The Queer Show Pride Night

Hal Bromm Gallery invites you to The Queer Show Pride Night, a special evening of community and celebration to help kick off NYC Pride week. The event will be at the gallery (90 W Broadway) on Tuesday, June 24, 5-8pm, with a curator-guided exhibition tour starting at 5:30. Pride Night will be a celebration of the joy and resilience of queer art. Come learn more about the artists featured in The Queer Show Part II and share in their visions for a queer future.

Hal Bromm Gallery is pleased to present The Queer Show, Part II, a continuation of the gallery’s exhibition series exploring how artists have contributed to modern notions of queer identity. In the exhibition, queer artists subvert the tools of cultural erasure, twisting them into potent acts of reclamation and challenging society’s constructed notions of identity. The exhibition will be on view from May 22 through July 25.

The Queer Show, Part II extends Part I’s (2024) exploration of queer history starting in the 1970s into the present moment, foregrounding recent works, as well as historic works that demand reexamination in today’s social climate, that speak to the nature of queerness in the 2020s across a wide array of media, from painting and sculpture to photography and textiles. Work will be on view by Rajab Ali Sayed, Juan Arango Palacios, Nayland Blake, Chris Cortez, Abbey Gilbert, Jay Lynn Gomez, Glenn Ligon, Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Eric Rhein, Moises Salazar Tlatenchi, Richard Taddei (courtesy of Greg Salvatori Galley), Koco Toribio, and David Wojnarowicz.

Over the past 50 years, the word “queer” has become prevalent within culture as both an identity and an ideology. Queer scholarship since the 1990s has sought to shift cultural understanding of non-heteronormative identities by reading against existing material, unearthing the queerness that has been ever-present within culture, yet suppressed. To “queer” something is to understand it within a context of infinite possibilities. Queerness is political, a philosophy, a state of being, a means through which those outside of the heteronormative mode of existence can find community. Queer people, despite being on the margins of society, have always been at the forefront of the avant-garde, smuggling narratives of queerness into the greater canon of contemporary art. The Queer Show, Part II celebrates the legacy of queer artists seeking to develop new modes of expression.

Examining how artists imagine and realize queer futures within their work, the exhibition is centered on the ideas of queer utopia and temporality proposed by author and theorist José Muñoz in his influential book Cruising Utopia (2009). In Muñoz’s work, queer art and experiences can be a framework to radically reimagine a future that defies strict temporality and traditional heteronormativity. The notion of queer temporality—a complication of past, present, and future—is present throughout much of queer theory, as queerness is formulated as something that defies fixity in all dimensions and requires acts of radical becoming and imagining. In The Queer Show, Part II, artists invoke aesthetics of the past as a means of legitimizing and celebrating queer life in the present. They are not simply signaling to a future yet to come, they are already standing in it.

The artists in this exhibition reify queer futures by exploring themes of spirituality, mythology, comfort, transformation, and celebration, bringing to light the undercurrents of queerness within our past and our present. Some invoke aspects of spiritual imagery in their work, such as Moises Salazar and Chris Cortez, establishing a queer presence within an aesthetic tradition often co-opted by normative society as a means of suppressing queer existence. Koco Toribio and David Wojnarowicz employ reference to history and mythology as a means of anchoring their queerness within cultural tradition. Jay Lynn Gomez and Rajab Ali Sayed create scenes that reflect the joy and comfort of queer community, even in the face of tragedy.