As a cautious world continues to reopen and a sense of normalcy begins to return to its art museums, a lively summer lineup of no-holds-barred exhibitions by and about queer artists is helping ensure that the imbalances exposed by the pandemic remain center stage, and that the urgency surrounding them isn’t lost. Highlighting themes such as activism, racism, ageism, ableism, innovation and intimacy, these shows help envision a future informed by past progress, but still mindful of present challenges and unafraid to keep evolving.
Organized last year to honor the 100th birthday of Touko Laaksonen (better known to the world as Tom of Finland) by Fotografiska Stockholm and the Tom of Finland Foundation, this studly show reveals his work process through the photographic portraits that served as source material for many of his famed homoerotic drawings. Through Aug. 20
Tom of Finland, Tom & Tom Katt, 1984.Tom of Finland Foundation
Intimacy is one of queer art’s enduring central themes, and here it’s granted an entire exhibition dedicated to showcasing some of the many ways — in both theme and format — that queer intimacy is portrayed in contemporary art. The show includes more than 30 pieces from iconic global queer artists such as AA Bronson, Annie Liebovitz, Slava Mogutin and Zanele Muholi. Through Aug. 30
“Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond”.Ralf Rühmeier / Schwules Museum
Groundbreaking queer performance artist Ron Athey finally gets his due in this survey of his work and career, in which his highly visceral performances and transformative use of his own body as a site of trauma, resistance, sexuality and religious ecstasy earned him a spot center stage in the 1990s culture wars — and has strongly influenced a generation of both artists and viewers ever since. Through Sept. 5
Installation view, Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Through Sept. 5, 2021.Jeff McLane / ICA LA
In his vivid, dreamlike paintings that have been likened to the works of Titian, Gauguin and Manet, Kenyan-born Michael Armitage challenges cultural assumptions and explores themes such as sexuality and civil unrest, bringing unsettling beauty to otherwise ugly situations. A Royal Academy graduate, Armitage returns to his alma mater here with 15 large-scale paintings from the past six years. Through Sept. 19
Michael Armitage, Pathos and the twilight of the idle, 2019. Oil on Lubugo bark cloth, 330 x 170 cm.Theo Christelis / White Cube
The career and broad impact of innovative Austrian-born fashion pioneer Rudi Gernreich — who created legendary body-positive pieces such as the monokini and the thong, and who was also the 1950s partner of seminal gay rights activist Harry Hay — are explored in this collection of more than 80 ensembles, alongside original sketches, personal papers, photographs and newly filmed oral histories, as assembled by L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center. Through Sept. 26
Peggy Moffitt modeling a George Sand pantsuit designed by Rudi Gernreich, fall 1967 collection.William Claxton / Courtesy of Demont Photo Management & Fahey/Klein Gallery Los Angeles
The formative first 15 years in the creative journey of renowned multimedia artist Shahzia Sikander are celebrated in this beautiful show, which follows her path from pioneering deconstructor of traditional manuscript painting in her native Pakistan, to art student in Providence, Rhode Island, and Houston, to young artist in New York, a period during which she delved into the themes — including gender, sexuality, race, class and culture — that still shape her work today. Through Sept. 26
Eye-I-ing Those Armorial Bearings, 1989–97, and Sly Offering, 2001.Shahzia Sikander / Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York.
The magical queer community that flourished on Fire Island’s Cherry Grove in the 1950s is showcased in this free (but timed-entry ticketed) outdoor exhibition in the New-York Historical Society’s rear courtyard, comprising some 70 enlarged photographs and additional ephemera from the Cherry Grove Archives Collection. The museum, New York’s oldest, announced last week that it would expand to include the American LGBTQ+ Museum by its 200th birthday in 2024. Through Oct. 11
Outside of Bea Greer’s Home, Bea’s Brunch, 1951.Cherry Grove Archives Collection / Gift of Harold Seeley
Brooklyn-born video artist Gregg Bordowitz began merging his work and his AIDS activism in the mid-1980s, documenting the many protests he took part in as a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, and creating video portraits of himself and others living with HIV and AIDS. This first comprehensive overview of his influential career also includes his more recent work, which explores the nexus of his religious, sexual, political and cultural identities. Through Oct. 11
Gregg Bordowitz, still from Fast Trip Long Drop. 1993. Video (color, sound).Gregg Bordowitz / Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
In the first section of this powerful two-part exhibition, Tennessee-born and Harlem-based artist Wardell Milan uses new works on paper to explore the subtle normalization of white supremacy and racial violence in America. The show’s second portion uses a site-specific structure — along with performances choreographed by Zachary Tye Richardson and sculptures designed by Billy Ray Morgan — to explore the concept of “safe space” for marginalized communities. Through Oct. 24
Wardell Milan. The Timmerman’s Kitchen, New Canaan, CT, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and David Nolan Gallery
This microsurvey of the work of chameleonesque visual and performance artist Martine Gutierrez showcases her cheeky deconstructivism of glitzy conventions such as fashion and advertising to explore themes around gender, race and identity, as often inspired by ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures and their deities embodying duality and gender fluidity. Through Oct. 24
Exhibition installation view, Martine Gutierrez: Radiant Cut at Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston.Sean Fleming / Courtesy of Blaffer Art Museum
In this queerified and age-embracing homage to classic 1950s and ‘60s Scopitone film reels — a precursor to music videos that played inside special jukeboxes in cocktail lounges nationwide, and glorified young cisgender white male-dominated culture — Samantha Nye recreates the old film shorts shot-for-shot with queer elder actors, discarding ageist and ableist definitions of sexuality and eroticism, and expanding our vision of love, sex, agency and belonging. Through Oct. 31
Video Still from Visual Pleasure/Jukebox Cinema – DADDY (Verse 4), 2018.Samantha Nye / Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre spent five years traveling across America to document the life stories of transgender and gender-nonconforming older adults for this broad and captivating collection of portraits and accompanying interviews (also fully accessible in a virtual 360 tour on the exhibition’s web page) that span the human spectrum of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class and location. Through Jan. 2, 2022
Hank, 76, and Samm, 67, North Little Rock, Ark., 2015.Jess T. Dugan / Barrett Barrera Projects
The hauntingly gorgeous works of New York-based artist Jennifer Packer, appearing here in a first West Coast museum showcase, include intimate portraits of her family and friends that play with the viewer’s sense of dimension and perception. Packer’s works, which also include politically charged still lifes, recast classic conventions in contemporary light to imbue them with new meaning. Through Feb. 21, 2022
Jennifer Packer, Idle Hands, 2021, Oil on canvas.Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, Corvi-Mora, London
Not unlike the Schwules Museum’s “Intimacy” exhibition, this group show explores the power and significance of intimate relationships in queer art, and features more than 30 pieces (including several new acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection) from artists such a Salman Toor, Nicole Eisenman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Catherine Opie and Paul Cadmus. July 17 — March 13, 2022
Michigan-bred and now Miami-based Robert Andy Coombs’ photographs document his own experiences at the rarely highlighted intersection of sexuality and disability, challenging ableist preconceptions and inviting the viewer along for a narrative that’s at turns tender, playful, sensual and revealing. Aug. 14 — Nov. 6
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
