15 LGBTQ art shows that are spicing up global museums this fall
If variety is the spice of life, the world’s museums are perfectly seasoning things this fall with an expansive range of exhibitions from LGBTQ artists, exploring myriad motifs like queer motherhood, Afrofuturism, positive indecency, disposable consumerism and gay history. From Miami to Melbourne and from Houston to Helsinki, here are the exhibitions to catch this fall.
Carlos Alfonzo: Late Paintings
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Born in Havana in 1950, Carlos Alfonzo came to the U.S. as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and soon built an international career on his vibrantly colorful neo-impressionistic works. As explored in depth here, his paintings took a sharp, somber turn in the final year of his life prior to his death from AIDS-related complications in 1991.
Through Nov. 6
Rebecca Ward: Distance to Venus
SITE Santa Fe
In this solo show, Texas-born and Brooklyn-based artist Rebecca Ward explores the theme of queer motherhood through curvy pieces that trace the transformative phases of pregnancy and childbirth, all the while utilizing the process of banded, sewn and deconstructed canvases that hallmark her paintings.
Through Nov. 7
Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
One of Australia’s most noted, controversial and thought-provoking artists, Paul Yore crafts found images, materials and texts into exuberant, sexually charged and politically loaded works that celebrate hybrid and fluid queer identities, as seen here within five themed and purpose-designed spaces at Melbourne’s ACCA.
Through Nov. 20
General Idea
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Canadian trio Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, collectively known as General Idea, were witty and wacky provocateurs who challenged the established art world and addressed themes like consumerism, queer identity and the AIDS crisis (complications from the disease took both Partz and Zontal in 1994). This most comprehensive retrospective of their still-influential 25-year career features more than 200 works.
Through Nov. 20
Rafael Soldi: A Body in Transit
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami
Peru native Rafael Soldi uses his photographic work to examine how queerness and masculinity intersect with immigration, memory and loss. In this show, three of his interconnected series present self-portraits, images of queer male-identifying Latinx immigrants and mined video stills that mirror his childhood experiences at an all-boys Catholic school in Lima.
Through Dec. 4
The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930
Wrightwood 659, Chicago
Developed by a team of scholars led by art historian Jonathan D. Katz, and the first part of an ambitious project that will continue in 2025, this groundbreaking exhibition of more than 100 works surveys the first wave of self-consciously queer art after the term “homosexual” was first coined in Europe in 1869.
Through Dec. 17
Martine Gutierrez: Indigenous Woman
Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa
Tulsa’s esteemed Philbrook presents works from visual and performance artist Martine Gutierrez’s Indigenous Woman project, which began as a self-modeled and photographed glossy magazine of high fashion-esque portrait interpretations of indigenous Mesoamerican and West African deities. Here several of the magazine’s captivating pages have been blown up and mounted in elaborately hand-painted frames.
Through Dec. 31
Tove Jansson
Helsinki Art Museum, Finland
Best known for creating the magical Moomin characters, Tove Jansson is one of Finland’s most beloved artists and authors. This celebration of her life and work includes paintings by Jansson, photographs by her brother and Super 8 film footage shot by Jansson and her life partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, during summers they spent together on the Finnish island of Klovharu.
Through Dec. 31
Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Surprisingly the first New York museum show by influential German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, this MoMA exhibition explores the full breadth and depth of his three-decade career, highlighting how his unconventional and profoundly inventive approach has been both informed by and become a platform for a variety of social and political causes.
Through Jan. 1
David LaChapelle: Make Believe
Fotografiska, New York
Honoring another influential photographer with his first major museum solo show in North America, Fotografiska presents more than 150 pieces by David LaChapelle, whose vivid and often cheeky work blurs reality and fantasy while showcasing the fashionable and the famous.
Through Jan. 8
Indecencia
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York
This group show of queer artists from Latin America or of Latin American descent expands on the “indecent” theology of Argentine writer Marcella Althaus-Reid, in which oppressive ideas of normality are deconstructed and dismantled, and the indecent is embraced for its power to throw off the shackles of colonialism and patriarchy.
Through Jan. 8
New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Rooted in storytelling like most of her work, this enthralling collection of new pieces by Nigerian-born Toyin Ojih Odutola is set in 2050 in Eko, the traditional Yoruba name for today’s Lagos, and presents a future haunted by human-driven environmental changes, as inspired by the speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler and the poetry of Dionne Brand.
Through Jan. 22
Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Utilizing traditional Palestinian embroidery techniques, Jordan Nassar explores the concepts of home, land and memory in pieces that combine geometric patterns with abstract landscapes. Each of the two multipaneled embroideries in this show, his largest works created to date, contains 57 individual panels, with titles pulled from a book by Lebanese American writer Gibran Khalil Gibran.
Through Jan. 29
Anthony White: Limited Liability
Seattle Art Museum
The dense and vivid work of Seattle artist Anthony White presents a world not unlike our own, overpacked with morsels of flashy but disposable pop culture, technology, luxury branding, gaming, junk food and various other vices, within pieces that have been uniquely and painstakingly created using PLA, a melted biodegradable plastic primarily used for 3D printing.
Through Jan. 29
Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
In this first museum solo exhibition of El Paso-native Troy Montes-Michie’s work, his collages of magazine images of the Black male body appear alongside his sculptural works that trace the social history of the zoot suit, the eponymous garment at the center of the 1943 Los Angeles attacks on Mexican American, African American and Filipino American youth known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
Through Jan. 29
