Art
10 Chicago Art Exhibitions to See This Winter
CHICAGO — There will be hundreds of exhibitions between now and the end of March, when the weather starts to warm up around these Middle West parts. Here's 10.
Queer
Art
Tom, Bob, and the Boys: Queering Midcentury Americana
LOS ANGELES — Bob Mizer and Tom of Finland are to queer pop culture something like Picasso and Braque are to 20th-century abstraction: shocking then but still rich and surprising.
Art
Flushing Nothing Down the Tubes
CHICAGO — If Jean Genet shit out the text from his book The Thief's Journal, which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison, and cheerleaders barfed up blood and guts in high school, they might combined look like the conceptual results of Oakland-based Jason Benson's PH://Dungeon_Mix_[vol.1]://The_H
Art
Divining the Future of the Past
CHICAGO — Donna Huanca is from the South Side of Chicago, and she hasn't been back here since she was 15, an adolescent girl.
Art
Subversive Style, Straight Out of the Closet
“Through clothing, an inner phantom self becomes visible,” quoth FIT Professor of Art History Anna Blume on a plaque before one of her sartorial signifiers: a relaxedly tailored suit, white shirt and tie.
Art
Ask Me Any (Gendered) Question
CHICAGO — Gender is a fun game to play — if you know the rules and are willing to break them accordingly. As I was working on a story about a queer art show here in Chicago, I found myself thinking about the show as a space for cruising, as if in a bathhouse. Conveniently, much of the art in this sh
Interview
They’re Here, They’re Queer, Get Into It: Dirty Looks
This July, the monthly film series Dirty Looks mounted the second installment of their “On Location” program, an ongoing presentation of art interventions that encroaches everywhere from bars to galleries to the television sets of everyone in the New York area. The series takes on guerrilla tactics
Art
Transgressive Queer Art, Tinged with Nostalgia
Today's New York art world is painfully nostalgic for the 1980s — a time when rent in the East Village could be paid on tips, syringes littered the streets, and social forces challenged artists to create astounding works. Creativity crackled in the air, as did the impending trauma and transformation
Interview
The Facelessness of Tomorrow Begins Today
CHICAGO — It is impossible to go back to a world without biometrics and facial recognition tools, but it is not too late for a political act against the idea of allowing our faces to be scanned for the purpose of surveillance or informatic capture.
Interview
How to Become Queerly Mentored
CHICAGO — While New York may be the American epicenter of all things art, continually battling it out with the fantasyland that is Los Angeles, the opportunity to work with an older, possibly queerer mentor (queerer in the sense that they're older than you and have been there, done that) doesn't oft
Books
The Bookish Queer: Locating Queer Literature, Then and Now
How did queer writers and bookish types find queer content in the past and how they do it today, when so many of the past networks would appear to have dispersed?
Books
Your Worst Fear and Your Best Fantasy Traced Through Art History
Holding a sign that reads "I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy," a photograph of a proud and defiant woman at a gay liberation march in the 1970s opens Phaidon's newly published Art & Queer Culture, illustrating the dual visions of queer identity by the field of art history.