Definition Please
Erin DeJesus
What is gay art? The Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation has spent decades amassing a collection that answers this question and building a community to preserve it.
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Sure, we've got Mapplethorpe, Haring and Warhol, but to many, the definition of “gay art” is still a
mystery. Charles Leslie, cofounder and curator of New York City’s
Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, hopes to change that.
“When it comes to art that’s seen as ‘gay,’ all of it is
political,” Leslie says. He should know: The eponymous Leslie/Lohman
Foundation, run by Charles and his partner of 48 years, J. Frederic ?“Fritz” Lohman, holds
more than 4,000 works of gay art, accumulated over the course of decades. “A significant part of
the collection is erotic, and I don’t use the word ‘pornography’ because there
is no pornography in that sense,” Leslie says. “We have romantic work, we have
political work, spiritual work. But it all resonates with gay sensibilites.”
The collection, housed in a gallery space in Soho, features pieces by Warhol,
Mapplethorpe, Barbara Nitke and Chuck Close. But for every household name,
hundreds of lesser-known gay artists are represented, including Neel Bate,
Titolo, Patrick Webb and PORK.
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first opened its doors inside
the couple’s Soho loft in 1969, during a time when a gay art scene in New York
didn’t exist. “No one practiced in demonstrably gay terms,” Leslie says. “The
nearest thing that came to gay art was erotica — some of it very cheap and
vulgar, some of it so brilliantly renderend that it should have been recognized
as high art.” As avid art collectors and friends of several gay artists, the
pair decided to hold an informal show in their loft, handing out invites to
friends. “We expected, over the weekend, to have maybe 50 or 60 people coming
through. By the end of the weekend, we had hundreds." |
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This led to two gallery spaces and a budding
catalog of art, homoerotic and otherwise. “It began incrementally,” Leslie
says. “Fritz and I always had small personal collections of art; we were ourselves
collectors of forbidden art.” He pauses. “Then, we were the strange
beneficiaries of the AIDS epidemic."
As HIV/AIDS devastated NYC and its gay community in
the early ‘80s, the first incarnation of the Leslie/Lohman Gallery was forced
to close in 1981. But as artists passed, friends and family members often
donated the deceased’s work as a way of memorializing the person who created or
made the collection. “By
1990, we had a serious personal collection,” Leslie says. “We realized there
was a mounting amount of this work that was potentially endangered. We began to
document the destruction of gay art. That’s one of our jobs — to identify
imperiled collections." |
Since reopening in 1990 as a
nonprofit arts organization, Leslie/Lohman has exhibited everything from annual
photo and group shows to 1994’s Diamonds, Gold and Myrrh (an exhibit that
combined jewelry and sports erotica) to The Culture of Queer, a 2005
partnership with the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center. (Though the original
show was disrupted by Hurricane Katrina just two days after its opening, Culture
of Queer was remounted and exhibited in New York City in 2006.) Leslie/Lohman
prides itself on collecting and showing art that might otherwise never see the
light of day.? “If the work could as easily be submitted to a
mainstream gallery as to this one, it’s probably not for us,” Leslie says. “If
it’s something that would curl the hair of someone at a mainstream gallery,
we’ll look at it.” The foundation encourages artists to submit their work to be
considered for future shows or exhibition in its online gallery.
Even after more than 40 years,
Leslie and Lohman remain the organization’s main donors, and much to Leslie’s
chagrin, the gallery has received little support from gay curators at more
mainstream institutions. Though the foundation has a loyal membership base, the
current economic situation may hamper the frequency of exhibits, programs and
plans to celebrate the foundation’s 20th anniversary. “The future looks
complicated,” Leslie says. “But we’ll soldier on.” leslielohman.org. |
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