First Days in NYC

FIRST DAYS IN NEW YORK – By Elliott Williams 

The show has begun! After arriving in New York, we are exploring the scenes of lower manhattan. Speaking on behalf of the team, while we have walked a shocking amount in the past 24 hours the city has been thrilling and welcoming to our group. Our travel day was relatively painless.

Friday was our first real day of study. We met with queer art historian Dr. Jonathan Katz and explored themes of queer representation, imagery, and meaning throughout modern and contemporary periods.

First, the Whitney. Dr. Katz led us through part of the museum’s permanent collection as well as a gallery on protest art. Key to his lecturing was revealing queer themes in art that has been lost. Whether through misunderstanding, deliberate hiding, or respectability politics, much of the identity and meaning behind the work of LGBTQ artists is left behind once a work becomes part of the art world. Some particular pieces that stuck out to me include:

Edward Hopper, A Woman in the Sun (1961)

Along with work by Warhol, Paul Cadmus, and the triumvirate PaJaMa, we saw how themes of isolation are manifestly queer, and appears again and again in queer works. A sense of being alone in a crowd, knowing that you’re different than those around you, and recognizing that your identity is different things to different people are not only captured by these artists but best contextualized by their queerness.

Ellsworth Kelly, Red, White, and Blue (1961). Dr. Katz (and I) found it fascinating that every hard-edged abstractionist in the 60s was queer. Why is that? A compelling explanation was that the edges and geometry gave them a way to make statements about queer sexuality and relationships that survive within in dominant culture. We saw in the similar, yet differentiated colors and shapes of this work potential analogies to human relationships.

From the Whitney, we saw a gallery exhibition of Hugh Steers’s The Nullities of Life, which captured gay male intimacy and domesticity during the AIDS crisis, and documents the artist’s desire to direct his art towards a political end. Following, we saw Cell Count in the La MaMa

Galleria, an exhibition of works related to AIDS activism.“… and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping Amazonian blowdarts in ‘infected blood’ and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions,” (David Wojnarowicz)

Our last stop was the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art. Admittedly, I was getting pretty tired. In the gallery I saw beautiful depictions of queer domesticity, artifacts of cruising culture, and contemporary queer works in photography.

It was such a privilege to be led by Dr. Katz. At one point while we were walking, I asked him about what got him into studying art history, specifically queer art history. He talked his desire to help people understand context and know why things are the way they are influences his

    

eye for art. It fascinates me how in America, because the vast majority of art is privately-held, the culture of the 1% that owns artwork dominates the narratives and context shared with a piece. Even though an artist’s queerness may provide so much value and understanding to a work, those realities are still censored. This impacts who and what our culture deems worthy of knowing, and whether marginalized individuals can see their existence in the majority culture’s artifacts. One of the most important places where a young person can see their reflection in a wall is in a museum.

I hope that as we go throughout the trip, we find spaces that draw more attention to queer people of color, trans people, and women. Today reminded me that a disproportionate amount of the queer art in the historical record and exhibited today is gay and male. I look forward to better understanding the disparity here and learning from others in the cohort.

 

In other news, our fearless leaders seem to be doing well and have not yet disowned us: