This is a list of notable visual artists who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or otherwise non-heterosexual. This list covers artists known for the creation of visual art such as drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, performance works and video works. The entries are in alphabetical order by surname. Birth and death dates are included. All new additions to this list should include a reference.
Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. Camp aesthetics disrupt many of modernism's notions of what art is and what can be classified as high art by inverting aesthetic attributes such as beauty, value, and taste through an invitation of a different kind of apprehension and consumption.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
Jonathan Ned Katz is an American author of human sexuality who has focused on same-sex attraction and changes in the social organization of sexuality over time. His works focus on the idea, rooted in social constructionism, that the categories with which society describes and defines human sexuality are historically and culturally specific, along with the social organization of sexual activity, desire, relationships, and sexual identities.
Over the course of its history, the LGBT community has adopted certain symbols for self-identification to demonstrate unity, pride, shared values, and allegiance to one another. These symbols communicate ideas, concepts, and identity both within their communities and to mainstream culture. The two symbols most recognized internationally are the pink triangle and the rainbow flag.
A gay icon is a public figure who is regarded as a cultural icon by members of the LGBT community. Such figures usually have a devoted LGBT fanbase and act as allies to the LGBT community, often through their work, or they have been "openly appreciative of their gay fanbase". Many gay icons also have a camp aesthetic style, which is part of their appeal to LGBT individuals.
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA), formerly the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, is a visual art museum in SoHo, Lower Manhattan, New York City. It mainly collects, preserves and exhibits visual arts created by LGBTQ artists or art about LGBTQ+ themes, issues, and people. The museum, operated by the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, offers exhibitions year-round in numerous locations and owns more than 22,000 objects, including, paintings, drawings, photography, prints and sculpture. It has been recognized as one of the oldest arts groups engaged in the collection and preservation of gay art. The foundation was awarded Museum status by the New York State Board of Regents in 2011 and was formally accredited as a museum in 2016. The museum is a member of the American Alliance of Museums and operates pursuant to their guidelines. As of 2019, the LLMA was the only museum in the world dedicated to artwork documenting the LGBTQ experience.
Juan Boza Sánchez or Juan Stopper Sanchez was a gay Afro-Cuban-American artist specializing at painting, drawing, engraving, installation and graphic design.
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
Carrie Moyer is an American painter and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Moyer's paintings and public art projects have been exhibited both in the US and Europe since the early 1990s, and she is best known for her 17-year agitprop project, Dyke Action Machine! with photographer Sue Schaffner. Moyer's work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Tang Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She serves as the director of the graduate MFA program at Hunter College, and has contributed writing to anthologies and publications like The Brooklyn Rail and Artforum.
Sharon Hayes is an American multimedia artist. She came to prominence as an artist and an activist during the East Village scene in the early '90s. She primarily works with video, installation, and performance as her medium. Using multimedia, she "appropriates, rearranges, and remixes in order to revitalize spirits of dissent". Hayes's work addresses themes such as romantic love, activism, queer theory, and politics. Hayes works to develop "new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political movement, not as a moment without historical foundation but as one that reaches simultaneously backwards and fowards." She incorporates texts from found speeches, recordings, songs, letters, and her own writing into her practice that she describes as “a series of performatives rather than performance.”
Catherine Lord is an American artist, writer, curator, social activist, professor, scholar exploring themes of feminism, cultural politics and colonialism. In 2010, she was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal.
Jennifer T. Macdonald is an American conceptual artist whose work explores the artifices and tropes used in the construction of language and meaning at the intersection of law, gender identity, sexual orientation and desire.
Jill Posener is a British photographer and playwright, known for her exploration of lesbian identity and erotica.
A lesbian bar is a drinking establishment that caters exclusively or predominantly to lesbian women. While often conflated, the lesbian bar has a history distinct from that of the gay bar.
Cathy Cade, is an American photographer noted for her work in documentary photography, including photos about lesbian mothering. She has been a feminist and lesbian activist since the early 1970s, starting as an activist and inspired by the power of photography in the early 1960s as part of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Queer art, also known as LGBT+ art or queer aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and various non-heterosexual, non-cisgender imagery and issues. While by definition there can be no singular "queer art", contemporary artists who identify their practices as queer often call upon "utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships and relationships." Queer art is also occasionally very much about sex and the embracing of unauthorised desires.
Mathew Jones is an Australian-born contemporary artist who also took British citizenship in 2005.
Rauschenberg, who was better known in 1963 than Warhol was, and Jasper Johns were both prototypical Pop artists as well as gay men; they also were lovers.
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