While many sectors of society are pulling back on LGBTQ+ celebration, support and representation – including retailers like Target, tech giants like Meta and Google, and non-profits such as the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (Rainn) – art venues large and small are showing up for Pride month this June. Here’s a roundup of many of the things happening all over the country to celebrate and encourage the LGBTQ+ community this year.
[redacted] – New York
[redacted] is a series of queer-oriented events being offered throughout the month of June, hosted by New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, dedicated to LGBTQ+ art. Things start on 7 June with a street party with live music, a live screenprinting session of historic protest posters and a cyanotype workshop in which the audience can make their own prints with the sun’s rays. All month, the museum will also be exhibiting Young Joon Kwak’s Resisterhood and ficciones patógenas, a group show dedicated to the sexual and gender diversity of Indigenous people in the Americas.
Pride block party – Dallas
The Dallas Arts District will be celebrating with the Pride block party on 20 June, with parallel offerings at local arts institutions the Crow Museum of Asian Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center. In addition to the offerings in its galleries – featuring art by Anila Quayyum Agha and others – the Crow Museum of Asian Art will provide a cut paper design studio. The Dallas Museum of Art gets festive with sketching in the galleries, line dancing, film screenings, art making and more. And the Nasher Sculpture Center will offer multiple musical performers and movie screening and exhibitions by Otobong Nkanga and others.
To Move Toward the Limits of Living – Palm Springs
To Move Toward the Limits of Living is a collection of queer art from the archives of the Palm Springs Museum of Art. The exhibition focuses on ways that LGBTQ+ artists have fought to overcome exclusion from various spheres of society, while also demonstrating the forms of queer community in the face of challenges such as identity, marginality and the Aids epidemic. Its goal is to help queer people find feelings of abundance, despite a fearful and often threatening world.
Pride Month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
A pop-up studio for making paper quilts with local artist Katie Kaplan, a fashion festival where audiences can strut on a runway and create their own pieces, an audio tour on queering art, and talks on historical queer creative art networks are just a few of the offerings that the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be featuring throughout Pride month.
Pride at the Whitney – New York
The Whitney offers a variety of Pride events including a community Pride mural on 8 June. Queer Teen Night on 13 June celebrates with art making, performances, dancing, giveaways and exhibition tours, and 18 June will see the hosting of a dance dedicated to queer joy, honoring community leaders. There will also be a performance from the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus and queer walking tours.
Rainbow on the Eastside – Washington state
The fifth annual Rainbow on the Eastside exhibition of queer art will offer a diverse cast of 15 LGBTQ+ artists, with many returning from prior iterations of the show. Offerings will include non-binary Filipino American artist Kai Baylon; Lytal, a local jewelry up-cycler; and Kayla Molloy, a digital artist. The show is on view throughout June at the Centro Cultural Mexicano’s two locations in Redmond, Washington.
Pride at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh will be offering a diverse range of Pride events and exhibitions. The Andy Warhol Museum will offer a queer youth prom and the first public screening of the film (pride/prom), while the Carnegie Museum of Art presents a summer solstice sanctuary, dance party, meditation and celebration of Latino artistry. The Carnegie Science Center will screen the drag classic and Oscar winner The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago
Just in time for Pride, the exuberant show City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago debuts at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Starting in the mid-1980s, the show explores the important – if under-appreciated – role played by Chicago artists and activists in the movement for queer equality. With some 30 artists and collectives represented, the show is intergenerational in its focus and will offer archival extras to help speak to the wider context in which these artists operated.
Pride at the Met – New York
The Met is offering a variety of events throughout the month of June, including LGBTQ+ picture book readings, tours and expert presentations on subjects including gender and sexuality in the medieval era, a performance by the Brooklyn classical ensemble ChamberQueer, and a performance by bassoonist Joy Guidry.
The First Homosexuals – Chicago
The First Homosexuals is a wide-ranging art exhibition that covers the decades after the word “homosexual” was coined in 1869. It examines how gay and lesbian individuals became a category unto themselves, for the first time “cleaved from the rest of the population and given an identity which turned on their sexuality”. The exhibition is enormous, with 300 works by more than 125 artists from 40 countries, and it claims to offer the “earliest known representation of a homosexual couple in the history of European art” and “the first modern trans representations” in art. It can be seen throughout Pride at 659 Wrightwood Gallery in Chicago.
