Casa Susanna

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 freely cross-dress en femme during an era of strictly defined gender roles. They used the camera to create and affirm their femme identities, exchanging photographs at gatherings or sharing them by mail. These snapshots—some candid, others playfully performative—were rediscovered at a Manhattan flea market in 2004 and 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.

Arranged thematically across three galleries, the exhibition will feature approximately 270 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 collection of Betsy Wollheim, whose father was a member of the Casa Susanna community. The exhibition will also present issues of the underground magazine Transvestia, which published the photographs along with fiction, poetry, makeup and clothing advice, and autobiographical essays by members of the community.

During this period, most cross-dressers lived in isolation and shame. The exhibition presents new research into the double lives many cross-dressers had to lead 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 respectable housewife, the 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 screening of the PBS documentary Casa Susanna introduced by Isabelle Bonnet and an intergenerational panel discussion featuring members of the Casa Susanna community.

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

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IMAGE CAPTION:

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