Art After Stonewall, 1969–1989: Grey Art Gallery and Leslie-Lohman Museum

During a month marked by festivities and rainbow flags, it's easy to forget that before the party, there was the riot. Before the rainbow flag, there was the pink triangle. Although we are celebrating World Pride in New York, it's important to remember that in many parts of the world there is still a present level of danger, death, and discrimination queer people face daily. The exhibition Art After Stonewall, 1969–1989, organized by the Columbus Art Museum in Ohio but debuting in New York, where it is cohosted by the Leslie-Lohman Museum and New York University's (NYU) Grey Art Gallery does a useful service in reminding the viewer of the politics underpinning Pride and central to queer history more broadly. In contrast to various mainstream Pride campaigns saturating the city, the exhibition understands queer history—especially late twentieth-century queer political history—not teleologically but as a sequence of steps forwards and backwards, halting transitions, painful histories that linger, traumas that appear first as farce and then as tragedy (or, sometimes, as the more expected inverse). At the same time, the show does want to tell a historical narrative, and its three curators—Jonathan Weinberg, Tyler Cann, and Drew Sawyer—have organized it into seven themes that follow on one another chronologically.

Although Stonewall did not necessarily mark an overt, generalizable shift in artists' representational strategies, visibility was gradually and increasingly accorded to queer artistic practices in its wake. The story, as it has been told in art history and art criticism, is somewhat different when it comes to the AIDS crisis, which Art After Stonewall emphasizes as a crucial hinge. The AIDS crisis

Figure 1.

Installation view "Art After Stonewall" at the Grey Art Gallery. Photo by Nicholas Papananias, courtesy Grey Art Gallery, New York University.

was a collective trauma, had a collective impact, and contemporary American art is very much shaped by it. An entire generation of artists in the late 1980s either put their artistic practices on hold to participate in activism, or incorporated activism into their work. Many formed collectives, producing visual material such as posters and videos in order to raise awareness—about policy, safer sex practices, and so on—and to coalesce an engaged queer counterpublic. Others pursued metaphoric ways of responding to the epidemic through engagements with materials, aesthetics and representation. A host of critical theorizations of art's relation to politics, and to queerness, emerged at this time and continue to inform our discipline.¹ Within art discourse, many of the conversations that still organize considerations of sexuality and visuality arose as conversations about AIDS.

As friends and colleagues both researching and writing about art of the AIDS crisis, we decided to highlight the conversational aspect of this collaborative review by adhering to the format of a dialogue. Engaging a conversational mode allows us to present a view of the exhibition that underlines our individual, but often overlapping, commitments and critiques, as well as the shared moments of pleasure and displeasure, reverie and thought, joy and frustration sparked by an exhibition that presents a coherent story, but tries to do so through a multivocal range of artists' visions. The way the show aggregates ephemera, historical and documentary material, and so on, alongside a range of more "finished" artworks; seems to frame Stonewall as both communal and deeply subjective, a social cause and also something one could make expressive work around. Our dialogic model considers both these aspects.

Nicholas Chittenden Morgan (NCM):

What strikes me is that the chronological split between the Leslie-Lohman Museum location, dedicated to the late 1960s and 1970s, and the Grey Art Gallery, dedicated to the 1980s, has the odd effect of potentially cleaving the AIDS crisis from Stonewall—even though seeing AIDS activism in relation to Stonewall is one of the exhibition's main arguments.

Ksenia M. Soboleva (KMS):

Absolutely, the curatorial decision to divide it up this way does risk doing exactly...