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...
EBONY G. PATTERSON,... THREE KINGS WEEP ..., 2018
Ebony G. Patterson uses lavish surfaces and verdant motifs to entice viewers to contemplate not only the power of beauty and fashion but also historical and contemporary violence against Black people. In . . . three kings weep . . ., a trio of young men shed tears as they sit silently before a backdrop of floral wallpaper and fluttering artificial butterflies...
CRAIG HIGHBERGER, SUPERSTAR IN A HOUSEDRESS, 2004
Jackie Curtis is not a drag queen. Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier." -- Andy Warhol. Superstar in a Housedress examines the life and legend of Warhol transvestite superstar Jackie Curtis who was a poet, playwright, performer, and one of the great personalities of his time...
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...
JUDY CHICAGO, SUZANNE LACY, SANDRA ORGEL, AND AVIVA RAHMANI, ABLUTIONS, 1972
This performance began with Lacy and Rahmani’s earlier explorations of rape in their different practices—Rahmani in performance and Lacy in an artist’s book, Rape Is. The project was a true collaboration between all four women, teacher and students, with each contributing images and ideas for the final production...
NESRINE KHODR, I SWAM IN THE SEA LAST WEEK, 2003
I Swam in the Sea Last Week is a symbolic and poetic video evoking a changing situation through a female body swimming in the sea...
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...
KERRY TRIBE, UNTITLED (POTENTIAL TERRORIST), 2002
In November 2001, a casting notice for (Untitled) Potential Terrorist ran in Backstage West, an L.A-based movie industry trade magazine and actors’ resource, requesting submissions for an untitled, silent, experimental film...
SHELLY SILVER, WE, 1990
Even as the text instructs us otherwise, it is impossible not to read We's two images - that is, to respond to their symbolic quality, their suggestiveness. In a stream of associations, the rhythmic flow of people on the left becomes an ejaculation while the rhythmic hand on the right marks detachment, self-centeredness...
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…
RICHARD BILLINGHAM, RAY’S A LAUGH, 1996
First published in 1996 to enormous acclaim, Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh is one of the most significant photobooks of the turn of the twentieth century, as well as a cornerstone work of the Young British Artists generation..
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…