The Air is Electric – David McDiarmid in America exhibition

In 1977, fresh from his Sydney solo exhibition Secret Love (Dec 1976), the first explicitly gay art exhibition in Australia, David McDiarmid travelled to the United States. Having experienced the joy of belonging to an identifiable gay community in Sydney and buoyed by the potential that could be unleashed by the gay community, McDiarmid wanted to experience gay life, community, and art in the USA.

McDiarmid travelled across the USA, from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York, experiencing the pleasures and protests of the burgeoning gay scene. However, it was New York that made the most impact on the artist. In a letter back to Linda Jackson in Sydney, he observed that “The air is electric, the sidewalks are magic, and the people are crazy crazy crazy.” McDiarmid “absorbed everything he could of Manhattan’s bustling art, fashion, and music scenes. McDiarmid returned to Sydney in August 1977, wiser, more enlightened and liberated, but also, as the Australian photographer William Yang recalls, with ‘quite a radical sensibility’. It was only a few months before McDiarmid would himself be involved in the 1978 Mardi Gras protest on the streets of Sydney.

McDiarmid’s American photographs highlight his early interest in composition, colour, typography and symmetry that becomes evident in his later designs and artworks for which he became internationally recognised.

During his travels in the United States, McDiarmid was constantly documenting his experiences in correspondence and photographs, and through these we can start to understand the excitement of the liberatory activism and emergent gay community of the late 1970s – ‘the air was electric’ with new possibilities and freedom.

This exhibition was previously exhibited at the Bondi Pavilion Gallery in 2023 with support from Waverley Council and Sydney World Pride.

Curated by Nick Henderson and Angela Bailey

Produced by Australian Queer Archives