For this Pride Month, Artsy tapped eight curators and tastemakers with ties to the queer community to share the artists they’re championing this month, and why. Through their eyes, we dive into the practices of more than 70 artists, who together speak to the essence of Pride and why the visibility of LGBTQ+ artists is critical not just this month, but always.
Evan Garza and Chris Bogia
Co-founders, Fire Island Artist Residency
Evan Garza (curatorial fellow at MASS MoCA) and artist Chris Bogia highlight artists from the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) community—the first LGBTQ+ artist residency in the world, which they co-founded in 2011—including Leilah Babirye, Travis Boyer, Chitra Ganesh, Tony Feher, Keltie Ferris, Chris E. Vargas, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Elijah Burgher, Jeffrey Gibson, and couple/artist duo Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens. To this day, the organization continues to provide a live/work space for practicing and emerging queer artists in the historic LGBTQ+ community of Fire Island, New York.
Browse works by Evan Garza and Chris Bogia’s artists to celebrate.
Keltie Ferris
B. 1977, Louisville, Kentucky. Lives and works in New York.
U xxx Me, 2022
Keltie Ferris
Kadel Willborn
“Keltie is a pioneer of what we call queer abstraction—though today, we can just call it abstraction. Keltie’s work strikes an amazing balance between gestural linemaking, mastery of color, and a sculptural build-up of paint that puts his work in an orbit all its own. Keltie also utilizes colored frames, allowing more control over how the artwork appears on a wall, almost like a sculptor would, which I really respond to.” —Bogia
Travis Boyer
B. 1979, Fort Worth, Texas. Lives and works in New York.
Garden Bones; Ode to Penelope Hobhouse, 2022
Travis Boyer
The Valley
Seeper Cells, 2022
Travis Boyer
The Valley
“Travis Boyer’s work embraces the sensuality of gay male sexuality, and celebrates it on a symbolic level using iconography such as mushrooms, candles, shellfish, and the galaxy at large. His work is the result of a culmination of decades of work using dye and fabrics like velvet; he has a virtuosity over materials that we don’t get to see explored very often.” —Bogia
Elijah Burgher
B. 1978, Kingston, New York. Lives and works in Berlin.
Escaping Muses (after Lorenzo Lotto), 2021
Elijah Burgher
P.P.O.W
“Elijah is an incredible artist, painter, and draftsman. His work in recent years has primarily been engaged with issues related to Mother Goddess worship from Roman and Greek antiquity, blended with contemporary notions of queerness, transness, and this beautiful queer, witchy place where those elements meet. There’s a queer ritual aspect to Elijah’s work that dates back centuries, and the work cracks wide open these historical and mythological narratives.” —Garza
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
B. 1982, San Bernardino, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Exposure (_1150781), 2020
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Michael Dawson Gallery
A Sitting for Matthew, 2015
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Yancey Richardson Gallery
“Paul was easily among the most prolific artists that we had at the residency, making and printing a lot of work. His work is photographic in nature, documenting forms of queer ‘looking’ in the studio, between and among men and queer people. It’s evocative and sensual, and deeply important. I think Paul’s work has really broken a lot of barriers between ways of seeing and ways of experiencing photography.” —Garza
Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Curator
Gemma Rolls-Bentley highlights artists included in her forthcoming book, Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between: Sola Olulode, Leasho Johnson, Jenna Gribbon, Christina Quarles, Rene Matić, Ambera Wellman, Ajamu X, Robert Indiana, Leilah Babirye, Jeffrey Gibson, James Bartolacci, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Zanele Muholi, Chiffon Thomas, Xiyadie, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.
Browse works by Gemma Rolls-Bentley’s artists to celebrate.
Jenna Gribbon
B. 1978, Knoxville, Tennessee. Lives and works in New York.
My place beside her in bed, 2019
Jenna Gribbon
Fredericks & Freiser
Comment Section, 2021
Jenna Gribbon
Lougher Contemporary
“Jenna paints her wife, MacKenzie Scott, a musician also known as Torres, over and over and over again. It’s a beautiful gesture of love, looking, and truly seeing her life partner. There’s a deep romance, but also a normalization of domestic queer life found in her work.”
Leilah Babirye
B. 1985, Kampala, Uganda. Lives and works in New York.
Namasole Ndwaddewazibwa, Mother of King Kamaanya from the Kuchu Royal Family of Buganda, 2021
Leilah Babirye
Stephen Friedman Gallery
Najjengo from the Kuchu Ngabi (Antelope) and Katiguma (Bush-Buck) Clans, 2021
Leilah Babirye
Stephen Friedman Gallery
“Leilah’s work is extremely powerful; she makes beautiful sculptures that range in scale using found, often discarded materials. She reclaims and gives meaning to items that have been discarded, as a metaphor for the LGBTQIA+ experience in Uganda, where she is from.”
Rene Matić
B. 1997, Peterborough, England. Lives and works in London.
“Rene Matić photographs their community, the people that surround them, and the people that they love. What really comes through in Rene’s work is the joy, solidarity, and celebration that can be found in queer spaces.”
Léuli Eshrāghi
Curator of Indigenous Practices, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal
Léuli Eshrāghi—inspired in part by their own Indigenous Sāmoan culture, in which fa’afafine and other gender identities have existed for centuries—highlights Indigenous and queer artists whose works are all “conceptually solid and poetic, as well as materially rigorous,” including asinnajaq, Walter Kaheró:ton Scott, Yann Pocreau, Carlos Motta, Seba Calfuqueo, Tyrrell Tapaha, Sarah Sense, Tarek Lakhrissi, Osman Yousefzada, and Rosalie Favell.
Browse works by Léuli Eshrāghi’s artists to celebrate.
Yann Pocreau
B. 1980, Quebec City, Canada. Lives and works in Montréal.
Les mailles élémentaires, 2021
Yann Pocreau
Blouin Division
“Yann Pocreau’s gentle explorations of memory, light, refraction, geography, and emotion carry me to the poignant and hopeful places.”
Seba Calfuqueo
B. 1991, Santiago. Lives and works in Santiago.
“The voice of the river” series Berta y Nicolasa contra la instalación de Ralco frente a la moneda (Palacio Presidencial), 2023
Seba Calfuqueo
Galeria Marília Razuk
“The voice of the river” series. Cementerio indígena bajo el agua hasta hoy en Ralco, 2023
Seba Calfuqueo
Galeria Marília Razuk
“Seba Calfuqueo makes stunning ceramic, performance, and video works that recenter queer nonbinary Mapuche existence and directly resist Chilean and multinational corporate oppressions on various ecologies, including humans, in their Wallmapu homelands.”
Carlos Motta
B. 1978, Bogotá. Lives and works in New York.
The Fall of the Damned (Serpents), 2021
Carlos Motta (b. 1978)
P.P.O.W
“Carlos Motta’s deeply embodied research-based video, installation, and performance practice situates a profoundly queer intersectional critique of imperialism and binarism in relation to futurities of queer wellness and fulfillment, which we all need more of!”
Xavier F. Salomon
Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection
Inspired by the idyllic queer community gathering place of Fire Island, New York, Xavier F. Salomon highlights artists who live, work, spend leisure time, or otherwise engage with this historic community. Salomon chose a balance of artists who address the representation of the human figure as well as the natural landscape, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Kyle Coniglio, TM Davy, Nash Glynn, Jenna Gribbon, Doron Langberg, Thomas McCarty, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Stephen Truax.
Browse works by Xavier F. Salomon’s artists to celebrate.
Doron Langberg
B. 1985, Yokneam Moshava, Israel. Lives and works in New York.
Brice and Robert, 2020
Doron Langberg
Side X Side Gallery
Oren and Bennet, 2022
Doron Langberg
Craven Contemporary
“[Doron’s work] has a freshness, a feeling of liberty, and captures [Fire Island] and the people in a very, very unique way. He paints his pictures there—he’s on the beach, he’s by the swimming pool, he goes into nature, into the dunes, and he starts painting.…He has been central to representing a generation of Fire Island inhabitants.”
Nash Glynn
B. 1992, Miami. Lives and works in New York.
Posterier, 2017
Nash Glynn
HEIRESS
Body, 2023
Nash Glynn
HEIRESS
“[Nash] works with self-portraits and her own image. They’re often nude self-portraits, often very provocative and very memorable images.…She’s more of a magical painter, more whimsical, more surreal, in some way. Less of a direct observation, which is what you have with Doron. I just think her work is fabulous, and she’s been doing great, great things on the island.”
Sarah-Tai Black
Curator, film programmer, and critic
Sarah-Tai Black highlights Black queer artists exploring rich multiplicities of identity through figuration, including Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Qualeasha Wood, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Shikeith, Mickalene Thomas, Sadie Barnette, Daniel Obasi, Isaac Julien, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Miranda Forrester, Naima Green, Danielle Scott, and Lauren Halsey. “Figurative practices are one of several ways that the unbounded worlds of Black queer life can be cultivated and protected,” noted Black.
Browse works by Sarah-Tai Black’s artists to celebrate.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase
B. 1989, Philadelphia. Lives and works in Philadelphia.
Cold Dark embrace, 2020
Jonathan Lyndon Chase
CFHILL
Untitled, 2018
Jonathan Lyndon Chase
Michael Kohn Gallery
“The work of Philadelphia-born and -based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase is directed both inward and outward.…Working in sculpture, video, installation, and on paper, Chase foregrounds and affirms Black queer, femme, and gender-expansive subjectivity with grace.”
Shikeith
B. 1989, Philadelphia. Lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Adoration (never knew love like this before), 2020
Shikeith
McClain Gallery
Anthem, 2021
Shikeith
McClain Gallery
“In his sculptures, installations, and lens-based practice, artist Shikeith uses light, space, and durational techniques to create ecstatic images.…These photographs ask us: ‘Who are we when we welcome the vulnerability of communion? What possibilities are opened up through queer acts of tenderness?’”
Qualeasha Wood
B. 1996, Long Branch, New Jersey. Lives and works in Philadelphia.
Following, 2018
Qualeasha Wood
New Image Art
“The hand-beaded tapestries of textile artist Qualeasha Wood are self-portraits of the artist herself, often presented as a religious idol. Creating textiles out of digital images, Wood’s reframed self-portraits complicate the racialized and gendered hierarchy of looking. These works also critique the ways that the labor and cultural production of Black femmes has been historically exploited.”
Dawn Delikat
Executive Director, Pen + Brush
Dawn Delikat highlights artists who belong to the community of the nonprofit Pen + Brush, including Lola Flash, Felicita Felli Maynard, Michela Griffo, Alida Wilkinson, Emily Lombardo, Rowan Renee, Rennie Jones, Ash Edes, Danielle Scott, and C. Finley. For over 130 years, Pen + Brush has been dedicated to providing a platform to showcase the work of emerging and mid-career women artists and writers.
Browse works by Dawn Delikat’s artists to celebrate.
Felicita Felli Maynard
B. 1989, New York. Lives and works in New Orleans and New York.
Jean Loren Feliz, 2019
Felicita Maynard
Pen + Brush
“Felicita Felli Maynard is an artist who’s living and experiencing gender expansiveness,” Delikat told Artsy. “They started their work as a photographer stemming from archival research, looking into daguerreotypes and the early advent of photography, where Black and queer bodies did not have agency over their own image.” Delikat is particularly drawn to Maynard’s “Old Dandy” series, in which the artist reimagines and reembodies the lives of gender expansive performers from the 1890s in New York City, in a process that involves Maynard sitting for their own images in disguise, à la Cindy Sherman.
Michela Griffo
B. 1949, Rochester, New York. Lives and works in New York.
Untitled, 2022
Michela Griffo
Pen + Brush
“In a sense, Michaela Griffo is a real OG of both the feminist and LGBTQ+ communities, having been a member of the Redstockings; the radical lesbian movement Lavender Menace; and the Gay Liberation Front.…Griffo’s work breaks [women] out of the domestic narrative and stereotype, and brings women’s sexuality to the forefront in such a beautiful and tender way.”
Stamatina Gregory
Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
Stamatina Gregory highlights artists working in “compelling and transdisciplinary ways, pushing and transgressing their mediums, and working against categorization,” the curator told Artsy, including April Bey, Liz Collins, Lola Flash, Leasho Johnson, Jeffrey Meris, Laurence Philomene, Moises Salazar Tlantechi, Kang Seung Lee, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, and Carrie Yamaoka.
Browse works by Stamatina Gregory’s artists to celebrate.
Kang Seung Lee
B. 1978, Seoul. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
Untitled (I walk in the garden), 2022
Kang Seung Lee
Gallery Hyundai
“Kang Seung Lee’s work often centers on artistic figures, such as Tseng Kwong Chi, Martin Wong, or Peter Hujar, tracing their elements of their lives and legacies through mediums that harmonically intersect: drawing, embroidery, video, dance, and installation. Through a practice that involves incredible amounts of labor, and feels both critical and devotional, Lee channels the artists lost to HIV/AIDS in uniquely embodied ways, for both the artist and viewers.”
Lola Flash
B. 1959, Montclair, New Jersey. Lives and works in New York.
Basking, Provincetown, Mass , 1988
Lola Flash
Jenkins Johnson Gallery
“In thinking about histories of photography and representation, I always find myself returning to Lola Flash’s work. Their long career demonstrates that activism and art need not be differentiated practices; that subjects can be seen and not scrutinized; that mediums steeped in categorization and oppression can be deployed for liberation.”
Explore works by all artists selected by Artsy’s guest curators in the Curating with Pride: LGBTQ+ Artists to Celebrate collection.
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