12 LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

Born in 1978 in Bogota, Colombia, Carlos Motta is a New York–based artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes film, video, photography, drawing, and sculpture. His work focuses on the body as a “contested terrain” to explore themes related to politics and history as seen through a queer lens. These include social justice movements built around sexuality and gender, as well as the legacy of colonialism in Latin America from the Spanish conquest to today. Images of physical duress, violence, and death appear frequently in Motta’s work, which inveighs against neo-fascism and the Eurocentric narratives and value systems forcefully imposed on native cultures. Motta has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. This wide-ranging show at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), surveys his 25-year career, highlighting a body of work that is as rigorous as it is dramatic.

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), through October 26

A contemporary of the Young British Artists (YBA), Hamad Butt (1962–1994) was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in London. A queer artist who emerged during the AIDS epidemic (to which he eventually succumbed at age 32), he produced multimedia art that reflected the uncertainties of being an outsider threatened with extinction. This anxiety was made palpable in his best-known works, a series of installations featuring fragile glass containers holding elements such as iodine, bromine, and chlorine in gas and liquid form—all of which are fatal if released. Another piece, Transmission (1990), was a black-light installation for which viewers donned goggles that screened out ultraviolet light to reveal a wall painting of the fictional, carnivorous extraterrestrial plant that invaded Earth in the classic sci-fi movie Day of the Triffids. Butt’s first career survey at London’s Whitechapel Gallery brings together those works along with his paintings and drawings.

Whitechapel Gallery, London, Through September 7

As its title suggests, this exhibit focuses on the past 25 years of the legendary British artist’s career, though it also includes an ample selection of the iconic early compositions that made Hockney (b. 1937) a household name. Although Hockney’s practice extended to printmaking and photography, his reputation rests on paintings that channeled Impressionism, Matisse, and Picasso through an anodyne Pop Art sensibility. This made his portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes easy viewing over the decades, but Hockney’s work has always evinced his queer identity. He came out as gay while at London’s Royal College of Art in 1960, a time when homosexuality was still criminalized under British law. And during a sojourn in Los Angeles in the mid 1960s, he was unabashed about portraying gay life under the Southern California sun with images of naked young men languidly lying together or skinny-dipping in pools. These subjects and more are all part of “David Hockney 25,” the artist’s largest survey to date, at the at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through August 31

Opulently shot with a fine cinematic eye, the video installations of British artist Isaac Julien (b. 1960) have often employed historical scenes and characters to explore questions of race and queer identity. The most notable, Looking for Langston (1989/2016), transposes the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to the early 1990s and the AIDS crisis, layering images with spoken excerpts from the writings of Black gay figures including Langston Hughes and Richard Bruce Nugent. Lessons of the Hour (2019) retraces key episodes in the life of Frederick Douglass, connecting his work to contemporary activism. True North (2004) tells the tale of Matthew Henson, an African American member of Robert Peary’s 1909 expedition to the Arctic whose role in history was erased because he was Black. Now on view at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, this look at Julien’s efforts over his 25-year career is the artist’s most comprehensive to date as well as his first museum retrospective in America.

De Young Museum, San Francisco, through July 13

Mounted at the Denver Art Museum in cooperation with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, “History Is Painted by the Victors” is the first major survey of Canadian First Nation artist Kent Monkman. Born on Manitoba’s Fisher River Cree Reservation, Monkman (b. 1965) employs the vernacular of history painting to weigh in on the intersection of queer aesthetics, native culture, colonialism, and climate change in compositions that are often sweeping in scope. (One such painting, Mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), measures a monumental 11 by 22 feet; it’s included here in its first trip outside its home in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which commissioned the piece for its Great Hall in 2019.) Monkman’s work frequently features his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a “legendary being,” according to the artist, “who comes from the stars” and symbolizes the acceptance of gender fluidity within many indigenous cultures.

Denver Art Museum, through August 17

This group exhibition at the Phillips Collection in the nation’s capital pays tribute to the life and work of Essex Hemphill (1957–1995), a Washington, D.C. poet, performer, editor, and activist noted for his engagement with themes of race, gender, sexuality, love, and community during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. He was also well known for his collaborations with visual artists, and this show presents contributions by those who worked with or knew Hemphill during his lifetime as well as younger artists who were inspired by his example. (The former included Isaac Julien, whose video Looking for Langston features texts by Hemphill.) Among his other accomplishments, Hemphill was a co-founder, in 1979, of the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature, a publication showcasing writings by modern Black artists. He also helped to establish the spoken-word group Cinque, in 1983. He published numerous collections of poetry and essays and frequently gave public readings and lectures.

Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., through August 31

Not all the artists being celebrated during Pride Month highlighted LGBTQ+ issues in their work. Case in point: Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), an Atlanta-based abstractionist who spent four decades working in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. Her compositions often comprised fields of color overlaid with vibrant, radiating lines suggesting magnetic fields or cosmological structures. Indeed, she had a marked interest in astronomy, stating that her work represented “a continuing search for understanding relationships in the universe.” Similar concerns animated a series of “Wood Pictures,” assemblages and reliefs made out of found pieces of lumber, created in the early 1960s. These, too, sought to explore wider patterns in nature as revealed in surface textures. Thompson went against the grain by eschewing the political content of her contemporaries in African American art—not to mention queer themes—but given the recent resurgence in abstract painting, this revival at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, her work seem more relevant than ever.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, through October 12

Los Angeles-born artist Ser Serpas often deals with the subject of gender fluidity in her work, regularly drawing on her own experience with transitioning as inspiration. (She paid for her surgery with the help of a GoFundMe campaign, chronicling its progress on Instagram.) In high school Serpas (b. 1995) engaged in social activism and community organizing, the strains of which still reverberate in her art. Serpas is known for assisted “readymade” installations sourced by gathering found items from the area surrounding a particular exhibition venue; these are then assembled into discrete combines arranged in a grid. As in the case of Duchamp, Serpas’s efforts critique the cultural valuation of objects, though she takes the idea to the next level by disassembling the work and returning the various components to their point of origin. This exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel showcases all aspects of her practice, which also includes painting, photography, and performance.

Kunsthalle Basel through September 21

To describe Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) as protean would be putting it mildly: Over the past 35 years he’s taken a sweeping approach to photography in terms of both process and themes. He’s created abstract images using experimental darkroom techniques and has covered a wide range of subject matter, from still lifes and portraiture to landscapes and intimate scenes, consistently displaying an uncanny ability to make the everyday seem wondrously alive. His work closes the gap between art and his own life, which includes his identity as a gay man. In myriad subtle ways, then, his art combines the personal and the political. In this retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the last before the museum closes for five years of renovation, Tillman’s art will be contextualized within the era in which he emerged, with nearly 20,000 square feet of space given over to his exploration of technological developments and social upheavals since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Centre Pompidou, Paris, through September 22

Spanning sites in and around the National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., “Always to Return” focuses on an aspect of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s unconventional approach to portraiture—one that substituted texts and abstract materials for images. Emerging during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Gonzalez-Torres (1957–96) explored the contingencies of existence at a time when gay men were threatened by a terminal disease. In this respect, his pieces were often elegiac, especially his lightbulb installations, which have been placed in three key outdoor locations near the museum: the facade of the National Portrait Gallery itself, the first floor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library of the District of Columbia Public Library, and along 8th Street NW. There were also hints of mortality in his “candy” installations, which consist of regularly refreshed piles of wrapped candies, pieces of which can be taken by viewers. Overall, these works, along with others, underscore the artist’s contention that portraiture wasn’t a matter of capturing likeness, but rather a compilation of the always changing histories that shape the individual.

National Portrait Gallery and Archives of American Art, through July 6

An early adopter of internet art, Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954) is a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker who confronts the depredations of patriarchy, global capitalism, and environmental racism from a queer perspective. Her breakout film, Fresh Kill (1994), relayed the tale of a lesbian couple living with their child near the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island. The bleakly humorous plot involves a corporate cover-up of radioactive pollution that leads to the irradiation of their daughter (who turns green from eating contaminated fish) and her suspicious disappearance. Another work, Brandon, was a web art piece based on the 1993 rape and murder of a transgender man in Nebraska retold in nonlinear fashion. In 2019 Shu represented Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale with the commissioned work 3x3x6, which interrogated racism and institutional incarceration. At Haus der Kunst, Munich, this first-ever survey of Cheang’s career takes her debut feature as its starting point, continuing from there to explore her groundbreaking practice.

Haus der Kunst, Munich, through August 3

This show’s title is punctuated with an exclamation point for good reason, as its eponymous subject was a larger-than-life figure looming over London’s art and club scenes of the 1980s and ’90s. Fashion icon, artist model and performer, the Australian-born Bowery (1961–94) pushed the boundaries of style and gender, challenging the divide between aesthetics and life, becoming, in effect, a kind of animate art object. His plus-size body was his canvas for the outré outfits he designed for performances staged at nightclubs and galleries. The most notable of his costumes were captured in his collaborations with photographer Fergus Greer, whose images presented Bowery as a Regency dandy covered head-to-toe in polka dots, or as an S/M mummy in black vinyl. He posed frequently in the nude for the painter Lucien Freud, whose portrayals of Bowery became Freud’s most iconic work. This exhibition at Tate Modern, London, offers an immersive tour through Bowery’s shape-shifting career.

Tate Modern, London, through September 2