Like last year, 2024’s Pride celebrations come at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under threat, made all the more alarming by the upcoming presidential election, in which the very existence of American democracy is at stake. That has yet to still the political and cultural voices of the queer community, and indeed the latter are on full display, particularly in the realm of visual art, where LGBTQ+ artists have been exhibiting in greater numbers than ever. Below we recommend Pride-related shows mounted by prestigious museums here and abroad, international showcases featuring the work of LGBTQ+ artists, and a noteworthy nonprofit effort across a whole city.
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“Raúl de Nieves: and imagine you are here”
Image Credit: Baltimore Museum of Art A standout at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Raúl de Nieves explores the intersection of queer identity and the craft traditions and folklore of his native Mexico. Born in 1983 in the state of Michoacán and currently based in Brooklyn, de Nieves employs sewing, beadwork, feathers, and colored film to create fantastical narrative tableaux. These are populated with chimerical human/animal hybrids imbued with the otherworldliness of Mesoamerican mythology while also embodying the glitz and glamor of drag shows and gay nightlife. De Nieves brings all of his techniques and subject matter to the fore in this installation for the Baltimore Museum’s East Lobby, which features a 27-pane faux stained-glass window that meditates on the power of transformation through images of creatures—cicadas, monarch butterflies, a crested falcon—that came to him in a dream. Also featured are a multitiered chandelier depicting a human figure within a cocoon, a series of bead-encrusted figures seated on lobby benches, and another faux stained-glass piece in light-box form.
Baltimore Museum of Art, through May 4, 2025
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“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love”
Image Credit: The Broad, Los Angeles. Artwork copyright © Mickalene Thomas. Co-organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Broad in partnership with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, “Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” is the first major traveling survey of the artist’s career. Comprising more than 90 works made over the last 20 years, the show covers Thomas’s multidisciplinary practice with selections from her forays into painting, collage, installation, and photography, all accompanied by a catalog with an essay by the feminist author bell hooks. Drawing on art-historical themes and references to African American culture, Thomas is known for representations of imposing Black women that reflect upon the issues surrounding societal standards of beauty, empowerment, gender, and the LBGTQ + community. Her use of color and unusual materials such as sequins combine with bold compositions to offer indelible statements on the Black female presence in art, both currently and in the long term.
The Broad, Los Angeles, through September 29; travels to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025) and the Hayward Gallery, London (February 11–May 5, 2025)
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“Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge”
Image Credit: Photo copyright © yankont@pt.lu. Artwork copyright © Adagp/Comité Cocteau, Paris, by SIAE 2024. The word juggler in the title of this comprehensive survey speaks to Jean Cocteau’s overlapping roles as a writer, filmmaker, actor, and artist. Cocteau (1889–1963) was a quadruple threat whose eclecticism, flair for the dramatic, and open homosexuality earned him pushback within the French avant-garde. His artistic practice was just as wide-ranging as his vocations, encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, jewelry making, and designs for advertising, evincing a dizzying diversity that likewise drew criticism from some of his peers. Yet he was without question a key figure in the history of early 20th-century modernism, as this retrospective, the largest ever devoted to Cocteau, makes abundantly clear with its roundup of some 150 works on loan from the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée Jean Cocteau, and the Cartier Collection, among other sources. The result reflects a prodigious output that never shied away from gay themes, providing a template for future LGBTQ+ artists.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, through September 16
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“Nicole Eisenman: What Happened”
Image Credit: Image courtesy Hall Collection. Nicole Eisenman broke out at the 1995 Whitney Biennial with her self-explanatory mural Self-Portrait With Exploded Whitney. Since then she has explored the American psyche, and more generally the human condition, with an expansive range of paintings and sculptures that channel surf through art history, melding Expressionism, Surrealism, pop culture, and feminism while dipping into the stylistic wells of Francis Bacon, Otto Dix, Philip Guston, and many others. Often characterized by a gimlet-eyed view, her work displays an affinity for the gallows humor of Weimar art, which is especially timely given the slide into illiberalism seen in this country and abroad. Indeed, one could say that Eisenman’s work represents a sort of Neue Sachlichkeit for an era of authoritarian recidivism, filtered through a queer feminist lens. Co-organized by Munich’s Museum Brandhorst and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, “What Happened” is Eisenman’s first major monograph, featuring 100 works that span her career.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, through September 22
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“Cassils: Movement”
Image Credit: Manuel Vason. Design: Catherine Davies Bell. Courtesy of the artist. Hailing from Montreal and now based in Los Angeles, Cassils is a transgender performance artist, bodybuilder, and personal trainer who views the trans experience as “a process-oriented way of being that works in a space of indeterminacy, spasm, and slipperiness” rather than as a “crossover from one sex to another.” In this exhibition, Cassils expands upon their 2021 dance piece, Human Measure (created with choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque), with an immersive installation comprising photographs, film, and a large-scale cyanotype, all of which are situated at the juncture between sound and image. The centerpiece is a filmed documentary of the original performance—which transpires in a darkroom-like setting lit in red—projected over a pool of water to create a doubling effect. The performers’ movements oscillate between gentle and violent, evoking the fraught state of trans people everywhere as they face increasing threats to their rights and freedom.
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, through June 9
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“Zanele Muholi”
Image Credit: Artwork copyright © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York. Since the early 2000s, Zanele Muholi, self-described as a “visual activist,” has been documenting members of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities in various mediums. However, they are best known, perhaps, for a series of high-contrast black-and-white photographic self-portraits in which they capture their image while attired in elaborate headdresses made up of objects such as vacuum hoses, scouring pads, clothespins, and Afro picks. In such images, Muholi references intersectionality not only as the term is broadly understood but also as a sort of queer Afro-futuristic collision of tribal and popular cultures. These works are just part of this major U.K. retrospective featuring more than 260 photographs produced over a 20-year career in which Muholi has inveighed against the unfulfilled promises for LGBTQ + rights in post-apartheid South Africa.
Tate Modern, London, through January 26, 2025
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“Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product”
Image Credit: My Matson/Moderna Museet. Artwork © Vaginal Davis 2024. Over the years, performer, painter, curator, composer, filmmaker, and writer Vaginal Davis has made claims about her background that were as extraordinary as her multivalent career. She’s stated that she’s a descendant of Germany’s royal House of Hohenzollern—making her a relative of Kaiser Wilhelm II—and that she could speak five languages (including Assyrian) by the time she was a small child. Davis was actually born in South Central Los Angeles and got her start performing at gay clubs around Hollywood in the 1970s. Her admiration for the Black Panther Party eventually led her to change her name in honor of one of its most high-profile members, Angela Davis. Davis was a leader in establishing the overlap between drag and SoCal punk culture known as homocore or queercore, which she’s expressed through recordings, zines, artworks, and an outsize persona. All are given thorough exposure in this first major solo exhibition of her work.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, through October 13
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“David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos”
Image Credit: Guy Brett. Courtesy of David Medalla Archive and another vacant space, Berlin. Filipino artist David Medalla was probably not as well known in the United States as he should have been. Medalla (1938–2020) was better appreciated in Europe, where he participated in two seminal exhibitions during the late 1960s and early ’70s: “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” (1969) in Basel, and Documenta 5 (1972) in Kassel, Germany, both of which were groundbreaking introductions to Conceptual Art and concomitant practices. Medalla’s work spanned kinetic installations and performative pieces that involved audience participation. Antiauthoritarian by nature, Medalla opposed the Marcos regime in the Philippines and was openly homosexual at time when being gay was criminalized there. Although queer subjects appeared in his work, he was just as interested in the idea of impermanence and the ultimately enigmatic nature of existence. This comprehensive survey is his first in the United States, revealing an artist whose dedication to activism and experimentation remains compelling to this day.
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 9–September 15
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“I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections of the Contemporary Queer”
Image Credit: Grant R Glanfield. This show is the second biennial roundup of LGBTQ+ artists mounted by the not-for-profit organization Mighty Real/Queer Detroit, launched in 2022 to provide a “platform for artistic exploration of various queer perspectives crossing generations and disciplines.” Some 800 works from more than 180 artists will be spread out among 11 participating galleries across Detroit throughout June. These include the CARR Center, Detroit Artists Market, detroit contemporary, and the Elaine Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University, among others. The contributors are drawn from emerging, midcareer, and established artists from all over the world, including some who have exhibited at major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to artworks, the biennial features panel discussions, performances, and documentary shorts, with evenings devoted to such subjects as New York’s drag scene of the 1980s and the music of Big Mama Thornton.
Mighty Real/Queer Detroit (MR/QD), Detroit, MI, through June 30
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“Mário de Andrade: Two Lives,” (through June 6); “Gran Fury, Art is Not Enough” (through June 9); “Video Room: Tourmaline,” (through June 23); “Francis Bacon: The Beauty of Meat” (through July 28)
Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum. Copyright © the artist. The Museu de Arte de Sāo Paulo (MASP) has filled its current exhibition schedule with shows by prominent historical and contemporary LGBTQ+ figures. “Mário de Andrade: Two Lives” draws upon the collection of one of Brazil’s most important 20th-century cultural figures. A writer, musician, poet, teacher, and critic, de Andrade (1893–1945) amassed a significant holding of artworks by Brazilian modernists such as Anita Malfatti (1889–1964) and Lasar Segall (1889–1947), which appear here along with de Andrade’s own photographs. “Gran Fury, Art Is Not Enough” revisits the work of the activist art collective that sprang up in response to the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, and MASP’s video room presents the Brazilian debut of Tourmaline, a Boston-born transgender artist, filmmaker, activist, and writer. Finally, “Francis Bacon: The Beauty of Meat” features 23 paintings produced between 1947 and 1988 by the iconic Irish artist that reveal more evident than usual queer themes.
Museu de Arte de Sāo Paulo (MASP), Sāo Paulo, Brazil
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2024 Venice Biennale
This year’s Venice Biennale is notable for its inclusion of many LGBT+ artists, not the least of them being the star of the American Pavilion, Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist who identifies as queer. Gibson is known for his elaborately colorful beaded objects that filter examinations of identity through Native American motifs. Gay Lebanese artist Omar Mismar (who, among other things, has created maps out of his routes around Beirut as he followed men on Grindr) returns for his second consecutive Biennale appearance, while self-styled “trans-species” performance and installation artist Agnes Questionmark makes her Venice debut. Also on view are works by the painter Louis Fratino, who’s known for his vignettes of gay intimacy, and Xiyadie, the self-taught Chinese artist who has been producing intricate homoerotic cut-paper works since the 1980s.
Multiple locations throughout Venice, Italy, through November 24
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2024 Whitney Biennial
Like this year’s Biennale in Venice, the Whitney Biennial’s latest edition leans into LBGTQ+ artists with a show subtitled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” a theme related to how far artificial intelligence has complicated our already challenged view of reality and how it impacts the “permeability of the relationships between mind and body and the fluidity of identity.” Like all of the contributors to the biennial, the queer artists involved take varied approaches to the subject. Seba Calfuqueuo’s video borrows from the indigenous cosmology of her native Chile to blur the line between nature and the body, while Jes Fan literally turns himself inside-out with 3D printed sculptures based on CAT scans of his own anatomy. P. Staff’s installation—a room lit bright yellow with an electrified net for a ceiling—meditates on the way the central nervous system communicates danger to the brain as a metaphor for the precariousness of queer existence. Meanwhile, Isaac Julien’s five-channel video reflects upon the career of critic and philosopher Alain Locke, a closeted gay man who was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Whitney Museum Of American Art, through August 11