BONUS NUMBER 85: DONALD MERRICK, a.k.a. DOMINO....PART ONE

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

Aug 18, 2024

The Donald Merrick that I wrote about in April 1984 for Mandate’s tenth anniversary issue (see below) had an alter ego. This second artist called himself Domino, and his work was more suited to Honcho’s anything-goes pages. You’ll understand why as you scroll past my “respectable” feature, which pictures works that many galleries would welcome today as the Zim-Lerner Gallery did forty years ago.

The artist himself lived a double life. Donald Merrick was born in Minnesota in 1929. After high school he imitated, whether intentionally or not, the open-road travels of novelist John Steinbeck, whose writings he admired. As I point out in the Mandate feature, the people in Don Merrick’s canvases are working class. You meet them every day. They’re ordinary folks, men and women, bedrock Americans, the salt of the earth.

Domino’s men, on the other hand…well, they’re rock hard but you don’t run into them every day.

Like Steinbeck, Don Merrick traveled “on my thumb,” as he said. Even in his youthful travels he favored rugged macho types such as lumberjacks and stevedores and cops. After a few years of this Whitmanesque life he changed direction. While still in his twenties he earned a degree at the Art Institute of Chicago, followed, in 1955, by a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. He taught art for a short time at the University of Missouri and also at Virginia Commonwealth University. Then an abrupt shift: in 1960 he moved to New York to become art director of Arts Magazine.

Details of these years are scarce. It is known, however, that he married and returned to an academic career. In 1963 he was appointed head of the art department at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

As a closeted gay man in the years before Stonewall, he found an outlet for his erotic art by creating, in secret, the kind of drawings that would later be collected as the unmistakable work of Domino. These early efforts he destroyed for fear of discovery.

It is thought that even before the end of his marriage he began saving Domino’s male erotic pictures. At some point the name Domino became inseparable from those images and in 1978, Stompers, a gallery on West Fourth Street in New York, mounted the debut exhibition of Domino’s art.

That was four years before I became editor-in-chief of Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy. My predecessors, however, had spotted Domino’s work, as well as that of Donald Merrick, and by the time I arrived at the magazines he was a regular contributor. I didn’t know him well, but I recall conversations with an agreeable, unassuming man when he came to our offices.

A man I dated who also dated Don Merrick told a different story. At home, Don was Domino.

Donald Merrick died of AIDS in 1990. He would surely be happy that his legacy increases in both aesthetic and commercial value with each auction of gay erotic art. On August 22, the Swann Auction Galleries in New York will offer five works by Domino and one by Merrick, with price estimates from $300 to $4,000.