The Art Newspaper: Museums in the US and Canada show their Pride in June

Institutions are celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month with exhibitions and events

The First Annual Queens Pride Parade in 1993 (Photo: Courtesy Daniel Dromm Photograph Collection, LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, LAGCC, CUNY) [image description: people in march at front of photograph carry a banner in pink with black text, the writing says Queens Lesbian & Gay Pride Committee, it is a sunny day and there are balloons in the background with rainbow colors]

June is already here, and with it, LGBTQ Pride month. Cultural institutions around the US and Canada are celebrating with a colourful array of events and exhibitions. Here is a small sample of the many ways for culture vultures to show their pride.

The Brooklyn Museum has a series of events planned for Pride Month, including a special Teen Night: a Night Among the Gods on 9 June planned by, and for, LGBTQ teens and their allies. The evening includes music, workshops and a look at exhibitions dealing with gender and sexuality, such as the ongoing permanent collection show A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt, explores why women were often depicted on their coffins with male attributes. And on Thursdays throughout June, the museum is screening new short films by young, local  artists called Black Queer Brooklyn on Film.

On the other side of the East River, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has organised MetFridays: Pride on Friday, 23 June, with an array of events, from gallery talks to art-making—but the silent dance party sounds especially fun.

The Queens Museum celebrates the 25th anniversary of the borough’s pride parade in the exhibition The Lavender Line: Coming Out in Queens (9 June-31 July), with an opening reception on 9 June. On 18 June, the museum will commemorate the homophobia-driven murder of Julio Rivera in 1990 in a schoolyard in Jackson Heights, Queens—a catalyst for the coming out of the borough’s LGBT community and its pride parade—by screening the recent documentary Julio of Jackson Heights (2016).

Meanwhile, the exhibition Voice=Survival, due to open at collectors Shelley and Donald Rubin's temporary exhibition space the 8th Floor (15 June-11 August), looks at the ongoing battle against HIV/Aids with works and archival materials by artists including Donald Moffett, Kiki Smith and David Wojnarowicz.

Pride is celebrated all year round at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, which recently reopened its expanded its space in SoHo, New York. The museum’s annual summer benefit, Live Loud Now, is due to be held on 8 June. On 10 June, the museum will open its exhibition Found: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction with a family-friendly block party that includes activities for all ages and a youth art fair from students at the Gender & Sexualities Alliance at The Math & Science Exploratory School.

See how the concepts of gender fluidity, identity and presentation apply to Edo-period Japan (1603-1868) in the Japan Society’s exhibition A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints (until 11 June), which looks at Wakashu (“beautiful youths”), a gender category of adolescent males—considered appropriate and desirable sexual partners for both men and women—with its own specific dress and hairstyle.

Works by RAGGA, a community of queer Caribbean artists, are currently on show at the New Museum in New York in the exhibition RAGGA NYC: All the Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another.

Outside of New York, The Work of Love, The Queer of Labour, a temporary exhibition at the Stamford, Connecticut art space Franklin Street Works (until 27 August), shows contemporary art in a variety of media that looks at queer identities through a class lens, but also asks: can queer communities, that have existed outside of rigid social structures, provide an example of how we can create a more egalitarian, loving society?

The Minneapolis Institute of Art is dedicating its monthly Third Thursday free public party on 15 June to Pride, with music, dancing and a workshop for making flags for the Twin Cities’ annual parade.

And love in all of its forms is in the cards at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts at the exhibition Love Is Love: Wedding Bliss for All à la Jean Paul Gaultier (until 9 October). The show celebrates universal matrimony in a whimsical display of 35 bridal dresses and wedding suits in by the French designer, worn by mannequins—some even posing on the tiered layers of a giant white wedding-cake installation.

by VICTORIA STAPLEY-BROWN  |  5 June 2017