Art and Queer Culture

Alexander Gray Associates was delighted to celebrate the launch of Art and Queer Culture, edited by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer, with cocktails and conversation; libations and liberation.

Spanning 125 years, Art and Queer Culture is the first major historical survey to consider the ways in which the codes and cultures of homosexuality have provided a creative resource for visual artists. Attempts to trouble the conventions of gender and sexuality, to highlight the performative aspects of identity and to oppose the tyranny of The Normal are all woven into the historical fabric of homosexuality and its representation. From Oscar Wilde to Ryan Trecartin, from the molly houses of eighteenth-century London to the Harlem drag balls of the 1920s, the flamboyant refusal of social and sexual norms has fuelled the creation of queer art and life throughout the modern period.

Catherine Lord is Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. She is a writer, artist and curator and has received numerous fellowships and awards for her work on cultural politics, disability, queer identities, feminism and colonialism. Her books include The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (2004) and Son Colibri, Sa Calvitie: Miss Translation (2007).

Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Professor in Art History and Faculty Chair of Stanford in Washington at Stanford University, and curator. He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Art (2002) and the newly published What Was Contemporary Art? (2013).