LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

Ruminating on the work of Alex Katz, the artist David Salle once opined that a Katz painting would be recognizable even “if it fell out of an airplane at 30,000 feet.” The same is certainly true of Keith Haring (1958–1990), whose rapidly dashed-off combinations of hieroglyphics and coloring-book outlines represent one of the most iconic styles of late-20th-century art. A gay man tragically cut down at an early age by AIDS, Haring first emerged as a subway graffiti artist in the urban chaos of 1980s New York. Indeed, the frenetic quality of his work evoked the sense of time running short that confronted so many during the period when the disease was a death sentence. Haring’s work, then, hardly needs an introduction, but this show at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, does fill a gap regarding a lesser-known aspect of his practice by staging the first major exhibition of his sculptural work, which ranged from monumental public projects to boom boxes covered with his unforgettable designs.

Chicago native Arch Connelly (1950–1993) started out in San Francisco in the 1970s, a place and time representing a golden age of gay sexual liberation, before moving to New York City in the early 1980s, a place and time representing the ending of that dream by AIDS. Connelly himself succumbed to the illness, though his work remained defiantly outré to the end, making him a beloved figure in New York City’s East Village art scene. A ceramics major in college, Connelly gravitated toward the Bay Area’s avant-queer performance milieu, designing sets for groups like the outrageously gender-fluid Cockettes. Their flamboyant, surrealist sensibility found its way into Connelly’s pieces, which often comprised collages and objects bedazzled in glitter and fake pearls. They could be frankly erotic as well, with some works incorporating gay porn. In the years since Connelly’s untimely death, his reputation has dimmed somewhat, an oversight this first major retrospective aims to rectify with a selection of works, several of which haven’t been seen in more than 35 years.

For more than 25 years, the Berlin-based Danish artist Henrik Olesen has drawn upon the aesthetic vocabulary of post-minimalism to pursue a research-based practice focused on queer identity and its precarious place in history. His 2001 text and photo piece Lack of Information, for example, documented anti-gay laws around the world, while a 2025 follow-up, Art with Information, presented a timeline of gay sex, beginning with the banning of sodomy during the Middle Ages. The body and its organs factor into Olesen’s subject as metaphors, and so, too, does the food chain as an allegorical hierarchy of hunter and hunted. The latter takes center stage in the artist’s first show in Zurich in 20 years, in which he presents a series of sculptural copies of animals and objects. The former take shape specifically as a crocodile paired with its prehistoric ancestor, while a group of milk cartons are affixed with labels describing the frequency of homosexual behavior among different species, including swans, bonobos, and gray whales.

Few figures in 20th-century American art were as responsible for shaping its trajectory as the gallerist Betty Parsons (1900–1982). Scion of a wealthy family, Parsons opened her space in New York City in 1946, where she helped to launch the careers of Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Ellsworth Kelly, and Mark Rothko, among others. She gave Barnett Newman his first solo show and did the same for Robert Rauschenberg—an outing that yielded zero sales. Besides being a dealer, she was a poet and an abstract artist whose paintings and sculptures followed the aesthetics she promoted. She was also queer and had spent the 1920s and 1930s in Paris as part of an expatriate lesbian milieu around Gertrude Stein. (Parsons was briefly married to a man who was also gay; their divorce led her family to disinherit her.) This show represents the first major survey of Parsons’s career, examining her oeuvre within the context of these intertwining aspects of her life. While her works weren’t specifically gay-themed, they do reflect the complexity of Parsons as a person and as a titanic presence in postwar art.

This group survey represents the fourth edition of “Spectrosynthesis,” an exhibition series mounted by the Sunpride Foundation, a cultural nonprofit dedicated to promoting LGBTQ+ art and practices in Asia. True to the organization’s mission, “Spectrosynthesis” has offered a feast of queer artists from all over the Far East with previous presentations in Taipei, Bangkok, and Hong Kong. Each iteration has featured a global roster of LGBTQ+ talents, including a selection of artists from the host nation. This year’s proceedings, at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, South Korea, follows suit: One section, “The Two-Sided Seashell,” provides a multinational selection of works, while another, “Tender: Invisibly Visible, Unlocatably Everywhere,” focuses on Korean artists interrogating the queer experience in their own country. As a whole, “Spectrosynthesis” imagines queer identity as an ever-evolving state, a transformational process working toward a future of total equality for every gender and sexual preference.

A pioneer of internet-based art, Shu Lea Cheang explores the fluid nature of gender, the place of LGBTQ+ identity in the digital age, and the ways in which sexuality is a social rather than a biological construct. Her films, web projects, and mixed-media installations could be best described as a kind of queer sci-fi with an eco-cyberpunk sensibility. Her work also intersects with the trend of post-pornography, a sex-positive feminist and queer cultural movement that appropriates and subverts mainstream porn tropes for its own ends. Cheang represented Taiwan at the 2019 Venice Biennale and received a Guggenheim commission for her online piece Brandon (1998–1999), which was based on the 1993 rape and murder in Nebraska of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man. Her most recent work, an interactive, multichannel video installation titled Lover Love, is currently on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Soho. Featuring projections on floor-to-ceiling screens that viewers can move along tracks, the work follows the everyday life of a trans community in Tucson, Arizona, against the backdrop of backlash against transgender rights.

The Zurich-born artist Walter Pfeiffer is part of a long line of gay photographers known for surveying the terrain of the male body. Born in 1946, Pfeiffer emerged during the 1970s alongside Larry Clark, Duane Michals, and Peter Hujar, yet the immediacy of his images and his use of color comported more with the aesthetics of a younger generation that included Jack Pierson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Ryan McGinley. He has worked for fashion publications like Vogue France, with models Cara Delevingne and Eva Herzigová serving as subjects. For his own work he casts nonprofessionals—young, beautiful men for the most part, but also transgender women and drag queens. Pfeiffer also creates landscapes and still-lifes whose careful arrangement recalls his time working as a window dresser. Little-known during most of his career, he ha3s enjoyed critical acclaim and great demand over the past 20 years. This retrospective of his prolific, 60-year output—his first institutional survey outside his native Switzerland—covers all aspects of an oeuvre notable for its sexual frankness and sense of irony.

This institution-wide initiative celebrating Pride features a number of programs and collection highlights related to LGBTQIA+ artists and subjects. Among the former are special docent-led tours for Metropolitan Museum members every Tuesday and Saturday in June, exploring more than 5,000 years of art relating to LGBTQIA+ experience and themes. Meanwhile, “Queer New York: A Virtual Walking Tour,” mounted in conjunction with the LGBT Historic Sites Project, visits locales associated with queer artists who have called the city home, including the West Village residence and studio of Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland, Keith Haring’s Crack Is Wack mural and playground along Harlem River Drive at East 128th Street in Harlem, and Martin Wong’s residence and studio on the Lower East Side. Artworks by LGBTQIA+ artists, as well as those featuring LGBTQIA+ subjects, are being featured online as well as in the Met’s galleries, with paintings and photographs by Marsden Hartley, Kehinde Wiley, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and many others.