New York hosts the only museum in the world devoted to gay and lesbian visual art, but what is "gay art?" Join Leslie-Lohman Museum Director Hunter O'Hanian to answer this question.
From Caravaggio’s angelic rent boys or Botticelli’s curvaceous Venus on the half shell, to the feminist eroticism of Anita Steckel or the pistils and stamens of Robert Mapplethorpe’s audacious calla lilies — we know sexy art when we see it. But is gay art really a thing?
“Gay art,” O’Hanian neatly d...
New York hosts the only museum in the world devoted to gay and lesbian visual art, but what is "gay art?" Join Leslie-Lohman Museum Director Hunter O'Hanian to answer this question.
From Caravaggio’s angelic rent boys or Botticelli’s curvaceous Venus on the half shell, to the feminist eroticism of Anita Steckel or the pistils and stamens of Robert Mapplethorpe’s audacious calla lilies — we know sexy art when we see it. But is gay art really a thing?
“Gay art,” O’Hanian neatly defines, “is that which speaks to the LBGTQ community. It’s work that represents the experiences of any member of the LBGTQ world. In this sense, the whole topic of gay art is a subject that could be comparable to landscape or still life.”
In his presentation, O’Hanian will discuss more than 20 works by well known artists and ask a broad range of questions: Is there a gay sensibility to the piece? Is there eroticism in the human form? How have men, women, and transgenders dealt with these issues at various times and in different ways?
O'Hanian will talk about "coding," the way in which gay artists try to reference their sexual orientation in their work. Gay art, he says, wasn’t really thought of as a concept until the post-Stonewall part of the sexual revolution and AIDS eras, when lesbian, gay, and transgender movements achieved a wider perception in public discussion.