10 LGBTQ+ Artists to Know
Barbara Hammer, Louis Fratino, and More
It’s Pride Month throughout most of the United States, and it also happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. With this piece of history looming in our minds, wanted to celebrate those in the LGBTQ+ community who contribute to visual arts. While there are hundreds worth mentioning, we’d like to focus on ten artists who have and continue to explore the beauty, the difficulties, and the many unique experiences of queerness.
Laura Aguilar
Mostly self-taught, Laura Aguilar is a photographer who was known for images often showing queer women and people of color. Notably, many of her works fused the natural landscape and her own body. Latinx, queer, and obese, Aguilar used her lens to show beauty and dignity of herself and people like her. Aguilar died just last year due to medical complications, but her legacy and work lives on for future queer, POC artists.
Mickalene Thomas
Very few artists have reached Mickalene Thomas’s level of success, but not many people have her sheer talent either. Thomas may appropriate Cubist gestures or the poses of figures from Édouard Manet paintings and insert black women, often wearing stylish dresses and natural hair. Thomas uses the rich source material of western art history to reposition black, female bodies as symbols of power, desire, and beauty. Thomas creates vivid, intelligent, and sexy paintings, but she also provides her viewers with an important and defiant shift in narrative.
Salman Toor
Salman Toor is a painter who was born in Pakistan and now resides New York. Mediating those two worlds often plays out on Toor’s canvases, even more so recently. Although he’s a queer painter in one of the most liberal places in the world, he is navigating a foreign country where being Muslim and hailing from the Middle East is challenging, to say the least. Men who look like Toor are given their proper treatment, they are rendered tenderly and with compassion.
Benjamin Fredrickson
Sex work is the oldest profession according to some, but it is still often stigmatized and treated as a crime in many parts of the world. Benjamin Fredrickson’s work as a photographer began with him shooting his clients when he was a sex worker. After being diagnosed with HIV, Fredrickson was galvanized to focus more seriously on his photography and to de-stigmatize sex work, queer desire, and HIV.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a photographer who explores longing and erotic desire. His work often features fragmented limbs and nude bodies, which hint towards something yet leave a viewer questioning and wanting more. Often, Sepuya and his camera is featured in his images, implicating both himself and the viewer in whatever image he has captured. Elegant and subdued upon first glance, Sepuya’s images are charged with hunger and sensuality.
Louis Fratino
Louis Fratino is known for his intimate portraits of men. Always engaging, his portraits can range from casual to deeply erotic. The style of painting that Fratino deploys is equally sensual, with canvases covered exaggerated swathes of color and rounded, fluid bodies. After a heralded show at New York gallery Sikkema Jenkins, Fratino seems poised to become a major figure in contemporary painting.
Vaginal Davis
Not many can be called a “drag terrorist,” but the multidisciplinary artist and performer Vaginal Davis certainly can. Davis was born intersex and her mother was a radical feminist and activist who enabled Davis to embrace her unique position. Davis creates visual art, as well as performances, lectures, and music. She recognizes that because she is intersex, a person of color, and queer, she is considered unfit for this world. However, because she sees that, Davis has been able taunt and undermine those same racist, patriarchal ideas.
AA Bronson
AA Bronson is a living legend. As one of the three founders of General Idea, an art collective that helped pioneer non-material based artworks. Although more broadly conceptual when General Idea began in 1968, by the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS activism became the focus of their work. Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal themselves both succumbed to the virus in 1994. Their iconic and controversial appropriation of Robert Indiana’s LOVE painting became widely known and circulated internationally. After General Idea, Bronson also led the popular artist bookstore Printed Matter in New York from 2004 to 2010 and has maintained his own art practice.
Martine Gutierrez
Martine Gutierrez’s work has a glossy, commercial quality, but her work is much more than surface level glamour. Gutierrez is a transgendered woman who grapples with her complex Latinx heritage and her states of gender and sexuality in her work. By using the magazine and commercial language of photography, Gutierrez fashions herself as part model, part goddess. Instead of having a company use her for clout or for mainstream gawking, Gutierrez presents her pure vision, which defies conceptions of ethnicity, gender, and is, frankly, sublime.
Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer was a trailblazer for exploring the lesbian and female identity through her photography and films. Hammer’s work was groundbreaking in the 1970s and continued to provoke until her passing earlier this year. Technically experimental and unabashedly queer, Hammer would integrate feminist theory with her own experiences as a gay woman, as well as those of her friends and lovers.
