Panel Synopsis:
This panel offers a reevaluation and theoretical repositioning and rethinking of lesbian and gay art history’s theories, methodologies, and goals; examples of these can be culled from the papers in Whitney Davis’s important 1994 anthology, Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History. Interestingly, Davis’s anthology emerged when a decidedly queer theory was exploding across the humanities, critiquing not only heteronormativity and patriarchy but also lesbian and gay history and theories themselves. Yet, queer theory played a virtually nonexistent role in dominant art history.
Thus, this panel will perform two things:
1) provide an overview of where queer art history is and what queer art-historical work is being done, and does, which have only recently emerged within the discipline from a more dominate lesbian and gay art history that has used queer as an umbrella term and not deployed it as a theoretical tool and/or methodology; and
2) show how the recent intersections of queer art history with feminism and/or anti-racist work have productively complicated queer art history.
Both entail exploring if, and how, queer art history has altered, or opened, the discipline of art history and its corollaries, and what this may mean—as well as what work remains to be done.
Queer(ing) Art History?
Chair: Robert Summers, Independant Scholar
John Paul Ricco, University of Toronto
Renate Lorenz, Independent Artist and Art Historian
Queer Curatorship
Room: Gramercy A/West, 2nd Floor
_________________________________________________________________ABOVE: Featured Image: 17 Years’ Supply by Wolfgang Tillmans
queeringartandtheory 