Weekend afternoons, Michael Bonfiglio crawls into the window of his Andersonville storefront gallery and either stands or sits cross-legged before an easel. There, surrounded by boots, handbags, and mannequins decorated with dots of acrylic paint, he applies more dots to a canvas. Passersby ignore him; others stop and stare.
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“Hopefully people will come inside, see my stuff, and buy,” says Bonfiglio. As evening falls he’ll often dispense with many of his garments. “Michael keeping his clothes on is kind of hard,” says his friend Elizabeth, the owner of Bon Bon, the chocolate shop next door. “He’s always going around barefoot in a teeny-tiny tank top or without his shirt.” Bonfiglio says that the sight of him bare chested has caused drivers on Clark to honk their horns and whistle. “I’ve had men come in and offer to have sex,” he says. “I direct them to the bathhouse down the street.”
Bonfiglio rented a space on the second floor of the building he’s in now. To grab people’s attention, he hooked up two bubble machines in an open window. “The bubbles would blow out and onto the people walking by below,” says Bonfiglio, “and I had a sandwich sign directing them upstairs to the gallery. They came, but I didn’t want to run a bubble machine for the rest of my life.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/David V. Kamba.
