This Pride Month, I am delighted to announce the launch of Watson Library’s newest artist index, the Index of LGBTQIA+ Artists. This index currently includes 394 artists that appear in our online catalog, Watsonline, and will expand as we identify more artists in our holdings and grow our collection. The following selection of books are among the resources the Watson team used to create the list of artists that appear in the index.
The title page of Christopher Reed’s Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) features a panel from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
In each of the four survey texts presented below, the authors confront the complexity of historical identification; the deeper into the past one looks, the more difficult it becomes to determine which artists to include. Sexual norms, laws, cultural attitudes, and language have shifted throughout history and vary widely between places and cultures. The authors of these books approached this problem in diverse ways, and each provides valuable perspectives and insights into queer history.
Christopher Reed’s aim with Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas is to highlight and affirm the diversity of queer experiences across cultures and time periods, cautioning readers against the temptation to consolidate queer experiences into a single homogenized history. This book covers ancient through contemporary art from across the globe. Reed deftly circumvents the constraints of determining the artists’ gender identities as the criterion for inclusion by focusing on the relationship between art and sexual identity and depictions of queer subject matter.
Liz Collin’s “Knitting Nation Phase 4: Pride” in Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, Art & Queer Culture (London: Phaidon, 2019)
Acknowledging the difficulty of compiling a list of queer artists with shifting identity definitions, politics, and historical context, Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer state that their aim in Art & Queer Culture is to “explore how particular artists have constructed, contested or otherwise responded to alternative forms of sexuality at pivotal moments in the last 125 years.” This book uses abundant images of artwork from each period to draw out its themes, making it a great resource to discover LGBTQIA+ artists.
Left: Pilcher, Alex, A Queer Little History of Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2017). Right: Summers, Claude J.,ed., The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts (San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 2004)
A Queer Little History of Art by Alex Pilcher features 70 works of art created from 1900 to the present that center queer experiences and expression. This tiny book is rich with images and international in scope. By contrast, Claude J. Summers’s The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts is almost all text. Truly encyclopedic in breadth and style, it contains alphabetically organized essays about artists, movements, and historic periods.
Harmony Hammond, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (New York: Rizzoli, 2000)
In addition to these four examples of broad art historical surveys, Watson Library has various holdings that center historically underrepresented groups of artists. Harmony Hammond notes that when Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History was published in 2000, there was little writing about lesbian art, an omission she describes as an erasure: “This lack of accessible history is a form of oppression, for those who are denied a history of culture do not exist.” She adds, “To resist this erasure and insist on the history of lesbian art is the project of this book.” This book, the earliest written on its topic, surveys three decades beginning with the 1970s, the point at which Hammond places the category “lesbian artist” as taking form in the wake of the gay and women’s liberation movements.
Gill, Lyndon, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)
Carnival and calypso music are focal points for Trinidad and Tobago’s queer history in Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. In author Lyndon Gill’s words, “Through foregrounding a queer presence in Carnival masquerade design, calypso musicianship, and HIV/AIDS prevention and care services—the artistic genres and the activist cause that hold pride of place in T&T’s national imaginary—Erotic Islands documents a grassroots lesbian and gay artistry and activism that has long been culturally rooted.”
Works by Joey Terrill in C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (Los Angeles, C.A.: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, 2017)
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. is the catalog for a Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition of the same name held in 2017. The exhibition was the first to focus on LGBTQIA+ Latinx artists and featured Chicano/a/x artists working in L.A. from the 1960s to the 1990s. The catalog includes 10 essays and over 400 images.
Hernandez, Jasmin, We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World (New York: Abrams, 2021)
We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World highlights the work of 50 Black and Brown contemporary artists and art workers, with a focus on inclusion for queer, trans, and nonbinary artists. The book includes an interview with each artist and art worker accompanied by photographs of their work or studio. Author Jasmin Hernandez powerfully concludes her introduction with the following message: “We Are Here is a document of Black and Brown voices in the art world, visualized by a Black woman, with the intention of making visible those who are often erased. We’ve been here, we are here, and we will continue to be here. The hyper-visibility of Black and Brown artists and culture-makers that we’re seeing isn’t a trend. The guard has shifted, and no one, including myself, is asking for permission.”
