Sal Salandra, born 1 January 1946, is an American contemporary artist known for what he calls thread painting, embroidery centered on homoerotic pictures. Leather gear, BDSM scenes, and gay male sexual subcultures sit in the same frame as American pop figures and Catholic imagery. For him the needle is not there to separate the worldly from the sacred. It puts the dungeon and the sanctuary in neighboring rooms. The bodies in the work are adults.
He is a second-generation Italian American who grew up in Edgewood, New Jersey, with six siblings. The household was devoutly Catholic. As a young man he considered the priesthood, and Christian images still fill the art. Severe dyslexia ended that path. He became a hairdresser and worked at it in New Jersey for fifty-five years.
In 1993 Salandra and his husband left their West Village apartment for East Hampton, New York. The move carried Catholic memory and queer domestic life into the studio that came later. In 1980, bedridden with the flu, he picked up needlepoint for the first time, using a kit from his mother-in-law.
In 2015 the work turned. He began figurative human forms, and that shift produced the homoerotic motifs he is known for. Leather, BDSM, and other gay sexual subcultures collide with pop culture and with Catholic saints. He cites the corporeal punishments built into Catholic tradition as the source for the BDSM scenes. Many pieces stack several smaller scenes into one larger composition. Writing in the Brooklyn Rail, Osman Can Yerebakan describes a mix of Hieronymus Bosch’s chaos and the flat pseudo-perspectives of Middle Eastern and South Asian miniature painting.
In January 2020, at seventy-four, Salandra was included in the New York Outsider Art Fair, and the attention was new. On 4 July 2020 he mounted his first solo show, “Sal Salandra’s Thread Art Paintings,” at East Hampton Tow, a mobile extension of East Hampton Shed. In 2021 he had another solo at Club Rhubarb, which is appointment only. In 2022 he was in a group show in the Netherlands. The works often hang in candy-colored frames. The cheerful border hits the explicit leather in the picture.
For people who watch BDSM culture, Salandra shows that SM imagery can live in needlepoint as readily as in photography. A man who once meant to be a priest did the stitching. Memory of ritual Catholic punishment became the grammar of erotic thread painting, so leather, bondage, and desire did not have to stay unspoken.
