Opposition, 1962, Acrylic on canvas
Like last year’s Pride celebrations, this year’s take place under the grim cloud of backlash. Trump 2.0 has made life for the transgender community seem increasingly precarious, but even “mainstream” gays and lesbians have to worry whether gay marriage will be overturned. One legal challenge made its way to the Supreme Court, though it was defeated; more are sure to follow. Meanwhile, polls have shown a dip in support for LGBTQ+ rights among Americans since the early 2020s. All in all, it’s not a great picture. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine now that there was ever a time when corporations went all in on Pride banners and products during June. And yet, LGBTQ+ rights are still being fought for, with artists in the vanguard—as our recommendations for the best shows of LGBTQ+ artists during this year’s Pride celebrations make clear.
Few figures in 20th-century American art were as responsible for shaping its trajectory as the gallerist Betty Parsons (1900–1982). Scion of a wealthy family, Parsons opened her space in New York City in 1946, where she helped to launch the careers of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Ellsworth Kelly, and Mark Rothko, among others. She gave Barnett Newman his first solo show and did the same for Robert Rauschenberg—an outing that yielded zero sales. Besides being a dealer, she was a poet and an abstract artist whose paintings and sculptures followed the aesthetics she promoted. She was also queer and had spent the 1920s and 1930s in Paris as part of an expatriate lesbian milieu around Gertrude Stein. (Parsons was briefly married to a man who was also gay; their divorce led her family to disinherit her.) This show represents the first major survey of Parsons’s career, examining her oeuvre within the context of these intertwining aspects of her life. While her works weren’t specifically gay-themed, they do reflect the complexity of Parsons as a person and as a titanic presence in postwar art.
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