underscoring the responsibility of museums to preserve and celebrate stories that are often overlooked.”

Arranged thematically across three galleries, the exhibition features approximately 160 works, uniting three collections of photographs created by this network of cross-dressers: from the holdings of the Art Gallery of Ontario; from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman; and from the The Met’s collection, donated by Betsy Wollheim, whose father was a member of the Casa Susanna community. Works include chromogenic prints, silver gelatin prints, and Polaroids; the Polaroid camera, first introduced in the late 1950s, was especially popular among cross-dressers, who appreciated both the instant results and the privacy afforded by a process that did not require the assistance of a commercial lab. The exhibition also presents issues of the underground magazine Transvestia, which published the photographs along with autobiographical essays by members of the community, makeup and clothing advice, fiction, and poetry.

In their day, members of the Casa Susanna community called themselves “transvestites.” Today that word is widely considered pejorative. The exhibition uses the preferred term “cross-dressing” to describe the practice of wearing clothes typically associated with a different gender than that which an individual presents day-to-day.

During the 1960s, most cross-dressers lived in isolation and shame. The exhibition presents new research into the double lives many in this community led as married men with established careers. The photographs also bring to light the type of woman they aimed to embody—the girl next door, the happy housewife, the respectable matron—a middle-class ideal of femininity that was both liberating and limiting. Casa Susanna offers insight into a significant pre-Stonewall cross-dressing scene, inviting visitors to understand this world and its connection to the lives of transgender people today.

Credits and Related Content

Casa Susanna is curated by Dr. Isabelle Bonnet, Independent Curator and Scholar, and Sophie Hackett, Curator of Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario. The Met presentation is curated by Mia Fineman, Curator, Department of Photographs, The Met.

The Met will host exhibition-related programs, including a conversation between Casa Susanna community member Diana Merry-Shapiro and a contemporary novelist on September 12, as well as a screening of the PBS documentary Casa Susanna on January 13.

The exhibition is featured on The Met website and on social media.

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July 21, 2025

Image: Andrea Susan (American, 1939–2015). Photo shoot with Lili, Wilma, and friends, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY, 1964–1968. Chromogenic print, 3 5/16 x 4 1/4 in. (8.4 x 10.8 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015