Queer Art

Curators Barnes and Rolls-Bentley (coauthor of Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between) offer an accessible if overly brief introduction to queer art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Spotlighting art that “troubles normative (especially heteronormative and cisgendered) ways of thinking, categorizing or being,” they cover artists who depict themselves as a means of “asserting their visibility on their own terms”; who reconstruct histories of queer life; who portray romantic and platonic queer love; and who use their work to envision new futures that spurn “inherited limits” and allow “queerness [to] thrive by design.” Household names like Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol appear alongside such contemporary artists as Salman Toor. (Entries for each artist provide a representative artwork, brief biography, and list of key works.) The authors conclude with a timeline of queer art history, a short glossary, and suggestions for further reading. There’s plenty of good information to be found here, but the entries exist in a vacuum, sufficiently discussing each artist’s engagement with queer themes but doing relatively little to provide context or encourage interconnected thinking. It’s a useful reference book, with limits. (May)