The authors found that writing queer culture into the history of art meant redrawing the boundaries of art as well as those of history. "By mixing canonical figures like Picasso and Robert Rauschenberg with a salesman at Sears who made scrapbooks, we are inviting people to think about the various worlds that art inhabits and makes possible, and the relation between private and public forms of artistic expression." The caption for the page reads, 'The San Francisco we know and love.' Near each beach, Wood has placed a small circular photograph of men enjoying themselves au naturel. "My favorite page in the scrapbook," says Meyer, "is a spread which includes a golden map of the city specifying the location of several nude beaches. The scrapbook, Meyer says, exemplifies how queer people have defined and occupied their own social spaces over the years, even when they could not publicize either their sexuality or the images that they made depicting it. 1924), a Sears salesman who frequented San Francisco's gay beaches in the 1950s and '60s and documented the proclivities on offer at each. These include a map from a scrapbook by Tim Wood (b. Meyer and Lord mined archives and libraries for works with queer content that might not be well known to the public, particularly for works made in the 19th and early 20th centuries. "But then the context opened our eyes." Redrawing boundaries "We'd maybe find something visually not galvanizing at first," Meyer says. 1979) is represented by her 2003 image of two women holding hands – a radical statement in her place and time. For example, Polish photographer Karolina Bregula (b. The authors survey 300 visual artists from all over the world, in what they see as an enduring resource for art teachers, students and enthusiasts.īy "queer," Meyer says he means "sexual and cultural practices that defy the norm, and that build community around an idea of difference rather than assimilation."ĭuring the course of the project, Meyer, whose research had previously centered on 20th-century America, learned that varying degrees of homophobia and persecution around the world meant that artists expressed their queerness in varying degrees of radicalism. Meyer, a scholar of 20th-century American art history and the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford, co-authored Art and Queer Culture, the most comprehensive survey of queer art in the 19th and 20th centuries.Ĭo-authored with retired University of California, Irvine, artist and critic Catherine Lord, the book traces a dialogue between visual images and queer culture, including but not limited to high art, and homosexual culture from 1885 to the present. Whether in art or in mass media, such images convey universal emotion, while also drawing power from their ability to shock.Īs such, Meyer argues that pictures of same-sex kissing and other homoerotic imagery demonstrate in a uniquely clear manner the interdependence of all art within its social context. In making formerly private content public, such scenes "help to create queer culture by generating alternative images of – and possibilities for – love and intimacy," says Meyer. News coverage of recent milestones in gay rights routinely includes images of happy same-sex couples kissing in celebration.īut according to Stanford art historian Richard Meyer, visuals of same-sex kisses and other gay images do much more than illustrate happy moments. Courtesy of the artist.Stanford's Richard Meyer co-authors the first major historical survey to consider the ways in which homosexual codes and cultures yield creative resources for visual artists.īy Barbara Wilcox The Humanities at Stanford Sasha Wortzel, We Have Always Been on Fire, 2018. David Antonio Cruz, runlittlewhitegirl, portrait of the girls, 2016/2017.
Courtesy of Carpenter Center for Visual Arts/Harvard Art Museum. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehman Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Silence = Death Project, Silence = Death, 1987. Courtesy of the artist, Salon 94, and the Solomon R. Tseng Kwong Chi, Art After Midnight, New York, 1985. David Armstrong, George in the Water, Provincetown, 1977.
Hal Fischer, Signifiers for a Male Response, from the series "Gay Semiotics," 1977/2014. Diana Davies, Gay Rights Demonstrations, Albany, NY, 1971.
Courtesy of Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. © The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY. Johnson hands out flyers for support of gay students at N.Y.U.), c. Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York. Header Image (in chronological order): Fred McDarrah/Getty Images, Celebration After Riots Outside Stonewall Inn, Nelly (Betsy Mae Koolo), Chris (Drag Queen Chris), Roger Davis, Michelle and Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, June 1969.