A History of Gender Identity & Sexuality in Art

• Queer and Trans Visibility in Art History

  • For many members of the LGBTQIA2+ and a range of additional expressions of gender identity and sexuality, often we do not see ourselves reflected or respected in the past. Around the world today we face continued prejudice and persecution
• Queer and Trans Visibility in Art History

  • Works of art since ancient times have revealed the complexities of a wide range of gender identities and human couplings
• • Contemporary artists can be advocates for inclusion and change. They often draw inspiration from artists of the past in order to present a vision for the future.
• • Kent Monkman, Metis, Fisher River Band, History is Painted by the Victors, 2013
• • Kent Monkman, who is Cree and Scottish and identifies as two-spirit, a term used by some Indigenous folks to describe individuals who embody both masculine and feminine spirits and thus move beyond a gender binary
• • Monkman's work engages with long-standing European and North American histories of art by remixing historic compositions and incorporating Native people as protagonists.
• • Monkman also critiques legacies of colonialism, racism, homo/transphobia in the art world more broadly and museums in particular. For example, his large painting History is Painted by the Victors presents a poignant continuum of queer and trans history.
• • Albert Bierstadt - Mount Corcoran (1876-77)
• • Thomas Eakins - Swimming (1885)
• • Panoramic vistas by government-sponsored painter Alfred Bierdstadt, who documented the beauty of landscapes that would eventually be regulated by US state and federal laws, as well as scenes of white, settler, male intimacy outdoors by realist artist Thomas Eakins, known for homoerotic subtexts in his works
• • Miss Chief Eagle Testickle - Monkman's alter ego - gazes directly a the viewer from the lower center of the canvas while painting an image of Crazy Horse and Northern Plains tribes defeating Lt, Colonel George Custer's troops at the Battle of Little Bighorn
• • Mickalene Thomas - Sleep: Deus Femmes Noires (2012)
• • One advantage of turning to contemporary art is that artists today -- especially creators of color -- are revealing vibrant and long histories of queer and trans presence that have otherwise been marginalized, censores, or erased.
• • Mickalene Thomas reimagines 19th century French painter Gustave Courbet's canvas of two white women sleeping as an intimate scene between Black women
• • By doing so, she challenges ideas about bodies and beauty, and aims to make headway into the "boy's club" of individuals often championed in the art world
• • Thomas and Monkman both help us see the past anew and their work asks that we take a moment to unlearn harmful histories of hetero- and cis(gender) normativity that have relegated the rainbow of LGBTQIA2+ and other historical identities to the shadows
• • Gustave Courbet - The Sleepers (1866)
• • Heterinormativity and cisnormativity are concepts that assume heterosexuality and gender assigned at birth are normative or preferred modes of sexual orientation and gender identity, respectively.
• The Maori (Aotearoa/New Zealand)

  • Carved wooden box shows 14 different scenes of bodies engaged in sensual and sexual acts
• Greek Symposia

  • A vase painting that has a gathering of men of myriad ages that might have involved acts of erotica, nakedness, and drinking
• Ancient Roman Love Story

  • Emperor Hadrian and his paramour Antinous
• Keith Haring

  • Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death, 1989
• Graciela Iturbide, Magnolia

  • Non-binary muse; limited range of queer examples from the past that may or may not be presented in survey texts