Gemma Rolls-Bentley nonetheless remembers the primary time she noticed work by a queer artist. She was in her early 20s and had simply moved to London when she got here throughout an exhibition of Catherine Opie’s black and white pictures on the Stephen Friedman Gallery. By this level, she had two artwork historical past levels below her belt however nothing she had been taught about had been contextualised as queer. “Then I noticed all these photos of dykes on bikes and leather-based daddies – in a blue chip gallery, in Mayfair!” she recollects. “It was one thing that I’d by no means seen endorsed or validated in that approach. It was like: they’re my individuals they usually’re hanging in a gallery!”
The encounter prompted a loyal curiosity in researching and platforming queer artwork. For nearly 20 years now, Rolls-Bentley has produced exhibitions and constructed collections of labor by LGBTQ+ artists the world over. In 2022, she curated the Brighton Beacon Assortment, the biggest everlasting show of queer artwork within the UK. Final yr, she curated Dreaming of Dwelling at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Artwork in New York, an exploration of the comforts and issues of queer and trans home life.
Rolls-Bentley’s new guide, Queer Artwork: From Canvas to Membership and the Areas Between, is the most recent step in her mission to fill within the gaps in artwork historical past. Designed in “horny espresso desk guide” format, it goals to supply an accessible introduction to the sphere with quick biographies of virtually 200 artists making work between the late Nineteen Sixties and the current day. Established queer artists akin to Tom of Finland and Keith Haring sit in dialog with up-and-coming modern artists, together with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who specialises in interactive video video games, and photographer Clifford Prince King. Offered in themed chapters slightly than chronological order, the guide encourages readers to attach the dots between totally different moments within the queer artwork timeline.
A lot of the work included stretches far past conventional portray and images, from the general public artwork venture of Dyke Motion Machine! to Andrew Logan’s ongoing Various Miss World occasion sequence, which reimagined the eponymous competitors by means of drag and cabaret. “For queer individuals, the pathways to present haven’t been easy, and so the artwork of the group shouldn’t be at all times going to be present in a gallery or a museum, or the normal locations the place you may discover artwork,” she says. “It may be on the street, at a protest, on a dancefloor, on a podium.”
Guaranteeing that the venture had an intersectional and world outlook was key. In addition to drawing on her present reference factors as a veteran within the business, Rolls-Bentley adopted a radical analysis course of to make sure that “no stone was left unturned”, working with galleries, museums and analysis assistants, and trawling by means of archives of queer artwork exhibits courting again to the Nineteen Seventies. Ghada Khunji, an artist from Bahrain she found at a bunch present over a decade in the past, was onerous to hint however was finally tracked down by means of Fb. Working with artists from nations the place homosexuality remains to be criminalised meant she needed to tread fastidiously so as to make the expertise each constructive and protected for them. “The telling of queer artwork historical past that we’ve got had has tended to give attention to cis, white, homosexual, male variations of queerness,” says Rolls-Bentley. “It felt extraordinarily necessary to me that greater than half of the artists within the guide weren’t cis male and never white. I actually needed to speak that the queer and trans expertise is multifaceted; there may be not one model of what that appears like.”
Selecting what constitutes “queer artwork” was equally tangly. Is all of it artwork made by queer individuals? Or does it need to explicitly depict LGBTQ+ themes? “I don’t assume these are simple inquiries to reply. There are a few examples within the guide of artwork made by individuals who don’t determine as LGBTQIA+ however they felt like actually necessary components of this story so I’ve included them,” she says, pointing to Chantal Regnault’s photograph sequence of Harlem Home Ballroom scene drag queens from 1989 to 1992. “For me, queer artwork is artwork that displays the queer expertise in a technique or one other.”
Does she fear that grouping artists based mostly on their id is reductive? “I believe as a result of queer artists have been missing from artwork historical past, there may be nonetheless a necessity for a guide referred to as Queer Artwork that brings these artists collectively. Nevertheless, as a curator, I really feel very strongly that if we’re grouping artists, it must be about greater than their id. With any labels, there’s at all times a threat of pigeonholing, and so after we discuss queer artwork as a categorisation of artists, it ought to simply be one of many accessible lenses by means of which we are able to take a look at their work. That artist may nonetheless be a Black artist, an summary painter, a panorama photographer.”
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Rolls-Bentley hopes the guide will nurture a shift within the artwork world and in society extra usually. A foreword by Isaac Julien notes the “transformative energy of artwork to problem norms, provoke thought and spark change”, a sentiment Rolls-Bentley agrees with. “I didn’t know that the life I’ve now was a chance,” she says. “It might’ve made an enormous distinction if I had a guide like this the place I may see individuals like me being memorialised and celebrated.”
Regardless of key progressions like “equal marriage and lesbians on Coronation Avenue”, and a rising motion of queer artists, there’s nonetheless loads of work to be achieved for the group, Rolls-Bentley says, particularly for a lot of Black, brown and trans individuals, who’re “nonetheless going through the largest challenges”. “I really need this guide to provide individuals a chance to contemplate a unique perspective. I wish to keep in mind all the artists who had been misplaced too younger and I wish to give area to those that use their artwork to think about a greater future. I actually consider that that’s the energy of artwork and I hope that that’s what comes throughout on this guide.”
