Patti Smith explored gender and identity in her work as she evolved as a woman and as an artist. In the memoir, Just Kids, she wrote about her life as a young artist in New York City and her relationship with art and her lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe. She found that art was her calling at an early age but it look many years of her adult life before she committed to music, the art form that she made her famous. She didn’t identify with music when she began her life as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. Her mediums of expression were poetry and sketching. The quest to define her identity is tightly woven into the fabric of her life as well as her work. For many years she served the role of the provider and supporter of Robert’s dreams to become an artist. She was also a muse and inspiration for Mapplethorpe, which sometimes her ability to see herself as the artist. She saw herself as woman only in context with Robert and his work rather than as an independent person. She spoke about the world that she built with Robert and the effect it had on her when that world crumbled after he began his life with a male partner. That was one of the major experiences that allowed Smith detach herself, to an extent, from Robert and begin to evaluate her life without identifying herself in terms of him. Throughout her time in Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, she explored her identity as a woman who is equal and in many cases superior to her male partner because she was the “breadwinner” and supported herself and Robert financially. For years she willingly accepted that role, and this she continued to embrace that attitude of power in her independent career as a musician. As one of the pioneers of punk she was also a pioneer as a woman lead in a band.  She wrote in her memoir that she struggled to find musicians who were willing to work in a band with a female lead. She detached her identity as a woman from her identity as an artist: she didn’t give into the pressures to identify with certain social roles because of her gender. This allowed her to express herself in her work. Her character and presence gave an edge to her music and defined her as a revolutionary preforming artist.