Paths That Cross: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis

Paths That Cross: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis is on view at Weinstein Hammons Gallery through November 28, 2026. It's a show that traces decades of artistic exchange between three people who shaped one another's trajectories: Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lynn Davis.

Smith and Mapplethorpe met in 1967, both twenty and newly arrived in New York. They lived together through the late sixties and seventies, supporting each other as their practices grew—Mapplethorpe moving from collage and jewelry into photography, and Smith from poetry into rock and roll. Their bond, romantic at first, evolved into a lifelong platonic partnership. Mapplethorpe's iconic portrait of Smith ended up on the cover of her 1975 album Horses.

Lynn Davis entered that orbit through Mapplethorpe and became his close friend and collaborator. The exhibition takes its name from "Paths That Cross," a song Smith wrote for Sam Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe's lover and patron, who died in 1987, two years before Mapplethorpe himself succumbed to AIDS-related complications. The hanging recreates the 1979 Trade-Off show at the International Center of Photography, in which Mapplethorpe and Davis each photographed the same subjects and the results were hung side by side.

It's a look at how these three worked around each other over the years, and the Trade-Off recreation lets you see how two different eyes could land on the same subject. You can find the gallery at 908 W 46th Street in Minneapolis, and the show runs through November 28.