Work I
Returning to the Light
The body is held in natural softness as emotional weather settles and becomes a stable new climate. The skin receives light that meets the luminescence emerging from within.
Limited collector release
Cycles of the Divine Masculine
Photographs by Steven Menendez · Featuring Art Patterson
Cycles of the Divine Masculine is a limited collector release from Steven Menendez’s larger photographic project The Divine Masculine.
The series explores masculine presence in emotional relation to landscape and elemental forces.
This collector release presents five works from the series, offered as signed and numbered 16 × 20 archival prints, with 8 × 10 open edition prints also available.
This release marks the first collector offering from the series.
About the series
A study of masculine presence in relation to the world.
In Cycles of the Divine Masculine, Steven and I explore a form of masculine presence that is rarely depicted in contemporary representations of the male body.
Rather than spectacle, the work investigates my body as a conduit for emotional and ethical qualities that I value: openness, patience, steadiness, vulnerability, and responsibility.
The photographs place my human body in contact with the elemental landscape of Playa Aragon. Sea, wind, stone and horizon carry my emotional register in another form. The body resonates with nature. Inner states emerge through posture, movement, and gaze.
The work is informed by philosophical and poetic traditions that celebrate masculine virtue as an expression of openness and care. In this sense, masculinity is understood not as power over others but as the willingness to embody qualities that allow Good and Beauty to take form within community.
Collector position
This release presents five works from the developing series and opens its first public collector moment.
It marks a first chapter of a growing work that will unfold gradually with future releases, exhibitions and publications.
The works
Five photographs from the first collector release.
The works are organized and titled by the natural elements that became emotional companions.
Work II
Withdrawn in Stone
The body recedes from stimulation and the new, seeks stability and comfort to integrate awakened emotions. Compression characterizes the contours of the body in withdrawal before the next expansion.
Work III
Anticipating the Wind
The body finds support and takes an upright, active posture from which to observe, to listen to the blustering visions and forms that blow by. An abiding erect stillness maintains the body apart from visions in the wind to allow many possibilities to be surveyed and not yet grasped.
Work IV
Release in Waves
The body embraces the rhythmic lap of waves as the internal tide stirs, moves and transforms emotions. Fear and sadness and joy synchronize to the push and draw of the sea.
Work V
Wonder on the Horizon
The body inclines toward beauty, toward the draw of ethereal visions of future potentials. The wonder of the child relaxes the body, expands the joints and sets the limbs into opened-fingered reaching and invitation.
The artists
Two practices meeting in one body of work.
Art Patterson is a writer, philosophical artist, and educator whose work explores embodiment, masculine virtue, myth, and the search for forms of life that can hold beauty, seriousness, and emotional honesty together.
Through philosophy, contact dance, conversation, and artistic experimentation, he investigates how the body can become a site of meaning rather than display. Cycles of the Divine Masculine extends that inquiry into photography, asking what refined masculine presence might look and feel like in lived relation to the natural world.
Steven Menendez is an award-winning New York City photographer known for fine art figurative nude photography that brings tenderness, introspection, and emotional depth to the male form. His work has been shown at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and in exhibitions across New York, Fire Island, Provincetown, and Miami.
Alongside his photographic practice, he has spent more than two decades in LGBTQ+ activism, including creating Pride installations at the Stonewall National Monument. Across both art and activism, his work returns to beauty, intimacy, and the possibility of a more compassionate masculine image.
A meeting in Zipolite
The collaboration began by chance on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca.
The collaboration began by chance on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca.
I danced naked on the beach at sunset. Playa del Amor — the Beach of Love. The gays of Zipolite gather there each evening to watch the sun sink into the Pacific. Then when the sun goes down, many find a secluded corner to play.
That evening my focus was captured by the stony cliff, the howling wind and the fierce waves. I entered a dance trance, held by the rock, tossed by the tide, lifted by the breeze, illuminated and powered by the reddening sun.
When I move with the elements, they have a way of emptying me out. The wind gusts and I’m blown across the sand. The sea current sucks and I’m drawn in. Am I the wind? The sea?
From that spacious, quiet mind I turned my gaze to the beach. I looked into the eyes of our community of gay men. Many saw my dance and very few met my eyes with theirs. Wincing and darting away from my gaze, I saw clearly what we’re holding in our queer community, in our queer spaces and in our queer selves.
Steven saw it all. He approached me afterward and asked if I would collaborate with him.
The emotional atmosphere of the work
The day of the shoot, I arrived at the beach already transformed.
The night before, I met Michel. We danced openly and sensually — he let me show him how, but he didn’t need to be shown. He relaxed his powerful figure to flow into tender improvisation. He tuned into me and we created new forms of dance I’d never explored.
We spent the evening together and late into the early morning, reciting poetry and marveling at this recognition of two men of virtue, both deep in our own individual projects of attuning to our deepest selves.
I was living in Walt Whitman’s poems that night:
Re-examine all you’ve been told in school, in church or in any book,
And dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.
And:
The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him.
The morning of the shoot, my breath came in soft and easy, my chest fluttered. The beauty and thrill of that encounter — vulnerability, wonder, presence — carried directly into the present work.
On Playa Aragon I found those emotional ingredients in the elements of the landscape. The waves splashed me with cold thrill. The birds lifted my gaze toward the possibilities of this new love.
Steven led me to scenes he’d chosen. As I excavated emotions before his lens, he directed me toward the light, or toward the earth, or into the sea to help those emotions find their home.
Wonder and awe expressed through my body, and then settled. The love and uncertainty I brought into the shoot merged into steadiness. During that encounter with the sea, land, sky and the witnessing photographer I grew my container to hold these feelings. They settled. And grew.
All five works
Returning to the Light
Withdrawn in Stone
Anticipating the Wind
Release in Waves
Wonder on the Horizon
The first collector release
A complete limited release of five works.
Object
Each limited-edition work is produced as a 16 × 20 inch archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl archival paper, 285 gsm, 100% cellulose.
Edition
Each of the five works is released in a complete edition of 10 signed and numbered 16 × 20 prints.
An 8 × 10 open edition is also available.
Series
These five works belong to Cycles of the Divine Masculine, photographed on Playa Aragón in Oaxaca, Mexico, drawn from Steven Menendez’s ongoing photographic project The Divine Masculine.
Rights
The purchase of a print transfers ownership of the physical artwork only. All image rights and reproduction rights remain with the artist.
Purpose
The aim is to place the work with individuals who feel a genuine resonance with the images and wish to participate in the early life of the project.
Acquire a print
Enter the first release.
This page marks the first public collector release from the series. Collectors may request one of the works through the form below.
Collector summary
Series
Cycles of the Divine Masculine
Artist
Steven Menendez
Subject
Art Patterson
Edition
16 × 20 limited edition of 10 prints · 8 × 10 open edition
Paper
Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl · 285 gsm · 100% cellulose
Signature
Signed & numbered verso by Steven Menendez
Shipping
Shipped unframed · USA included · International available
$400
16 × 20 limited edition print
$125
8 × 10 open edition print