ART & DESIGN
The 3 Little Pigs, a digital image by Marc Martin on display at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. This is one of the works on display as part of the Pride Month celebrations.
ART NEWS
In celebration of Pride Month, museums, galleries, and art institutions across the country are hosting art exhibitions, showing films, and rolling out the red carpets to bring attention to the plight of the LGBTQ community.
BY KAZAD
BALTIMORE, MD —It is Pride Month, and museums, galleries, and art institutions across the country are doing everything to make it eventful. From the Baltimore Museum of Art to Baltimore Creative Alliance, Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, many events are lined up not just to celebrate but also to bring attention to issues affecting the LGBTQ community.
What does LGBTQ mean?
What does LGBTQ stand for? Many people have been asking this one question. LGBTQ full acronym is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer or Questioning. These terms describe a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Queer Interiors at the Baltimore Museum of Art continues to be a major attraction for art lovers since it opened. However, the hope is that it will attract even more people to the museum during the Pride Month celebrations because of its relevance to the LGBTQ community.
Conceived and produced by Rahne Alexander and Jaimes Mayhew, Queer Interiors, which is part of an ongoing exhibition, includes a larger-than-life bed, furnishings, and personal artifacts. At the core of the installation is the multimedia wall quilt Baltimore LGBTQI+ Home Movie Quilt. The piece pays homage to Baltimore album quilts and the AIDS Quilt. The Baltimore LGBTQI+ Home Movie Quilt is an important example of a crowd-sourced multimedia portrait of the city’s LGBTQI+ communities.
Creative Alliance Celebrates Pride Month
At the Baltimore Creative Alliance, the Pride Month celebration began in May. Last month, the organization held its popular Charm City LGBTQA Film Festival. Several films focused on the experiences of the LGBTQ community. In its 4th year, the event featured movies like Of Girls and Horses, TAB: Hunter Confidential, The Circle Out in the Night, Queer Shorts, Gerontophilia, and several others.
In addition to the movies, there were also talks dedicated to LGBTQA. According to the curator K.J Mohr, this year’s festival featured award-winning films, highlighting the lives and issues affecting the LGBTQA community. The films were carefully selected from films that premiered at the most renowned national and international LGBTQA film festivals, including Sundance, Berlin, and Tribeca.
In June, Baltimore Creative Alliance has continued the celebration of the LGBTQ with the 6th annual Rainbow Fest 2017. Dedicated to Kathleen Happ, “the film festival is part of Creative Alliance’s ongoing support of the LGBTQA community of artists and activists in Baltimore.”
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Working in partnership with Planned Parenthood, Creative Alliance presented documentaries and shorts aimed at educating members of the community. The Passionate Pursuits was one of the documentaries in the festival. The documentary allows an insight into Angela Bowen, a lesbian feminist activist organizer, writer, and professor. Bowen grew up in the inner city of Boston during the Jim Crow era and faced many prejudices on her path to success. Her story explicates the challenges of race, class, gender, age, sexuality and they informed her strategies for survival.
Brooklyn Museum Celebrate Pride Month
At the Brooklyn Museum in New York, a series of events scheduled for June will bring attention to issues affecting LGBTQ in New York and around the world. Teens are the main focus of this year’s celebrations at the Brooklyn Museum. On June 9, the museum hosted a special event called LGBT Q Teen Night: A Night Among the Gods. The night was put together by LGBTQ teens and their allies. There was music, workshops, and other fun activities.
The LGBTQ Teen Night: a Night Among the Gods was an opportunity to see exhibitions dealing with gender and sexuality. A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt is one of the shows at the center of discussion during the event. The show investigates and questions why women were often depicted on their coffins with male attributes. The ongoing permanent collection show continues to be a major attraction during the Pride Month festivities. In addition, the museum will screen new short films by young, local artists called Black Queer Brooklyn on Film.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Met Fridays: Pride on Friday is one of the major events celebrating Pride Month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Scheduled for Friday, June 23, the event includes gallery talks and art-making. A dance party is the icing on the cake.
Queens Museum
The Queens Museum is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the borough’s pride parade with the exhibition The Lavender Line: Coming Out in Queens. It runs through July 31 with an opening reception slated for June 18. In continuation of the effort to bring attention to the plight of the LGBTQ, the museum will also on June 18 commemorate the murder of Julio Rivera, a 29 year old gay man, who was killed by three white skinheads because they wanted to “reclaim” their neighborhood from gays and homeless people.
Rivera was killed in 1990 in a schoolyard in Jackson Heights, Queens. The three white skinheads lured him to the schoolyard where they bashed his skull with a hammer before finishing him off with a knife. The homophobia-driven murder was later described as a hate crime.
Rivera’s senseless killing engendered the coming out of the Queen’s LGBTQ community and its pride parade. After the murder, New York City’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community began mobilizing, calling the police to take actions against those perpetrating hatred against the LGBTQ.
The 8th Floor
Voice=Survival will open on June 15 and run through August 11 at The 8th Floor, an independent art space set up by collectors Shelley and Donald Rubin in 2010. This exhibition is an important addition to other celebrations slated for Pride Month.
The multidisciplinary exhibition used the works and archival materials by artists to examine the battle against the HIV/Aids epidemic. The artists include Donald Moffett, Kiki Smith, David Wojnarowicz, ACT UP, Jordan Arseneault, and PosterVirus. Others include Yann Beauvais, Mykki Blanco, and Adinah Dancyger, Chloe Dzubilo, and Gran Fury. There were also works by Andrea Geyer, and Sharon Hayes, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gustavo Vazquez, Shan Kelley.
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
At the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Pride is celebrated all year round. But June is even more special as it is the Pride Month. As part of its celebration, the museum which recently reopened its expanded space in SoHo, New York, has great plans that will delight everyone.
At Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the celebration began on June 8 with the museum’s annual summer benefit Live Loud Now. Subsequently on June 10, Found: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction will go on display. The exhibition examines issues affecting the LGBTQ. Additionally, there will be a family-friendly block party. The event will include activities for all ages and a youth art fair from students at the Gender & Sexualities Alliance at The Math & Science Exploratory School.
Japan Society Celebrate Pride Month
A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints is at the Japan Society in New York. The exhibition examines gender fluidity, identity, and presentation apply to Edo-period Japan (1603-1868). The exhibition investigates Wakashu (“beautiful youths”), a gender category of adolescent males considered appropriate and desirable sexual partners for both men and women. In the show are overs 65 woodblock prints, as well as paintings, luxury objects, and personal ornaments. The show also offers a critical artistic and historical context for gender performance and sexual expression.
New Museum Celebrates Pride Month
On display at the New Museum in New York are works by RAGGA, a community of queer Caribbean artists. Titled RAGGA NYC: All the Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another, the exhibition is engaging viewers on a different aspect of gay life.
Franklin Street Works
The Work of Love, The Queer of Labour is at the Franklin Street Works. A temporary exhibition at the Stamford, Connecticut art space examines gay life through the prism of class. The works in different media expose how queer communities that have existed outside of rigid social structures can become shining examples of an egalitarian, loving society. More importantly, they show an integral aspect of the LGBTQ life that many people do not know about. The exhibition continues until August 27.
Minneapolis Institute of Art
For the Pride Month, the Minneapolis Institute of Art has dedicated its monthly Third Thursday free public party of June 15 to the celebration of the Pride Month. There will be music, dancing, and games. Additionally, there will be a workshop for making flags for the Twin Cities’ annual parade.
Museums and Galleries Celebrate Pride Month in Style using art and other forms of entertainment. Is there any Pride Month celebration going on around you? Join the art conversation: Share your thoughts and comments.
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