Queer American Art from Eakins to the Present - Detailseite

It’s no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19^th century and grew up together. Queer American Art from Eakins to the Present thus begins with the coining of the word “homosexual” in 1869, and surveys how painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to that development up until the new millenium. We will study the work of such prominent American artists as John Singer Sargent, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin , Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Paul Thek.

Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in American art and 2) why do we so often find that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well?  In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. Were queer artists driven by a utopian hope that in a more modern world, the egregious homophobia/transphobia of the past would finally be no more? And finally we will ask about the social and political usefulness of forms of queer political dissent if those forms still remain illegible as queer to a wider audience. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.

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