It’s Pride Month y’all! To celebrate, Singulart brings you a visual charcuterie board of talented queer artists here to shake up perspectives and interrogate the way we see the world. At Singulart, we understand the role that art can play in supporting social movements. We’re passionate about uplifting the voices, stories and artwork of diverse artists from around the globe. From daring performance art to rhinestone-encrusted collages, these creatives show us just how impactful art can be.
Alok Vaid Menon: Trans Identity, Photography, and Returning the Gayze
Alok Vaid Menon is a gender non-conforming performance artist, poet, fashion designer, model, educator, journalist and activist. Their personal website constitutes an important resource for education on trans issues that includes a beautiful portfolio of photographic work in which Alok appears as the principal subject. Their many photography projects seek to create space for trans* identities and ways of seeing, being, and knowing that counteract the heteronormative gaze.
Juliana Huxtable: Sex, Subcultures, and Art in the Digital Age
Juliana Huxtable is a visual artist, DJ, poet, and co-founder of the New York-based nightlife project Shock Value. Her interdisciplinary art practice explores themes like language, conspiracy theories, fashion, digital worlds and online sexual subcultures (namely furies), and Nuwaubian culture to name a few. Huxtable is also on the editorial board for Topical Cream and is a member of the New York City-based collective House of Ladosha, the artist group create everything from performance art to video installations inspired by drag and the history of New York ball culture.
Mickalene Thomas: Re-framing women in Classic Art
There are few artistic fields that Mickalene Thomas has yet to tackle. Paintings, collages, photography, video, and installations are all well within her repertoire. Blending iconography from art history with that of pop culture, Thomas’ artistic practice is focused on creating new avenues for femme sexuality, beauty, and power. Her art considers how femme people navigate the social scripts and spaces afforded and ascribed to them in popular culture.
Kalup Linzy: Exploring Gender, Race, and the Mundane through Performance
Kalup Linzy is a performance artist, director, producer and all around creative. His works investigate stereotypes around gender, race, and sexual identity through his satirical, irony-filled live performances and short films. Many of his projects explore the mundane elements as well as the melodramatic trials of rural life. His work has also taken aim at big names from the New York art scene and reality TV. His work has been described as camp for its satirical employment of pop culture symbolism.
Paul M. Sepuya: Innovative Portrait Photography for the Queer Age
Paul Mpagi Sepuya is best-known for his portrait photography that focuses on the various intimacy shared by the artist and his friends. In his portraits, Sepuya collapses past and present, background and foreground, photographer and photographed into one image. His photographs, often shot in traditional portrait studios, demonstrate the changing nature of his personal relationships that can oscillate back and forth between friendship, lust, and romance. In so doing, the studio itself become a kind of portrait space, where to be invited to pose is also an invitation to explore the possibilities and limitations of your relationship with the photographer.
Do you have a LGBTQI+ artist you want to highlight? Give them a shout out in the comments!
