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Taking a “Pink & Bent” Look at Art

The exhibition Pink & Bent: The Art of Queer Women, on display at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York City through June 28, delivers a rare and significant survey of lesbian art and artists from the 1970s through today.

Pink & Bent features the work of nearly 50 queer and feminist artists, including notable names such as Judy Chicago, Harmony Hammond, Phranc, and Joan E. Biren, and emerging talents including Allyson Mitchell and Maria Tsaguriya. Paintings, photography, sculpture, drawings and mixed media mingle on the walls, where they grapple with topics like gender roles, self-identity, the masculine and the feminine, and self-representation.

If that sounds ambitious, it’s meant to be.

“I really wanted for the exhibit in general to be provocative, create questions and stir up thought,” explained Pilar Gallego, who spearheaded Pink & Bent with her co-curator, Cora Lambert. Both of them are also artists and have works in the exhibition. “We really wanted to make it a monumental exhibition in terms of being inclusive and having different artists.”

Photo: Becca Bradley, Lover

That principle of inclusion extends into many areas, most obviously the curators’ choice of the open-ended term “queer” to describe the exhibition. Despite that preference, another popular word for women who love women appears rather conspicuously in seven huge wooden letters that spell out “LESBIAN.” Placed off to the side, near the gallery entrance where its bulk could be accommodated, it is the only work in the show contributed by a biological man, the deceased George Dudley.

While a variety of artists and mediums are represented in Pink & Bent, also emphasized is a range of ages, cultures, regions, aesthetics and levels of artistic accomplishment and commercial success. True to the feminist impulse that informs queer women’s art, the show aims above all to bring visibility to individuals and issues that often go unseen or get suppressed, whether in the art world establishment or on the graffitied, activist streets. Queer women from both spheres contribute to the exhibition.

Maria Tsaguriya, Untitled, 2007

Photos used with permission of the artists.

“This show is a safe space in which gay artists don’t have to censor their artwork,” said Lambert, who consulted her own list of superheroes in order to develop the impressive roster of participating artists. “They can be who they are and say what they want.”

Gallego echoed her co-curator’s point about the imperative for dialogue, particularly in 2008, a potent political year with much at stake for queer women.

“The story behind the work is very important,” she said. “We need to validate the stories that are quiet. It’s about voices.”

With almost 50 voices represented in the show, and with some of those artists speaking through more than one piece of work, the conversation can seem overwhelming at times, although the unusual opportunity to see queer women’s work collected in one place remains consistently gratifying. Because of the co-curators’ extensive commitment to inclusion, visitors may find themselves asking what, if any, common thread exists among such a widely diverse community of queer women artists.

In addition, as many lesbians probably recognize all too well, defining the parameters of a community can present a thorny task. Who are the members? What traits do they share in common? How can individuals embrace their uniqueness and still maintain a coherent group identity?

That impulse to inquiry can feel frustrating, until one concedes that provoking questions about community is precisely the point of Pink & Bent. So, what holds it all together?

As experienced at the exhibition, a fundamental and shared priority from the 1970s onward is the basic act of making oneself visible as a queer woman. That visibility imperative may take the form of documentation, such as the photography selected from Phyllis Christopher, legendary chronicler of the San Francisco dyke scene in the ’90s; or recasting, as occurs in the paintings Grace Moon makes of classic lesbian pulp novels like The Price of Salt; or maybe, incitement, as practiced by Guerrilla Girls Inc., the radical feminist artists whose critique of sexism and racial imbalances in the museum world and Hollywood influenced the film Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

Grace Moon, Nicole and Julie, 2004

Some of the earliest visibility efforts highlighted in Pink & Bent come from the pioneer Joan E. Biren, also known as JEB. Her tender images of women in everyday situations, taken in the era before Photoshop, catch viewers off guard because they capture the sensuality of seemingly innocent scenarios.

“I wouldn’t call them sensual,” JEB coyly responded to the observation. “I wouldn’t call them erotic. I would call them lovely to look at.”

JEB,

Priscilla and Regina, 1979

© JEB (Joan E. Biren)

JEB, Claire and Joan, the 10th anniversary celebration of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1986

© JEB (Joan E. Biren)

JEB says she started her work in the 1970s in response to a void she noticed after she came out.

“I had never seen photos like that, and I desperately wanted photos like that to exist,” she explains. “My life’s work has been to make the invisible visible.”

She recalled that, for her first lesbian photograph, she kissed her lover while pointing a camera at them from arm’s length. Other women at that time were reluctant to be subjects for documentary photos.

Although lesbians in general today are considerably less averse to self-promotion, due in no small part because of JEB, she thinks that the quality of mainstream portrayals could use some improvement.

“You can make an argument that we have visibility, but what I think we don’t have is authentic visibility,” JEB said, classifying the status of mainstream imagery as overwhelmingly femme, thin, white and middle-class. “We need to be more diverse.”

Racism, sexism and homophobia preoccupy the work of Lola Flash, a significant photographer in the generation after JEB who identifies as black and gay. She includes a self-portrait among the extraordinary palettes and nuanced expressions in her Epicene selections on view. The portraits examine boundaries and the blurring of them.

Lola Flash, Self-Portrait

“My experience of being black and being gay is that people don’t see just that when they see me,” said Flash, who explained that she observes a little bit of herself in each of her portrait models. “Above and beyond our ethnicity or our sexuality, we’re all good people.”

Flash described the purpose of her work as reappropriation: “The idea is to bring to the forefront images of people that you normally don’t see and to create a discourse about that.”

Since 2003, photographer Sophia Wallace has fostered conversation about an unseen segment of the queer community with Bois and Dykes, a project about female masculinity that explores the spectrum of identities from dyke and butch to tomboy, aggressive and transgender.

“For me, it was really about representing the basic,” she said. “I felt acutely a sense of invisibility about my life as a dyke living in New York City with my partner. My focus became butchness because I just didn’t see it anywhere.”

Sophia Wallace,

Sara, Matthew & Sushi, New York City

Recently, her visual love letter to butch women and trans men has taken the form of intimate and truthful portraits displayed in the Pink & Bent exhibition.

“A new direction with my work is artfully constructed portraiture with beautiful lighting,” Wallace said. Her latest approach produces work that is uncommonly gorgeous but unquestionably real.

Wallace joined a panel discussion called “Women in the Arts Speak Out,” with wood sculptor Nancy Azara and painter Heidi Pollard, moderated by Jennifer Edwards, at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation on May 29. Planned as an accompaniment to Pink & Bent, the conversation revealed the practical concerns of queer women artists seeking to navigate an inhospitable art world. Participants and guests debated how to set a fair price for work, why more queer artists do not identify as such, and how to find a space to exhibit.

In an illustration of the challenges, one gay man in the audience commented on what he perceived as the lack of sexuality in the exhibition.

“I was really surprised because there really isn’t that much sexual expression of women,” he said. He compared it to the more overtly anatomical displays common in gay male art.

The panelists quickly enlightened him, making reference to Cora Lambert‘s sexy image Sapatinho De Cristal, which represents the dyke aesthetic of a woman wearing men’s briefs. “I just think there’s a huge reservoir that’s hidden from view that is our sexuality,” cautioned Pollard, “and that because you can’t see it, no one thinks it’s there.”

The panel discussion is to be followed on June 12 by an event called “COME HEAR! Queer Women Reading Poetry,” hosted by queer poet and activist Alix Olson and featuring more then a dozen queer women poets, including Staceyann Chin.

Meanwhile, the opening reception for the exhibition on May 20 was the largest ever at the gallery, and it has already achieved notoriety as the lesbian happening of the season. “It was an art mob scene,” confirmed Angela Jimenez, whose photographs from a forthcoming book project about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival are displayed in Pink & Bent.

Apparently, inclusion makes for a compelling exhibition, in addition to a great party.

Pink & Bent can be seen at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York City until June 28, 2008. For more on Pink & Bent, go here.

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