Queer Art Across Generations: 5 Artists on View Now
A new selection on the Artnet Gallery Network brings together five artists whose work has helped define how queer life is pictured, staged, and remembered. William Gedney, Julie Mehretu, Martine Gutierrez, Michela Griffo, and Nan Goldin each approach identity from a different angle, but the through line is clear: visibility is never simple, and representation is always shaped by history.
The group spans documentary photography, abstraction, performance, and activist practice. William Gedney’s photographs register the quiet pressure of a life lived in concealment. Julie Mehretu’s large-scale abstractions translate migration, politics, and memory into layered visual systems. Martine Gutierrez’s Indigenous Woman (2018) examines how Indigenous, queer, and trans people are seen — and how they claim space on their own terms.
Michela Griffo (b. 1949), who came of age in 1950s New York and remains based there, was a founding member of the Radicalesbians, Lavender Menace, and the Gay Liberation Front. Her practice, which moves across painting, drawing, and photography, has long been shaped by activism, even when that work was overshadowed by her political organizing. More recently, her visual practice has drawn renewed institutional attention.
Nan Goldin (b. 1953), one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, is represented here by Drag Queens, Berlin (1993) and by the legacy of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. That 1985 multimedia project, built from more than 700 personal photographs, remains a defining account of intimacy, sex, love, abuse, and addiction. Its diaristic structure also helped establish a mode of photographic storytelling that continues to shape contemporary image-making.
Seen together, these artists trace a broader arc in queer art: from coded survival and private documentation to public assertion and historical reckoning. Their work also underscores how Pride month has become not just a moment of celebration, but a lens for revisiting the visual histories that made that visibility possible.
