LGBTQIA+ Artists at VMFA

Stadia III, Julie Mehretu

21st Century Gallery, Level 2

“I’m interested in describing this as a system. . . a whole cosmos, and that is the overall painting, while the little minute detail marks act more like characters, individual stories. Each mark has agency in that sense—individual agency.”—Julie Mehretu

Mehretu’s monumental paintings address contemporary themes of power, colonialism, and globalism with dramatic flair. She adopts imagery from architecture, city planning, mapping, and the media. At the same time, her bold use of color, line, and gesture makes her works feel like personal expression.

Stadia III belongs to a series of three Stadia paintings dealing with the theme of mass spectacle. Conceived in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the series reflects Mehretu’s fascination with television coverage that transformed the war into a kind of video game—as many at the time commented—and in the spectrum of nationalistic responses that she witnessed during travels to Mexico, Australia, Turkey, and Germany. The series also reflects her interest in the international buildup to the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Two Chairs and Fireplace, Mickalene Thomas

“What’s so great is that Matisse looked at Manet. And Romare Bearden looked at Matisse and Manet. And I’m looking at all three; it’s a lineage.”—Mickalene Thomas

Thomas explores traditional notions of femininity and beauty, as well as female empowerment, through paintings portraying provocative, glamorous African American women. She begins her three-part process by building sets redolent of 1970s domestic interiors, where she then poses and photographs her model. Finally, she paints the image on a much larger scale, incorporating materials such as glitter and sequins.

Thomas’s dialogue with art history is evident in this painting, which, unusually for her, presents a setting without the figure. The rich profusion of patterns plays on Henri Matisse’s paintings, while the illusion of torn and pasted fragments recalls Romare Bearden’s collages.

Willem van Heythuysen, Kehinde Wiley

Great Hall, Level 2

“A big part of what I’m questioning in my work is what does it meant to be authentic, to be real, to be a genuine article or an absolute fake? What does it mean to be a real black man? Realness is a term applied so heavily to black men in our society.”—Kehinde Wiley

Wiley’s lavish, larger-than-life images of African-American men play on Old Master paintings. His realistic portraits offer the spectacle and beauty of traditional European art while simultaneously critiquing their exclusion of people of color.

Wiley’s Willem van Heythuysen quotes a 1625 painting of a Dutch merchant by Frans Hals, whose bravura portraits helped define Holland’s Golden Age. Wiley’s model, from Harlem, New York, here takes the name of the original sitter from Harlem, the Netherlands, whose pose and attitude he mimics. Despite the wide gold frame and the vibrantly patterned background whose Indian-inspired tendrils encircle his legs, this subject’s stylish Sean John street wear and Timberland boots keep him firmly in the present and in urban America.

Matt and Jo, Catherine Opie

Photography Gallery, Level 3

Catherine Opie reworks familiar genres, including studio portraiture, to create alluring and evocative photographs that challenge normative representations of family, place, home, love, and community.  In Matt and Jo, which forms part of Opie’s 1990s series of portraits of her friends in gay, lesbian, trans and queer communities, the subtle lighting and lustrous emerald-green background recall the work of Renaissance painter Hans Holbein and, more broadly, the conventions of historic European portraits designed to command attention and respect. Opie is especially interested in how subtle details and gestures—the angle between the first and second fingers, the lightness of a hand on another’s shoulder, the set of the mouth—can convey a spectrum of emotions, in this case a mix of desire, tenderness, pride, and wariness. 

Franko B., London (Cross-Color Series-Scene Queens), Lola Flash

Photography Gallery, Level 3

Starting in the 1980s, Lola Flash began experimenting with printing positive color slide transparencies onto a type of photographic paper meant for printing color negatives. This non-standard use of materials, which Flash called “cross-color,” produces an inverted color spectrum in which colors appear as their opposite: blue turns yellow/orange; red turns green, and so forth. This process enabled Flash to present the heavily tattooed London-based performance artist and gay-rights activist Franko B in eerie, dramatically unnatural shades of blue and green. Made the height of the AIDS epidemic, Flash’s cross-color series challenges the fixity of identity, offering instead luminous and alluring visions of glowing, chimerical bodies.  For Flash, who is Black and queer, disrupting conventions of color is at once an artistic and political act that undermines binary stereotypes.

King of Arms, Rashaad Newsome

Shown from below an ornate gilded urban crown draped with lush textiles, Rashaad Newsome’s video conjures the grand traditions of procession and theater. His work channels a wide range of sounds and spectacles, from Mardi Gras festivities to hip-hop music to “vogueing” (gay ballroom scene from the 1980s) exploring themes of the Black body, ornamentation, and heraldic emblems. Through a blend of conceptual and technical strategies, Newsome constructs a new cultural framework of power that promotes innovation and inclusion. King of Arms fuses the art world with the opulent ballroom scene while engaging southern traditions of procession. Newsome welcomes collaboration from a range of leaders in the worlds of art, fashion, music, and activism, providing them with a platform for creative expression. His art especially serves as a space for LGBTQ voices and communities of color to shape their own representation and celebrate through pageantry and performance.