Diversity & Inclusivity Resources at The Ringling Art Library

From the 1890s through the 1920s, vaudeville reigned as one of the most popular entertainment forms in urban America. Through drama, humor, and satire, it invited its socially, economically, and ethnically diverse audiences to turn a self-conscious eye upon themselves and their culture, which was being rapidly transformed by such forces as immigration, racial discord, and new conceptions of gender roles. It was no coincidence that acts featuring cross-dressing performers and racial impersonators were among vaudeville's biggest attractions. In this lively and enlightening study, Kathleen B. Casey explores the ways in which the gender- and race-bending spectacles of vaudeville dramatized the economic, technological, social, and cultural upheaval that gripped the United States in the early twentieth century. She focuses on four key performers. Eva Tanguay, known as "The I Don't Care Girl," was loved for her defiance of Victorian decorum, linking white womanliness to animalistic savagery at a time when racial and gender ideologies were undergoing significant reconstruction. In contrast, Julian Eltinge, the era's foremost female impersonator, used race to exaggerate notions of manliness and femininity in a way that reinforced traditional norms more than it undermined them. Lillyn Brown, a biracial woman who portrayed a cosmopolitan black male dandy while singing about an antebellum southern past, offered her audiences, black and white, starkly different visual and aural messages about race and gender. Finally, Sophie Tucker, who often performed in blackface during the early years of her long and heralded career, strategically played with prevailing ideologies by alternately portraying herself as white, Jewish, black, manly, and womanly, while managing, remarkably, to convince audiences that these identities could coexist within one body. Analyzing a wide assortment of primary materials--advertisements, recordings, lyrics, sheet music, costumes, photographs, reviews, and press accounts from the era--Casey looks not only at gender and racial impersonation but also at how spectators reacted to these performances.

This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opens up a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919-1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers--notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed "spirit photographs" and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the "queer hauntology" of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right--during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

Gender relations were complex in Edo-period Japan (1603-1868). Wakashu, male youths, were desired by men and women, constituting a "third gender" with their androgynous appearance and variable sexuality. For the first time outside Japan, A Third Gender examines the fascination with wakashu in Edo-period culture and their visual representation in art, demonstrating how they destabilize the conventionally held model of gender binarism. The volume will reproduce, in colour, over a hundred works, mostly woodblock prints and illustrated books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced by a number of designers ranging from such well-known artists as Okumura Masanobu, Suzuki Harunobu, Kitagawa Utamaro and Utagawa Kunisada, to lesser known artists such as Shigemasa, Eishi and Eiri. A Third Gender is based on the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum, which houses the largest collection of Japanese art in Canada, including more than 2,500 woodblock prints.

Celebrated photographer Robert Mapplethorpe challenged the limits of censorship and conformity, combining technical and formal mastery with unexpected, often provocative content that secured his place in history. Mapplethorpe's artistic vision helped shape the social and cultural fabric of the 1970s and '80s and, following his death in 1989 from AIDS, informed the political landscape of the 1990s. His photographic works continue to resonate with audiences all over the world.   Throughout his career, Mapplethorpe preserved studio files and art from every period and vein of his production, including student work, jewelry, sculptures, and commercial assignments. The resulting archive is fascinating and astonishing. With over 400 illustrations, this volume surveys a virtually unknown resource that sheds new light on the artist's motivations, connections, business acumen, and talent as a curator and collector.  

Presenting two decades of work by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography after Photography is an inquiry into the circuits of power that shape photographic practice, criticism, and historiography. As the boundaries that separate photography from other forms of artistic production are increasingly fluid, Solomon-Godeau, a pioneering feminist and politically engaged critic, argues that the relationships between photography, culture, gender, and power demand renewed attention. In her analyses of the photographic production of Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas, Francesca Woodman, and others, Solomon-Godeau refigures the disciplinary object of photography by considering these practices through an examination of the determinations of genre and gender as these shape the relations between photographers, their images, and their viewers. Among her subjects are the 2006 Abu Ghraib prison photographs and the Cold War-era exhibition The Family of Man, insofar as these illustrate photography's embeddedness in social relations, viewing relations, and ideological formations.

Edward Lucie-Smith's examination of sexuality in Western art from prehistory to the present first treats the tradition chronologically, then considers its characteristic themes and symbols. A study of the fine art born of an obsession which has preoccupied Western artists from Michelangelo to Picasso, Rubens to Mapplethorpe. ... Publisher description.
Table of Contents: 1. Contexts. The erotic and the sacred -- The open secret -- The new paganism -- Eroticism and realism -- Cruel fantasies -- Love for sale -- The all-devouring female -- Erotic metamorphosis. 2. Symbols. Venus observed -- Lust in action -- Deviations -- Pleasurable pains -- Here comes a chopper -- Symbols and disguises -- Sexuality, modernism and post-modernism.

Lavishly illustrated with over 175 black-and-white and color images that range from high to popular culture and from Ancient Greece to contemporary America, Christopher Reed's arresting book reveals the deep linkages between art and homosexuality as we understand those terms.This is the first book to fully explore the interdependence between the identity of the artist and the homosexual. It offers a bold, globe-spanning narrative that draws on artwork from all the important periods in the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary, withspecial focus on the modern period. It was in the nineteenth century that the identities of the avant-garde artist and the homosexual took shape, and almost as quickly overlapped. The figures involved - Ingres, Courbet, Wilde, Whitman - are among that era's most iconic artists. The development oftwentieth-century art - exemplified in the work of figures like Gertrude Stein, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, and David Wojnarowicz - this book argues is simply not understandable apart from the concurrent development of ideas about sexual identity. This highly readable volume challenges the ideas ofmany prominent art critics and punctures the platitudes surrounding discussions of both art and sexuality. The book discusses what it means to be an insider and outsider, how sexuality came to define one's fundamental humanity, and what people risk (and gain) in rejecting economic and socialconformity.Reed shows that many of the core ideas that define modern thought more generally are nearly indecipherable without an understanding of this pairing. The debates that have surrounded artists and homosexuals in effect capture the dramatic history of the evolution of the modern mind.

Taking as axiomatic the concept that artistic output does not simply reflect culture but also shapes it, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection take a holistic approach to the cultural fashioning of sexualities, drawing on visual art, theatre, music, and literature, in sacred and secular contexts. Although there is diversity in disciplinary approach, the interpretations and readings offered in each essay have a historical basis. Approaching the topic from the point of view of both visual and auditory media, this volume paints a comprehensive picture of artists' challenges to erotic boundaries, and contributes to new historicizing thinking on sexualities. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the role played by artistic production-visual arts, literature, theatre and music-in fashioning, policing, and challenging early modern sexual boundaries, and thus help to identify the ways in which the arts contributed to both the disciplining and the exploration of a range of sexualities.

Saslow (art history, City U. of New York) ranges from the dawn of time to the present and from Europe and North America to China and Australia. He presents and discusses visual images relating to gay men and lesbians, but not always related to sex itself; the Stonewall riot and the AIDS quilt for example are represented.

This is a controversial and landmark study about homosexuality, politics, and the censoring of art. Conflicts surrounding homosexuality and creative freedom have shaped the history of modern art in America. Outlaw Representation traces this history by showing how gay artists have both resisted and responded to the threat of censorship. It features nearly two hundred images, ranging from the work of Robert Mapplethorpe to gay liberation posters.

Key artists' writings that have influenced and catalyzed contemporary queer artistic practice. Historically, "queer" was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, "queer" was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities. Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists' queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular "queer art." Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists' writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference. Artists and writers include Nayland Blake, Gregg Bordowitz, Leigh Bowery, AA Bronson, A. K. Burns, Giuseppe Campuzano, Tee Corinne, Barbara DeGenevieve, Dyke Action Machine!, Elmgreen & Dragset, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Simon Fujiwara, Malik Gaines, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gran Fury, Sunil Gupta, Hahn Thi Pham, Harmony Hammond, Sharon Hayes, Hudson, Roberto Jacoby, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Mahmoud Khaled, Zoe Leonard, Lesbian Avengers, Catherine Lord, Ma Liuming, LTTR, Allyson Mitchell, Zanele Muholi, Carlos Motta, Ocaña, Hélio Oiticica, Catherine Opie, Ridykeulous (Nicole Eisenman & A.L. Steiner), Marlon Riggs, Emily Roysdon, Prem Sahib, Assoto Saint, Tejal Shah, Amy Sillman, Jack Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Toxic Titties, Danh Vo, David Wojnarowicz, Wu Tsang, Yan Xing, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Akram Zaatari, Sergio Zevallos

In the decades preceding the Stonewall riots--in the wake of the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey's controversial report on male sexuality and in the midst of a cold war culture of suspicion and paranoia--discussions of homosexuality within the New York art world necessarily circulated via gossip and rumor. Between You and Me explores this informal, everyday talk and how it shaped artists' lives, their work, and its reception. Revealing the "trivial" and "unserious" aspects of the postwar art scene as key to understanding queer subjectivity, Gavin Butt argues for a richer, more expansive concept of historical evidence, one that supplements the verifiable facts of traditional historical narrative with the gossipy fictions of sexual curiosity. Focusing on the period from 1948 to 1963, Butt draws on the accusations and denials of homosexuality that appeared in the popular press, on early homophile publications such as One and the Mattachine Review, and on biographies, autobiographies, and interviews. In a stunning exposition of Larry Rivers's work, he shows how Rivers incorporated gossip into his paintings, just as his friend and lover Frank O'Hara worked it into his poetry. He describes how the stories about Andy Warhol being too "swish" to be taken seriously as an artist changed following his breakthrough success, reconstructing him as an asexual dandy. Butt also speculates on the meanings surrounding a MoMA curator's refusal in 1958 to buy Jasper Johns's Target with Plaster Casts on the grounds that it was too scandalous for the museum to acquire. Between You and Me sheds new light on a pivotal moment in American cultural production as it signals new directions for art history.

The collecting origins of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York--the only museum dedicated to preserving and fostering LGBTQ art--can be traced to 1969, when its founders hosted their first "homosexual art fair" in New York. Evolving from gallery to foundation to museum in five decades, Leslie-Lohman's collection mirrors shifting histories of LGBTQ social movements in the United States, from the Stonewall riots to the AIDS epidemic, when the founders often rescued the work of dying artists from families who wanted to destroy it. This volume presents two hundred objects from the museum's vast permanent collection, gathers texts that explore history, provenance, genre, and subject matter, and engages in critical conversations about gender and race in the museum's collection. At once a wide-ranging survey of queer art and a critical glance at contemporary museum collecting practices, Queer Holdings plumbs an institution's possible futures by revisiting the milestones of its activist past.   

Gilbert & George are among the foremost artists of their generation. A collaborative team, they were early to explore performance as an art form, and early to explore the idea that every aspect of daily life could be classed as such. They were early to mingle photography and graphics in a style reminiscent of advertising, and early to address sexual identity in that work. In fact, they were early to do much that viewers now take for granted. Their work has been exhibited worldwide since the beginning of the 1970s, and is either unusually accessible or completely unpalatable, depending on the viewer's mindset. It has attracted both fierce controversy and enormous acclaim, including the 1986 Turner Prize and the U.K.'s slot at the 2005 Venice Biennale. At last, on the fortieth anniversary of their meeting (September 25, 1967, Saint Martin's, London) and on the eve of a major retrospective that will tour six venues around the world--including Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the de Young Museum in San Francisco--here is a book that does justice to the scale, depth and ambition of their artistic achievement. Or rather, here are two books: designed and produced by the artists, this luxurious two-volume hardback set, which comes in a customized carrying case with handles, documents every picture the pair has created over the course of their 35-year career.With details and installation views of many significant pieces, it includes 1500 color illustrations. The Complete Pictures will be the most thorough and extensive publication on the artists' work ever assembled. Copublished with Tate Publishing, London.

"Sexuality and Form explores the insistence of the flesh as an element of carnality that resists exchange and conversion. Beginning with humanist aesthetics and the art of war, Hammill first discusses how the body gets aligned with various and subtle forms of violence. He then explores the epistemological and aesthetic spaces in the paintings of Caravaggio and Michaelangelo, the plays of Christopher Marlowe, and the scientific treatises of Francis Bacon, demonstrating how in each the flesh is bruised into visibility through poses that underwrite and belie ideals of secular civility." "Sexuality and Form is an ambitious new study of sexuality, aesthetics, and epistemology - one of the first works of its kind to bring queer theory and psychoanalysis together within a Renaissance framework."--BOOK JACKET.

An entirely new interpretation of modern American portraiture based on the history of sexual difference. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, and portraits from leading American artists. Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism. Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more--in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the "homosexual," in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists--of but not fully in the society they portrayed--occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities--and also their own. Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists--both gay and straight--as well as of portraiture itself.

Isolation and a desperate search for recognition in New York in the eighties are captured unsparingly by American painter Patrick Angus (1953-1992). The stark drama of his explicit themes, the phenomenal exactitude of his observations juxtaposed against the brilliant iridescence of his colorations, are currently being celebrated as a rediscovery in an international context. The subject of a homosexual artist's life in New York's demimonde is only the veneer of meaning of his work.Although his subject is inevitably his own life, it is a reflection the human condition we all know, the longing for love, friendship, and acceptance. This poetic unison, supported by superb technical execution, gives Patrick Angus' paintings and drawings their irresistible, emotional, and universal appeal. Painting was the passion of Patrick Angus' short life. Dying a victim of the AIDS plague, his only wish was that his work would survive him. This book is a posthumous homage to a great artist. Exhibition: Galerie Thomas Fuchs, Stuttgart 23.9-5.11.2016