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?