Until recently, the study of gay culture, sexuality and its effect and presence in mainstream culture itself was not focused on the level of history, art or human nature.
Within the past few decades, Dr. Jonathan Katz, UB's new associate professor of visual studies, has been changing that notion.
According to the Sept. 9 issue of The New York Times, the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture will open on Oct. 20 in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Katz and David C. Ward, a National Portrait Gallery historian, co-curated the exhibition.
The exhibition, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," considers the role of sexuality in the period of post-war American art, culture and its depiction. "Hide/Seek" is the first of its kind: a major museum exhibition focusing exclusively on sexual difference, exploring themes of gender, desire and social behaviors.
Throughout the decades, Katz, who will also direct the new visual studies doctoral program, has worked with numerous institutions and programs created within that sphere to combine queer politics and art history on a professional level.
"What I wanted to do was to explore the perceived sexual binary difference that we see in society by focusing on the artists who were closeted gay artists during one of the most homophobic periods in American society, the 1950s and 1960s," Katz said. "We have two seemingly separate groups of people supposedly - totally straight and totally homosexual - and never the two shall meet. Well, it turns out from an art historical standpoint that view really isn't accurate."
The exhibition is accompanied by a 304-page catalog, which will be published within the next few weeks by Random House. The publication, also titled "Hide/Seek Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," will explore the concealed influence of closeted gay artists on American artwork. "Hide/Seek" will feature artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Millie Chen, associate professor and chair of visual studies, praised Katz's originality and balance of socio-political activism and academic work.
"From a theoretical and professional standpoint, and from a curatorial standpoint, he's just unmatched in this field of work," Chen said. "[Katz was] certainly seminal in forming the academic inroads to this line of work, and despite his work's provocative nature and his daring to challenge to social-political landscape and status quo, he's always very measured, very calculated and professional, rising to the challenge and never daunted by it."
While the exhibition pays close attention to the 1950s and 1960s, it will extend back to the turn of the 20th century, through the surfacing of the modern gay rights movement with the 1969 Stonewall riots, the AIDS epidemic, and will focus on issues up to present day.
"One of the things I stress more than queer studies in this exhibition is that I'm ultimately a historian, and I'm trying to emphasize that we cannot deny history." Katz said.
Specifically, Katz and Ward's exhibit will showcase gays and lesbians in a society that marginalized them into a point of both external and internal influence within art, society and American culture itself.
"What happened for so many years was that sexuality was foreclosed upon," Katz said. "Art was a high value commodity in which the wealthy, who were primarily socially conservative, made up the core consumer level, so many gay artists had to not so much conceal or deny who they were, but to redefine who they were."
In the New York Times article, Ward emphasized that his work with Katz reinforced the prevalent social and political atmosphere of present day. Upon examining society in this light, there is an ever-present irony now at work within the gay rights movement of oppression through liberation.
"The way the political establishment forced gay people into the public debate for the pursuit of power, just as they shut them out, combined with the gradual liberation of gays in society," Katz said. "We have what Michel Foucault called in the History of Sexuality, a reverse discourse. Forcing people to acknowledge gays in that context forces them to see that gays face the same problems and have the same aspirations as everybody else."
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
