interview by JEFF RIAN portrait by DASH SNOW and JADE BERREAU Jack Walls, the downtown New York cult artist, was a long-time companion of Robert Mapplethorpe. In the early 1980s Walls was one of a number of black men Mapplethorpe photographed in various guises. (I had a dancer friend named Herby who actually cancelled a number of shoots with Mapplethorpe because he was so nervous about the limits to which the photographer would push his models.) Walls later developed his own art, and he has recently transformed a reprinted Mapplethorpe photograph, Ada, into 92 different collages. Mapplethorpe’s world was his subject. Jack Walls was one of the more important figures in that world — a world of people and images that Mapplethorpe used as symbols and icons of an era of social revolution. He treated his subjects with a combination of brazen revelation, erotic sentiment, and technical rigor. His elegantly…