Queering Art History: A Symposium

The last few decades have witnessed a proliferation of approaches and methods influenced by queer theory within the humanities. Simultaneously, both academics and the general public have become increasingly interested in "queer art" especially in the field of modern and contemporary art. Yet while scholars have assembled queer theory into an academic discourse and perhaps even a discipline, internal debates continually redefine the parameters and stakes of the term. However, the ways in which queer theory has and could further influence art historical methods and projects has yet to be properly explored, particularly within a transhistorical context. How does looking through the lens of queer theory shift our relationship to the object of inquiry? What is art history if history is queered? Moreover, how does queer theory relate to prior art historical engagements with gender and sexuality? This conference will offer a platform for many different voices to work through these and related issues. As we raise these questions, we also ask: What are the limitations or possibilities of ‘queer' as it relates to analyses of race, economic position, and the political?

Organizing Committee: Ksenia M. Soboleva PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, Christopher T. Richards, PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, Erich Kessel, PhD Candidate, Yale University

Speaker Bios and Abstracts

Program

Friday, March 1

6:30 – 7:45pm
Keynote lecture by Heather K. Love: “Underdogs: On the Deviance Studies Roots of Queer Theory”

7:45 – 9pm
Reception

Saturday, March 2

9:30 - 10 am
Breakfast and Coffee (for speakers)

10 - 11:45 am
Panel 1. Queer Objects (moderated by Kenneth E. Silver)

• Jon Davies: "Sell Your Parents"
• Laura Guy: "Lesbian Graffiti"
• Hyoungee Kong: " Exotic Fantasies and ‘Queer’ Desires: A Case Study of Fin-de-Siècle Japoniste Advertisements"
• Brian Castriota: “Object Trouble: Constructing and Performing Artwork Identity in the Museum”

12am - 12:45 pm
Lunch (lunch will be provided for speakers only)

12:45 - 2:15 pm
Panel 2. Queer Methods (moderated by Malik Gaines)

• David Sledge: "Forrest Bess and Queer Meaning"
• Isha Yadav: "Mapping the future of Queer art in India: Comparative Study of Gaysi Zine Bazaar and Aravani Art Project"
• Daniel Sander: "Between the Ground and the Sky"
• Paul Hurley: "Interspecies sex: queering performance with nonhuman animals”

2:15 - 2:30 pm
Coffee and Cookies

2:30 - 4 pm
Panel 3. Queer Temporalities (moderated by Carolyn Dinshaw)

• Ian Bourland: "Queer Futurity and the Second Life of the Image"
• Nicholas Morgan: "Against Nature's Queer Art History"
• Lexi Bard Johnson: "Is a Lesbian Wearing a Dildo Queer?: Questioning the Capacity of Queerness"
• Yujin Jang: "Oscar Wilde's Affection for the Greek Past: A Queer Analysis of Affect and Temporality”

4pm - 5 pm
Reception

Speaker Bios and Abstracts

Ian Bourland: "Queer Futurity and the Second Life of the Image"

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) and Minor White (1908-1976) were both celebrated queer photographers working in distinct registers. The one died in his prime and in relative obscurity but is now remembered as a crucial figure in postcolonial and intersectional art making; the other was a founder of Aperture and key figure in the history of American modernism. Both worked during periods in which their subjectivities, desires, and photographs were considered marginal or subversive and each built on inherited iconographies and visual strategies even as they elaborated potential futures. This talk lingers on the archive of which both artists are a part, and considers questions of memory, elaboration, deferral, and speculation that are at odds with standard accounts of contemporary art's linear sweep.

Ian Bourland is Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art History at Georgetown University and a regular contributor to a range of critical outlets such as frieze and Artforum International. His book Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s will be published by Duke University Press this March.

Brian Castriota: “Object Trouble: Constructing and Performing Artwork Identity in the Museum”

The collections of many private and public art institutions now contain a growing number of contemporary artworks that involve or combine live performance, technology, and ephemeral or replenishable materials. Existing acquisition, loan, and collection care policies – conceived around “traditional” artworks that exist as contained, physical, relatively static objects or assemblages – have been challenged by this growing category of “other” artworks that do not conform to established frameworks and protocols. Many works frustrate collection caretakers’ attempts to pin down and define a work’s essential properties, as these may continue to change in response to the work being repeatedly enacted or installed in new formats or configurations. While some have characterized these works as “unruly” actors in the museum sphere, this paper considers how they might be better understood as entities that queer museum taxonomies and protocols, notions of original and copy, and clear-cut divisions between an artwork’s creation and its implementation. This paper examines questions of artwork identity through a lens of queer theory, proposing that the illusion of an artwork’s seemingly fixed and singular identity is in fact constructed and performed within the museum space. This paper considers how these collection objects shift the way museums approach acquisition, exhibition, and collection care of contemporary art and potentially other more conventional heritage objects.

Brian Castriota is a conservator specialized in the conservation of time-based media and contemporary artworks. He holds a Master's degree in Art History and a Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU where he graduated in 2014. He has worked as a contract conservator for time-based media artworks at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Time-Based Media Conservation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. He is currently completing a doctoral degree at the University of Glasgow within the Horizon 2020 research program “New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art” and works as a freelance conservator for time-based media artworks at both the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Jon Davies: “Sell Your Parents”

In this paper, I examine artists Andy Warhol and Danh Vo’s appropriation of their respective parents’ handwriting as a key conceptual component of their practices. Julia Warhola and Phung Vo found themselves laboring for their sons, their hand-writing chosen based on the aesthetic valuation of their identities as migrants. Such acts of intergenerational borrowing, impersonation and boundary-crossing draw on experiences of displacement, instrumentalizing biological bonds of parentage towards the construction of more performative—queer—models of identity. These uses of parental handwriting queer the production and circulation systems of art. The temporal ruptures, fraught futurities and idiosyncratic trajectories that mark the time of queer lives are unimaginable without the affects and discourse of diaspora, exile and “unbelonging” that characterizes migration. Vo’s work in particular subjects the realms of the personal and the domestic to the vicissitudes of the global art market, which now traffics in his family’s detritus, gravestones and handwritten letters, moving them through and storing them in exhibition spaces and collections on every continent. Warhol and Vo’s work can be seen as employing commerce in order to remake the family in ways that are not just tolerable but procreative for queer people, to turn the logic of reproductive futurism into queer artistic production and dissemination by looking backwards—sometimes even antagonistically—towards the migrant parents that brought them into the world.

Jon Davies is a curator, writer and PhD Candidate in Art History at Stanford University. He curated the large-scale queer exhibition Coming After at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, where he was Assistant Curator from 2008–12. He also wrote a book on Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s film Trash, and is currently editing a volume of writing by the late video artist Colin Campbell.

Carolyn Dinshaw

Carolyn Dinshaw has been interested in the relationship between past and present ever since she began to study medieval literature. Her 1982 dissertation, subsequently published as Chaucer and the Text in 1988, explored the relevance of new critical modes for older literature, while in her 1989 book, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, she investigated the connection of past and present via the Western discursive tradition of gender. In Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999), she traced a queer desire for history. In her most recent book, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012), she looks directly at the experience of time itself, as it is represented in medieval works and as it is experienced in readers of those works. In the classroom, she regularly teaches materials past and present, in courses ranging from Medieval Misogyny to Queer New York City.

Malik Gaines

Malik Gaines is a writer and performer interested in representation. His book Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (2017, NYU Press) traces a transnational circulation of political ideas through performances of the sixties and beyond, and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His articles include “The Quadruple-Consciousness of Nina Simone” in Women & Performance, “City After 50 Years’Living: LA’s Differences in Relation” in Art Journal, and many essays and interviews about for journals, magazines, museum publications, and monographs for artists such as Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Meleko Mokgosi, Charles Gaines, Sharon Hayes, and Glenn Ligon. Recent writing has discussed Julius Eastman in Artforum and The Judson Dance Theater in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition catalogue. His research for a second book is concerned with performances and artworks at the limits of the U.S. state.

Laura Guy: “Lesbian Graffiti”

“Lesbian Menace Strikes Again”... “Liever Lesbies”... “To Hell With the Boys”...
One way that lesbian authorship became legible in the 1970s was through the feminist graffiti that illuminated urban centres. Blunt statements signed with Venus glyphs interlinked on the streets like dykes coming together on a demonstration. These illegitimate claims to public space were untraceable signatures that nonetheless insisted ‘We Are Here’.

How to conceptualise a lesbian sign making inscribed into the fabric of the city? Simone de Beauvoir once referred to graffiti as a ‘monotonous’ writing that was daubed in bathroom stalls by the kind of men who admonished her when The Second Sex first appeared in print. Whilst Derek Jarman invoked a more desirous kind of ‘stammerings’ these were still written ‘always man to man’. With reference to photographs, illustration and anecdote, I will trace a different line through remote actions and impermanent marks in order to establish an ephemeral archive of graffiti composed within lesbian community. This paper will reflect on graffiti as a particularly queer kind of object for art history. Not simply a metaphor for the paradox of lesbian visibility, I will explore how the material excesses of this example of lesbian culture might serve histories of queer art.

Laura Guy is an Early Career Academic Fellow in Art History at Newcastle University, UK. She received her PhD from Manchester School of Art with a thesis titled ‘Manifestos: Politics and aesthetics in queer times’ in 2017. Her writing has been published in various contexts including Frieze, Aperture and in Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice (2017). An essay ‘Desiring Photographs, Reading On Our Backs' is forthcoming from Women: A Cultural Review.

Paul Hurley: “Interspecies sex: queering performance with nonhuman animals”

The history of animal bodies in contemporary art is well documented – from the horses in Kounellis’ Untitled (1969) to the chickens in Mendieta’s Untitled (death of a chicken) (1974). While often read for their symbolic or representative function (Aloi, G. (2011) Art and Animals), or as furred or feathered readymades (Baker, S. (2000) The Postmodern Animal), how might we conceive of interspecies performances as queer ecologies of becoming? In the context both of the Anthropocene and of advances in scientific understanding of nonhuman sentience? Following Halberstam (Halberstam, J. (2010) ‘Animal sociality beyond the hetero/homo binary’ Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2010, 321–331.), I ask if a queer theoretical engagement with more-than-human aesthetic practices can overcome human exceptionalism in its racialised, gendered and classed form?

Considering a performance organised by British artist Angela Bartram in 2016, this paper asks the question (as Chen does) whether the queer is, or has ever been, human (Luciano, D. and Chen, M. Y. ‘Has the Queer ever Been Human? GLQ 21:2 – 3)? In Bartram’s collaborative interspecies pack, 7 human companions followed their canine counterparts to learn behaviours and establish empathy, but with one of the dogs on heat, the humans also unwittingly made public their own bestial selves. Through a carnivalesque performance of sex on show, the audience bear witness to experimental (non-touching) bestiality. Encountering the “strange stranger” (Morton, T. (2010) “Queer Ecology.” PMLA 125 (2010): 273–82.) thus facilitates an experiential queering of (interspecies) boundaries and of the limitations of the human itself.

Paul Hurley is an interdisciplinary artist and academic. He is interested in figurations of more-than-human worlds, and in how theoretical work can bring about new practices and understandings in a variety of contexts. Originally from a background in performance art, his practice has evolved to include socially-engaged and participatory work, both in artistic and academic research projects. His currently an Associate Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of West of England, a Senior Research Fellow in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton, and Artist in Residence at the University of Bristol. Over the past couple of years he has worked with engineers, microbiologists, dancers, vets, historians, chickens, poets, film makers, nurses, shamans, theologians, cooks, farmers and dogs.

Yujin Jang: “Oscar Wilde’s Affection for the Greek Past: A Queer Analysis of Affect and Temporality”

Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1891) can be read as a significant theoretical source for queer studies, as it implicitly makes an argument about homosexuality and its relation to the principles of aestheticism. In this paper, I will examine how the language in “The Critic as Artist,” especially that used to articulate Wilde’s reception of Greek culture, can be aligned with the rhetorical expressions of other queer narratives that explain the contemporary meaning of aesthetic modernism. The term “modern” as one of the characteristics of late-nineteenth-century aestheticism can be very paradoxical as it incorporates distinctly non-modern concepts. This becomes particularly evident in Wilde’s sense of backwardness seeking the past of the ancient Greek. Understanding how Wilde conceives the ‘modern’ characteristics of his aestheticism—which thus conveys the ideas of progress and advancement—is significant in that it establishes a counter-discourse to the idea that decadent aestheticism is a symptom of cultural and social decline. Through a close analysis of Wilde’s rhetorical expressions about the binary of high/low art criticism, the affect of an artwork, and the notion of “race” and its collective/subjective life, I will argue that Wilde’s affection for the Greek past contributes to the historical and cultural uniqueness of the nineteenth-century aestheticism, in terms of its deep connection to the affective and temporal experiences of his contemporaries.

Yujin Jang is a PhD candidate in the program of Critical and Cultural Studies in the department of English, University of Pittsburgh. My research interests include Victorian literature and culture (with a focus on fin-de-siècle aestheticism), gender and queer theory, film and media studies, and the interdisciplinary relations between literature and music.

Alexis Bard Johnson: “Is a Lesbian Wearing a Dildo Queer?: Questioning the Capacity of Queerness”

In a striking image, Emily Roysdon wears a paper mask of David Wojnarowicz’ face while lying on a bed, dressed in a shirt unbuttoned to expose part of her breast. She touches her chest with her left hand and pulls her pants down to expose a dildo that she grasps with her right hand. Roysdon’s image specifically mirrors the photograph from Wojnarowicz’s series, Rimbaud in New York, where friend John Hall masturbates on his bed while wearing a mask of poet Arthur Rimbaud. This work, untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), exemplifies José Esteban Muñoz’s call to “…engage in a collective temporal distortion…. to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present…” Roysdon does not simply build on the past but collapses the past into the present and asserts a queer genealogy that operates outside of the constraints of straight time. In Sara Ahmed’s terms, Roysdon’s work visualizes a re-orientation. And, as Ahmed reminds us, “…it is the ‘hands’ that emerge as crucial sites in stories of disorientation…Hands hold things.” Roysdon’s hands draw attention to her substitutions—Wojnarowicz for Rimbaud, herself for Hall, and dildo for penis. As will be discussed in this paper, Roysdon makes us contend with specificities of queer bodies and pleasure, centers lesbian sex and eroticism, and highlights both the affinities and disjunctures between gays and lesbians. This image, used as the cover of LTTR’s first issue named “Lesbians To the Rescue,” only puts further pressure on limitations and possibilities of queerness. 

Alexis Bard Johnson is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Stanford University and a 2018-2019 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art. Her dissertation is titled “Turning the Page: Image and Identity in U.S. Lesbian Magazines.” Her essay on Andy Warhol and drag was published in 2018 in the exhibition catalog for Contact Warhol: Photography Without End.

Hyoungee Kong: “Exotic Fantasies and ‘Queer’ Desires: A Case Study of Fin-de-Siècle Japoniste Advertisements”

This paper takes a cue from queer theorists’ analyses of overlaps between sexual non-conformativity and other forms of differences—including political, racial, and geographical—and traces queering effects of Japonisme (the Western taste for Japan) on middle-class French women. It focuses on the fin-de-siècle Parisian perfume Amaryllis du Japon’s periodical advertisings and posters (1891–93), which embody typical formulae of contemporaneous advertisements for Japoniste products by featuring kimono-clad Japanese women and emphasizing the floral aroma. These images were signified by two sets of cultural ideas: first, stereotypes of sapphic Japanese femininities that widely circulated in the West; and second, the allegedly close relation between olfactory sensations and women’s sexual arousal, as frequently suggested by writers and medical authorities. I suggest that these advertisements, citing the transgressive alterity of the faraway land, promised the viewers upon using the perfume enticing sensual experiences, such as non-normative sexual—e.g., gynosexual—adventures. Japan here functions as an imaginary exotic fantasy that provided visual vocabularies to desires that existed outside the normative and compulsory straight line. These images, in other words, provided occasions for their female viewer-consumers to privately sense, imagine, and enjoy possibilities of pleasures outside the class, racial, and gender boundaries of the French bourgeois sexual norms.

Hyoungee Kong is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation, “Fleshly Japonisme: Japonisme and Women’s Bodies in France 1871–1914,” examines visual and material representations of the Western taste for Japan in late nineteenth-century France and explores how ideas of Japan promised middle-class French women occasions to reimagine their bodies and bodily pleasures outside of Western norms. She has recently spent time at the National Museum of American History and the Freer and Sackler Galleries as a Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellow, studying late nineteenth-century photographs of Japan and advertisement images inspired by ideas of Japan. 

Heather K. Love

Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard), the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”), and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations (“Description Across Disciplines”). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, reading methods in literary studies, and the history of deviance studies. She is currently completing two books: Underdogs, on the deviance studies roots of queer theory; and Practices of Description: Reading the Social in the Postwar Period, which offers a literary history of microsociology from 1955-1975.

Nicholas Morgan: "Against Nature's Queer Art History"

The 1989 exhibition Against Nature, mounted by writer Dennis Cooper and artist Richard Hawkins at the Los Angeles independent art space LACE, sparked controversy and elicited polemics—both pro and con—for its emphasis on desire and insistence on the importance of visual pleasure in the midst of the AIDS crisis. What is more striking in retrospect than this sex-positive, anti-agit-prop position is the temporal dimension of Against Nature’s intervention. This paper examines the ways in which Cooper and Hawkins, along with the included artists (many of whose careers were cut short by the epidemic), framed queerness as sequence of historically contingent forms of sociality. This genealogical approach was offered as an attempt to both historicize the epidemic and to forestall the forgetting of earlier, seemingly obsolescent forms of sexual identity (a forgetting AIDS seemed to accelerate). Anachronism, deferral, and dilation were the crucial strategies employed by this array of artists. Insofar as Against Nature intervened into discourses around AIDS and art by reconceptualizing temporality, it anticipated later work in queer theory, and returning to it now sheds light on the American art of that period. But more broadly, the exhibition mapped its notions of queer time onto specifically art historical trajectories. Presenting an alternative model for narrating art history, for distinguishing between the arrière-garde and the avant-garde or the formalist and the political, the exhibition reimagined the idea of Modernism and Postmodernism along queer lines.

Nicholas Morgan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. His dissertation examines a range of queer artists working between 1989 and 1993, situating their art in relation to the AIDS crisis and tracking the interrogation of identity politics that often surfaces in their work. He has written for VisualAIDS, caa.reviews, Artforum and other publications. 

Daniel J. Sander: “Between the Ground and the Sky”

While modern and contemporary art history is beginning to progress from engagements with gay and lesbian studies to engage with queer studies, these meetings are arguably still primarily concerned with embodied anthropocentric sexualities. I look to recent developments in scholarship coming from science and technology studies, new materialist, and speculative realist perspectives so as to consider queerness in art as it relates to the nonhuman and inorganic. If, in legal discourse in the United States, queer sexual behaviour is punishable as a crime against nature, and if one related response by queer artists and academics has been to embrace and exaggerate an antisocial position, then this paper seeks a flattened aesthetic framework in which to retain queer negativity while reconfiguring relationality from the perspective of queer of colour critique. I do so through my previous research on select works of Roni Horn and Felix Gonzales-Torres, as well as through my recent curatorial practice at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. The works I address evidence tactics that do not hide queer content but spread it across a seemingly innocuous surface. This effect is accomplished by desublimating an organic ground into an inorganic background.

Daniel J Sander is Assistant Curator at the Leslie-Lohman Museum (LLM) and holds graduate degrees from NYU's Arts Politics and Performance Studies departments. Recent projects include the show Haptic Tactics at the LLM and a special issue of Women & Performance, 'Queer Circuits in Archival Times', based on a conference of the same name he co-organized in 2016. 

David Sledge: “Forrest Bess and Queer Meaning”

Significant research has been performed on how artworks come to mean and become culturally legible. At the same time, parallel questions exist within the field of gender: how do we assume our bodies, and how might those bodies enter into and interact with existing frameworks for social meaning? In both fields, such questions are of key importance in both historical and contemporary study. My paper joins these two parallel modes of inquiry, looking at their convergence in the artwork and sexological research of painter Forrest Bess (1911-1977).

How might the question “What does this artwork mean?” parallel demands for the strict classification of sex or gender? Furthermore, what are the psychic effects of these modes of questioning, of power-laden narrations necessary for an object or person to become culturally legible? If many abstract painters saw their work as a negation of language, Bess instead linked his paintings directly to the narration of sexuality. In both cases, they were tied to a series of hermaphroditic surgeries performed and documented by the artist. I employ Bess’s work to think through modes of constructing social meaning in both sexuality and the interpretation of art, and how they increasingly became joined together as abstraction claimed to speak for an “inner” self. I argue for the failures of descriptive language and its role in the (often exhausting) cultural scripts through which meaning is routed when we demand an accounting for, especially in instances where the act of asking implies an ambiguity or deviation from expectation.

David Sledge is a PhD student at Columbia University. He's worked on curatorial projects and research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Williams College Museum of Art. An active writer, he's appeared in recent months in Art in America and caa.reviews

Kenneth E. Silver

Kenneth E. Silver is Silver Professor of Art History, New York University and Adjunct Curator of Art, the Bruce Museum. He was a founding member of the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association and is the author of "Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art," in Hand Painted Pop, L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992; "Master Bedrooms, Master Narratives: Home, Homosexuality, and Post-War Art," in Christopher Reed, ed. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, 1996; and “The Murphy Closet and the Murphy Bed,” in Making It New: The Art and Style of Sarah and Gerald Murphy, Williams College Museum of Art, 2007.

Isha Yadav: “Mapping the future of Queer art in India: Comparative Study of Gaysi Zine Bazaar and Aravani Art Project”

India has only recently decriminalized the LGBT+ community, in its iconic judgment, but the art community has been working relentlessly to eradicate the social stigmas, resisting the marginalization and reclaiming its identity through art spaces for a long time. This paper will be an ethnographic account as well as comparative study of two indigenous queer art communities emerging from India, Gaysi Zine Bazaar and Aravani Art Project.

Gaysi Zine Bazaar is a closed, elite, and ticketed exhibition space for selected young art-educated and digitally equipped queer artists to display and sell their zines. Aravani Art Project is a collective of transgender women artists, from lower middle class and marginalized backgrounds that paint public walls. One is a closed, elite gathering of tech-savvy, digital artists and pop-art enthusiasts supporting them by purchasing prints. The other is a lower income group, secluded from the mainstream society, afraid, trying to claim the streets by painting them. Through this paper, I’m arguing that queer art is transforming conventional exhibition spaces and the meaning of art making itself, and in that process giving birth to a new art-viewer. I will be exploring how both the exhibition spaces are starkly segregated by class difference, and how that becomes the bedrock of sociality of queer artists based on their economical backgrounds, even though they belong to same category of artists. I shall study the difference in their aesthetics, how these contrasting communities help queer artists contest their identities, normalizes diverse sexualities, and how their identity is viewed and consumed in contrasting art spaces.

Isha Yadav is a feminist artist, a professor and an MPhil Research Scholar based out of New Delhi. Her thesis is on Feminist Art, South Asian women artists and Instagram. She has two master’s degrees. Isha is a founder of Delhi Art Slam, an art collective of over 400 artists in the city and is working towards gender and art collectives and activism in South Asia. 

Organizers

Ksenia M. Soboleva is an independent curator and PhD Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, studying queer art and lesbian visual culture. Her dissertation focuses on lesbian artists and the AIDS crisis in New York, from 1981-1996. Framing her research within a larger genealogy of lesbian invisibility, Ksenia reconsiders the role of lesbian artists in the AIDS Crisis, demonstrating how they acted not merely as witnesses or caretakers, but as active participants whose work needs to be studied with equal attention that male artists have received in order to create a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of artists’ response to the AIDS crisis. Ksenia holds a BA in Art History from Utrecht University and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, the history of gender and sexuality, animal imagery and performance studies. She is a contributing writer to Hyperallergic.

Christopher T. Richards is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts studying western medieval art. His dissertation focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vernacular French manuscripts and sketches a picture theory as a function of desire. The body, its desires, and its engagements with picture books is an abiding interest of Christopher’s, and he explores psychoanalytic and queer theory to explore these intimate encounters between readers and images. Prior to his graduate studies, Christopher worked as the Curatorial Assistant at Olana State Historic Site and the Collections Cataloguer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He remains interested in post-medieval responses to the 'medieval,' and the imagined worlds that medieval texts and images invite us to enter and to (re)create.

Erich Kessel is a PhD student in the department’s History of Art and African-American Studies program at Yale University. He holds a B.A. in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, where his research was supported by the Mellon-Mays Foundation and Penn Humanities Forum. He examines the relationship between black embodiment, afterlives of slavery and visual culture. In addition to his engagement with black radical thought and critical theory, Erich’s additional research areas include media studies, psychoanalysis, affect, the history and theory of fashion, and the study of popular culture.