JILL POSENER, THE ON OUR BACKS YEARS
When I first came to San Francisco in the late 80’s, I was running away from a Britain that I could no longer tolerate. Thatcher was Prime Minister and intolerance was pervasive. I couldn’t find a place to feel comfortable...
MEG TURNER, WET, 2014-ONGOING
Collected as a prototype for my first artist book, Wet is a series of 46 tintype portraits taken between new orleans and new york (with a few Texas and Florida trips) between 2014 and today. The theme of water runs a slow and steady thread through the layout - bodies of water by which we feel our own bodies, our own relaxation and divinity, bodies of water which turn to smoke in the process of long outdoor exposures...
ANONYMOUS, SEX DOLL POLAROIDS
The photo sets feature commercially-available dolls with added genitalia. The maker has set up tableaus and made photographic series that tell stories of straight, gay, and group scenes. We have not definitively dated them, but they are probably from the 1970s...
GROANA MELENDEZ, EL NOMBRE MÍO, AJENO
El Nombre Mío, Ajeno is an exhibition of photographs, videos and other lens-based works by Groana Melendez. In this work Groana creates an understanding of the interconnectedness of relationships, class and identity...
DANIEL RAMPULLA, COLLAPSE
Collapse, comes from this very nod to connection, two bodies “collapsing” together, the “collapse” of two people into one relationship, or the “collapse” of a dune as the shore begins to recede...
GOLDEN, ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE THIS IS NOT YOUR HISTORY, 2016
Robert Mapplethorpe This Is Not Your History was created as a direct retaliation to the Portfolio Z series shot and captured by Robert Mapplethorpe in the late ’70s. In photo history, Mapplethorpe’s works are often sourced and attributed as visual etymologies for queer representations—losing sight of how the gaze of whiteness makes a spectacle of blackness when its being is rendered as just ‘body.’..
RACHEL JUMP, ORIGINS
For most of my childhood our lives were scattered over countless households. My disparate memories of these places merely composed a fragmented idea of home. Later in life I began to question how my identity was shaped without a point of origin...
NICOLO GENTILE, PUT TO WREST, 2023
Nicolo Gentile’s installations reference motifs of the queer experience including kink and competitive/obsessive physique-building, as seen in material choices ranging from leather and latex to iron and steel...
MARTHA ROSLER, BODY BEAUTIFUL, OR BEAUTY KNOWS NO PAIN, 1966–72
This group of thirty-two photomontages extracts depictions of women’s bodies from popular media sources—glossy print ads and men’s magazines—and reassembles them in ways that upend the original messages...
OWEN MCCARTER, THE THREE EYED FISH
With Industrialization, the landscape of the Housatonic River began to shift dramatically and by the late 1800s thirty dams were in place. Iron and paper mills boomed with no thought towards the environmental effects they might cause...
NELSON MORALES, CROWNS
Since I was a child, I had this fascination for beauty pageants, especially pageant crowns, their symbols and meanings, their beauty, and the variety of them in different cultures. I have previously been portraying transvestite and transgender beauty queens in Muxe culture and was struck by their obsession with becoming a beauty queen...
ALEXIS RUISECO LOMBERA, AQUI AYA, 2017-19
Aqui Aya, 2017-19, is an investigation of place, belonging, and inherited family using self-portraiture. As I cross borders between Cuba and the United States, this series of photographs reflects on displacement as a structure of feeling and an assemblage of family as a world making strategy...
AVION PEARCE, SHADOWS
My intention with Shadows was to very lovingly depict this romance and moment in time. I want to see me more Black lesbian love stories. To read them and to see them in ways that are not just about tragedy and death...
GARY SCHNEIDER, NUDES, 2001-2005
One of today’s most thought-provoking and original artists, South African-born photographer Gary Schneider is best known for Genetic Self-Portrait, which extends the self-portrait beyond the figure into the depths of the elemental nature of the individual...
KELLI CONNELL, PICTURES FOR CHARIS, 2024
Pictures for Charis is loosely based on the life of Charis Wilson and the time she spent with photographer Edward Weston from 1934 - 1945. Using Through Another Lens: My Life with Edward Weston (Wilson’s autobiography) and California and the West (with text written by Wilson and images by Weston) as a guide…
CARMEN WINANT, MY BIRTH, 2018
This work is composed of over two thousand images of women preparing for and in the process of labor and childbirth. Winant is conscious of the ways the work of women is both visible and invisible: the activities shown here are widespread and essential, and yet pictures of them are not common, even in our image-saturated culture…
CHRISTIAN K LEE, ARMED DOESN’T MEAN DANGEROUS (TEXAS)
This work is about my experiences living in Chicago, Illinois. A city that is often related to gun violence. When I look at the news I realized that I only saw people that looked like me around guns that were criminals, but people of other races were depicted as cowboys and farmers. I became curious as to why this injustice-inbalance existed…
IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM, NUDES
Imogen Cunningham decided to become a photographer after seeing the photographs of Gertrude Käsebier. Cunningham grew up in the Pacific Northwest, worked for two years in Edward Curtis's studio, and later operated a successful photography studio in Seattle, Washington. In 1915 she married the painter Roi Partridge and moved to San Francisco…
ELEANOR ANTIN, CARVING: A TRADITIONAL SCULPTURE 1972
A landmark early feminist work, Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture comprises 148 black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s loss of 10 pounds over 37 days. Every morning she was photographed naked in the same four stances to record her barely perceptible self-induced weight loss…
AN-MY LÊ, DELTA
In her “Delta” series, Lê explored the Vietnam War’s migratory legacy. The color photographs focus on the everyday lives of Vietnamese and Vietnamese American women and girls in Ho Chi Minh City and New Orleans…