Queer Fight Songs
5 New and Not to be Missed Queer AF Exhibitions in NYC
Artwork details from Samantha Nye, Giles Crawford, Peter Clough, Richard Alvarez, and Baseera Khan. Images used courtesy of the artists and their respective galleries or cultural institutions.
Here we are, art world, in the ascension of spring 2022 in New York, which is also traditionally a cardinal season for notable art debuts.
I don’t want to ponder too much about why (as I think we are all over-taxed at reading anything more about our 2-year quiet period) but I am still having a difficult time sourcing comprehensive and helpful directories of exhibition information. Maybe there are new sites or apps to replace the ones that have gone dark (and sadly there have been many) but I find myself having to manually research listing information that used to be sourced organically.
As many of you reading this may already know, I am an art world person who loves, makes, curates, and advocates for queer art in its many splendorous forms. And I ardently believe that our spring season for queer art in New York is nothing short of visionary. With everything that I’ve said above in mind, I wanted to recommend five noteworthy exhibitions which are opening in the coming days and weeks and ask that you commit yourself to visiting as many of these selections as you can in person. I am presenting a curated mix that includes both art and design; galleries, museums, and cultural spaces, and work that is both accessible and challenging to process.
Indulge a short rant: much of the visual information below won’t be able to be easily seen on Instagram. Especially with queer work, it’s important to remember that what you actually need for your own self-betterment isn’t accessible via your smart phone.
What a wonderful time for queer people to support art that pushes forward the possibilities of culture.
I look forward to seeing you at these resplendent discoveries of queerness, and also to circulating follow-up articles throughout the season and year that shine a spotlight on where to experience eminent queer work in our raucous and enlightened city.
Queerly yours,
Christopher
Detail image from Samantha Nye, Have You Tried It? Photo courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey Gallery. Photo credit: Constance Mensh.
SAMANTHA NYE: ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE DOING ATTRACTIVE THINGS IN ATTRACTIVE PLACES
Candice Madey Gallery, 1 Rivington Street, New York, New York 10002
April 22–May 28, 2022 (Gallery hours: Wednesday—Saturday, 11am—6pm)
Opening: Friday, April 22, 2022, 6:00—8:00 p.m.
Candice Madey is pleased to present Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places, Samantha Nye’s first solo exhibition in New York City. Working across painting, video, and installation, Nye has dedicated the last decade to creating compelling dialogues between queer identity, mid-century references, and camp sensibilities.
Nye’s video and installation practice, recently the subject of a solo presentation at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, reconsiders 1960s Scopitone films, the precursors to today’s music videos. In her remakes of these predominantly white and heteronormative short films, Nye centers queer sexuality and intergenerational kinship by casting her mother, as well as women and nonbinary people of her mother's and grandmother’s generations, to star alongside the artist. These themes are also highlighted in Nye’s painting practice, a medium to which the artist has maintained a longstanding commitment.
The seven oil paintings on view at Candice Madey are part of an ongoing series (2018–present) that takes Slim Aarons’s popular poolside photographs of the 1970s as its starting point. Known for his depictions of wealthy celebrities and socialites lounging in luxury, Aarons once described his work as “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” Struck by this rhythmic utterance, Nye began to challenge the photographer’s heteronormative understanding of attraction and its equation to privilege. While drawn to Aarons’s aesthetics of abundance, she rejects the power structures embedded in the photographs’ content. Stripping Aarons’s pool sides of their original occupants, Nye instead re-populates them with lesbian queer elders — cisgender, non-binary, and trans — engaging in sexual play and leisurely kink.
NYC Queer Comic Book Fair Event participants Lucky Sanford @luckysanford, Giles Crawford @gilesdraws, and James Dillenbeck @Jamesdillenbeck. Images courtesy of the artists.
NYC QUEER COMIC BOOK FAIR
Bureau of General Services—Queer Division (at The Center) 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York, NY 10011
Saturday/Sunday: April 23—24, 1—7pm both days, with free admission.
More Info
Description: The NYC Queer Comic Fair is BACK! After a 2-year hiatus due to COVID-19, Doable Guys is taking the helm and bringing back the fun! We’ll be in the Bureau, located in The LGBT Community Center, on the second floor and we have about 15 creators lined up! All are welcome to join!
Vendors:
Doable Guys @doableguys
WabiSabiZinez @Wabi_Sabi_Zinez
Patrick J. Reilly @NotPatReilly
It's Alive Comics @itsalivecomicsnyc
James Dillenbeck @Jamesdillenbeck
Edward Ficklin Ig: @papertiger74
SquareBears @squarebears
Giles Crawford @gilesdraws
Queer Lobster Shop @queer.lobster.shop
Michael Shirey @bouquetBoys
Tony Ortega @drtonyortega
Daniel Stalter @danielstalter
Lucky Sanford @luckysanford
Please note that masks are required at all times within The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.
Film stills provided by artist Peter Clough and used courtesy of the artist and haul gallery.
EXALTATION OF THE POROUS BODY: VIDEO WORKS BY PETER CLOUGH
haul gallery 368 Livingston Street, Basement, Brooklyn, NY 11217
April 23–May 22
Opening: Saturday, April 23 from 2—8pm at haul gallery, with an reception for the artist from 6pm–10pm at Circa Brewery 141 Lawrence St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
More Info
[Note: The work in this show is extremely graphic. Viewer discretion is advised. Please read below.]
haul gallery is pleased to announce Peter Clough’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Exaltation of the Porous Body. This show brings together a new body of video work in which Clough celebrates his experiences as a queer submissive. All of the work in this show is about exaltation—an expression of both pleasure and worship—of a body that is amorphous, shifting, dynamic, and uncertain, full of gaps and holes.
The exhibition is centered around a two-channel narrative video work titled On the Erotics of Stuffing Large Objects into Small Spaces. The video is a meditation on a variety of Clough’s lifestyle practices that center around using devices or “toys” to control his experiences of space and time, including his long-term wear of a chastity cage, his daily use of butt plugs, and frequent sessions spent locked in a small cage. As a person standing six feet and six inches tall, Clough has always had a sensitivity to the uncommon dimensions of his own body. This work explores the unique experiences of space and time gleaned from the world of BDSM, and the solace Clough finds in experiences that push the boundaries of comfort and consciousness. And it explores the ways that using objects to regulate the body’s processes, focusing on the body’s holes and gaps, can address complex issues like subjecthood and gender identity.
The exhibition also features a new series of single-channel videos on monitors that function more like moving photographs. These works are silent and still, and many are shot in slow-motion as a way to situate them between the narrative and the photographic. Each is a meditation on a single practice or body part, and together they present a rich and multifaceted account of Clough’s own bodily experiences.
Detail images from Portia LaBeija by Richard Alvarez and Realness (The Face Competition) by Mariette Pathy Allen, courtesy of the artists and ClampArt Gallery.
A FEELING AS WELL AS A LOOK
BY RICHARD ALVAREZA
DRAG BALL, HARLEM, 1984
BY MARIETTE PATHY ALLEN
ClampArt, 247 W 29th St, New York, New York 10001
Both Exhibitions: May 12–July 16, 2022 (Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10—6pm)
Opening extravaganza: Thursday, May 12, 2022, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
More info Richard Alvarez
More info Mariette Pathy Allen
ClampArt is pleased to present Richard Alvarez | A Feeling as Well as a Look—the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. Depicting his subjects as modern-day saints, Alvarez explores the intersection of the mortal and the divine through disparate styles of Renaissance painting, the 1980s Manhattan underground, and the religious imagery of his youth.
The title of the exhibition derives from a passage in an artwork by Lorraine O’Grady from her series Cutting Out The New York Times (CONYT). Alvarez saw an exhibition of the artist’s work in 2018 and was inspired by O’Grady’s found poetry.
ClampArt is pleased to present Mariette Pathy Allen | Drag Ball, Harlem, 1984 – Mariette Pathy Allen has been photographing the transgender community for over forty years. Through her artistic practice, she has been a pioneering force in gender consciousness, contributing to numerous cultural and academic publications about gender variance and lecturing across the globe. Her first book, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, was groundbreaking in its investigation of a misunderstood community. Her second book, The Gender Frontier, is a collection of photographs, interviews, and essays covering political activism, youth, and the range of people that identify as transgender in the United States. It won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/Genderqueer category. Other books include TransCuba and Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand.
Detail images from Baseera Khan: I am an archive used courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
I AM AN ARCHIVE BY BASEERA KHAN
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238
October 1, 2021–July 10, 2022 (Museum hours: Wednesday—Sunday 11–6pm)
More Info
Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive is presented as part of the UOVO Prize for an emerging Brooklyn artist. Baseera Khan uses their own body as an archive, often employing a variety of multimedia collage techniques to visualize the lived experiences of people at the intersections of Muslim and American identities, both today and throughout history. The exhibition debuts eleven new artworks, in conversation with key works made since 2017, that explore Khan’s body as a site of accumulations of experiences, histories, and traumas.
On view are rich and multilayered sculptures, installations, collages, drawings, photographs, textiles, and a video in which Khan investigates othering, surveillance, cultural exploitation, anti-blackness, and xenophobia within our public and private spaces—and proposes avenues for protection and liberation. The works express Khan’s interest in revealing the economics of goods and materials—such as oil, hair, architecture, and art—as commodities that create inequalities and otherness and that are historical and contemporary drivers of global change.
