Mike Priddy stood in front of the painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw where his eyes had come from. There, in the portrait of a man he never knew, was his nose. His chin. His whole face, reflected back at him.
Priddy and his half sister, whom he’d discovered through the DNA-testing site 23andMe, arrived at SFMOMA in February to “meet” their biological father, who was portrayed in “The Family,” a 54-by-36-inch acrylic on canvas newly hung in a second-floor gallery.
It had taken Priddy 20 years, the help of an online sleuth, and relentless determination to arrive at this moment.
When he reached his mid-20s, Priddy — a 45-year-old technology and financial analyst in Waynesboro, Virginia — asked his mother whether he shared DNA with the father who raised him. The question had long tugged at the edges of his consciousness.
“I approached my mother and was like, ‘I don’t look like my father. I don’t think like my father. I kind of don’t talk like my father,’” Priddy said. She didn’t answer right away, but after consulting a friend, she revealed to her son a family secret: She and her former husband, who had since died, had turned to sperm donation after a medical procedure made him infertile.
Suddenly, the pieces fell into place. While Priddy’s father was devoted and present, the pair often found themselves at odds over their differences. “When I found out the truth, it was like this internal rearrangement and everything just kind of made sense,” Priddy said.
Now he had a new wish: to find the man whose DNA he carries.
In 1991, at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, a loving gay couple, Gary Pike and John Arbuckle, commissioned local artist Lenore Chinn (opens in new tab) to paint a portrait of them. The painting depicts the two men relaxing, entwined on a sofa covered in red satin. Pike, his white robe loosely open and a fuzzy black cat draped over his arm, leans back on Arbuckle, who wears a patterned gold kimono, pink tulips blooming in a vase on the side table to his left.
The intimate domestic scene projects a tranquil shared life, but also a tragic one: Pike was already in the late stages of AIDS and would soon suffer a dramatic decline. He died in early 1994 at the age of 46, weighing just 89 pounds.
Arbuckle, an accomplished artist (opens in new tab) and Pike’s partner for four years starting in the late ’80s, had hired Chinn to paint the final portrait of the couple. She composed it based on photographs she took of the pair in the living room of their Oakland home. For years after Pike’s death, Arbuckle kept the painting in his home, but he gave it back to Chinn so the artist could show it as much as possible and because the portrait had become too painful to look at.
SFMOMA acquired the painting from Chinn in January, part of an acquisition of 85 contemporary works (opens in new tab) from artists including Ruth Asawa, Nan Goldin, Sheila Hicks, and Gabriel Orozco. The museum declined to disclose the purchase price for “The Family,” and Chinn only described it as “significant.” Now part of the museum’s permanent collection, it can be viewed in a gallery featuring contemporary artists whose work explores family, lineage, and community.
Priddy’s voice halts with emotion as he recounts the circuitous journey that led him to San Francisco to see the painting in person and to meet Chinn and Arbuckle for the first time. His half sister, Carrie Belton, another of Pike’s biological children, joined him.
“I’m face to face with the first two people I’ve ever met who physically met my father,” Priddy said of Chinn and Arbuckle. “And I’m looking at an image of him with my biological half sister. What a moment.”
Belton, a 46-year-old insurance claims supervisor from Chesterfield, Virginia, felt an “overwhelming rush of emotion” as she studied the canvas up close. She spotted physical similarities she couldn’t discern in smaller digital images of the artwork. And she felt a fresh wave of gratitude for the role Pike played in the lives of both her and Priddy’s parents.
“He gave them families,” she said.
Belton keeps a framed photo of Pike, and a Fossil watch he wore, on a bedroom bookshelf alongside mementos of the late father who raised her. Her father had a workplace accident as a teenager that left him, like Priddy’s father, unable to have biological offspring.
“There are times I think about Gary and I wish he was here,” Belton said of her biological father. “I feel certain he would have still played a role in our lives.”
Priddy and Belton have grown close, bonded by shared genes and similar temperaments, since discovering one another through 23AndMe in 2018. Both submitted cheek swabs in hopes of locating potential half siblings, though to date they have found only each other.
As the two became acquainted, they discovered the many ways their paths had indirectly crossed. They grew up less than 30 minutes apart, and her grandparents attended the church where Priddy’s grandfather served as a pastor.
Priddy and Belton first learned Pike’s identity, and saw a photo of Chinn’s painting, several years after meeting each other.
The breakthrough came through a Facebook group called DNA Detectives, which Priddy joined hoping to unlock the mystery of his and Belton’s biological father. At that point, Priddy had additional information to share with the group. He and his half sister had combed through DNA databases for shared relatives, eventually locating some cousins. A volunteer “search angel” named Jael McClure Robitaille ultimately identified Gary Pike as their biological dad, unearthing the Chinn painting of him in the process through online searches.
“I’ve heard other stories of people finding their biological relatives, but I don’t think I’ve heard any in which a work of art contributed,” Chinn said. She’s a co-founder of San Francisco’s Queer Cultural Center and one of the featured subjects in the “Living Lesbian Legends” mural in the Castro. She witnessed the early days of the AIDS epidemic both as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and a clerical lab assistant at Franklin Hospital (now Davies Medical Center), an epicenter of HIV/AIDS treatment at the time.
“The Family,” a poignant reminder of the countless relationships shattered by the epidemic, echoes the 17th-century Dutch vanitas tradition, in which still lifes feature objects rich in meaning. “The symbolic flowers, fruits, and books remind us of the impermanence of knowledge and life itself,” said Nancy Lim, SFMOMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture.
By the time Priddy, Belton, Chinn, and Arbuckle gathered in front of “The Family” in February, Priddy had spoken with his father’s former partner several times. Over one 3½-hour Zoom session, Priddy and Belton listened rapt as Arbuckle shared a sweeping overview of their biological father’s life.
“It was wonderful, because they looked just like him,” Arbuckle recalled. “They have similar characteristics to Gary. They’re both incredibly intelligent and kind and well-mannered. We got along great.”
Arbuckle told the half siblings that Pike, who would now be 78, had been a child actor, appearing in the musicals “Mame” and “Gypsy.” He joined the Army, going on to enroll at Virginia Commonwealth University, and became a sperm donor at VCU’s medical school in 1978 and 1979, prior to the AIDS epidemic, to support himself through his graduate work. As a student, Pike accompanied one of his anthropology professors to the Congo River Basin to study Indigenous people in the Ituri Rainforest.
Later, he served as the director of inpatient records for Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. He wrote romance novels under a pseudonym and taught writing at UC Berkeley. He loved to garden and travel, and brought back the vase in Chinn’s painting from a trip to Egypt.
“He was a very unusual man,” said Arbuckle, who donned the same kimono from the painting when he met Priddy and Belton at SFMOMA. “That’s one of the things that attracted me to him. He was so fascinating.”
Arbuckle — who lives in Hunter’s Point with Gary DeMars, his partner of 32 years — not only regaled Pike’s biological children with their father’s adventures. He also shared how Pike’s father had rejected his teen son for being gay. And he recalled the many difficulties Pike endured as AIDS robbed him of his vitality.
“I absolutely was emotional when I learned how he passed,” said Priddy, who has three children of his own with his wife, Erika. He later found himself diving into films and documentaries about the AIDS crisis, devouring “anything relating to the topic,” including “The Band Played On,” “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Patient Zero,” and “Philadelphia.”
As Priddy gained a deeper understanding of that era, his curiosity evolved into a sense of purpose, a desire to honor the memory of Pike, a man he never met but whose spirit he believes he shares.
“If I can carry on his legacy, it’s to be a safe space and to be an ally,” he said. The point is not merely to accept the LGBTQ+ community, “but to embrace it and love it and cherish it and celebrate it.”
He recites details of Pike’s life with the ease of a well-acquainted family member. Still, the more he learns about his biological father, the more he wishes he could have known him.
“I long to hear Gary Pike’s voice, how he constructs a sentence,” Priddy said. “When you look at pictures of him, you see a man in thought. You see a person who has experienced a lot of life. With that comes wisdom.”
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