SANTA FE — What position did queer people play in creating the artwork communities all through the Southwest? Out West: Homosexual and Lesbian Artists within the Southwest 1900–1969 on the New Mexico Museum of Artwork goals to reply this query with a collection of works by artists in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Texas, a area of the US that afforded them the sexual freedom they had been denied elsewhere.
The exhibition primarily highlights artists in Northern New Mexico, equivalent to R.C. Gorman (Navajo), Marsden Hartley, Anne Noggle, Agnes C. Sims, Cady Wells, and We’wha (Zuni), whose names and practices could or will not be acquainted to museum guests. Traditionally, most of mainstream American media and Western artwork historical past has framed this space as a rural arts mecca for (largely White and male) artists whereas bypassing conversations about sexual identification and dismissing, exoticizing, or appropriating Indigenous cultures. Out West makes an attempt, not less than partly, to take part in dismantling that dominant narrative, very like the 1999 exhibition that Concord Hammond curated at Plan B Evolving Arts in Santa Fe, from which the present present borrows its title.
Fittingly, this exhibition has no strict or static boundaries, aesthetic or in any other case — no assumptions about or prescriptions for what “queer artwork” of the time could or could not have been. A fluid group cross-referencing happens all through, together with Anne Noggle’s black and white portrait of Laura Gilpin, Gilpin’s colour {photograph} of Agnes C. Sims, R.C. Gorman’s lithograph of Hosteen Klah (Navajo), and Paul Lantz’s painted portrait of Lynn Riggs.
A modernist exhibition wouldn’t be full with out substantial consideration to portray. Marsden Hartley’s “Rocks in Water” (1922–23) exemplifies his use of panorama to precise his feelings. Right here, a mountain vary is foregrounded by two bushes, each felled; one is useless and the opposite barely alive, struggling. Cady Wells’s santo portraits mirror his psychological state attributable to sexual prejudice, his fight in World Struggle II, and nervousness concerning the atomic bomb and close by Los Alamos. An early untitled, visually busy summary portray by Agnes Martin is a deal with for viewers who’ve solely encountered her later minimal gridded works, and Robert Gribbroek’s “Epiphyllum” (1953) connects the present to each the Transcendental Portray Group and widespread tradition (he went on to work at Disney Studios and Warner Bros.).
I used to be notably drawn to Anne Noggle’s “Untitled (Twin Mattress)” and “Grave Diggers” (each 1967), two black and white pictures wherein the viewer hovers barely over scenes which might be directly mundane, heart-wrenching, probably liberating, and finally inevitable.
Technically, the exhibition concludes in 1969, the 12 months of the Stonewall Rebellion, after which some individuals within the LGBTQ+ group started to make themselves and their sexual identification extra publicly seen. Curator Christian Waguespack extends the date vary to incorporate two works within the present by extremely influential artists, Concord Hammond’s “What Have You Carried out With Our Want?” (1997) and Delmas Howe’s “Zeus and Ganymede” (1980).
The experiences, expressions, and impacts of queer artists, whether or not within the Southwest or elsewhere, can’t probably be represented by one exhibition. Not surprisingly, and maybe not out of step with the exhibition’s theme, Out West left me wanting extra.
Out West: Homosexual and Lesbian Artists within the Southwest 1900–1969 continues on the New Mexico Museum of Artwork (107 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico) by means of September 2. The exhibition was curated by Christian Waguespack, head of Curatorial Affairs and curator of Twentieth-Century Artwork.