Art after Stonewall: 12 artists interviewed - gay artists - Cover Story - Interview

Art in America, June, 1994 by Holland Cotter

It has been 25 years since the Stonewall Riots signaled the beginning of the gay rights movement and the profound social transformation that has accompanied it. Here, a dozen gay and lesbian artists talk about their lives, their work and the culture at large.

On a June night in 1969 in New York's Greenwich Village, the police conducted a routine raid on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. It would have been just harassment as usual, except that this time the men in the bar fought back. Spilling out into the streets, they chased the police off with bottles, rocks and--the crucial ingredient--a united anger.

The celebration this month of the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots is the occasion for the 12 interviews with gay and lesbian artists which follow. Ten of them were taped this spring in New York; Donald Moffett and Zoe Leonard contributed written responses to specific questions. Only one of the artists was actually in New York in 1969. The majority were too young to have known the nascent gay and lesbian movement at first hand. What is important, in any case, is not the event per se but the states of mind and being that have emerged from it. As a direct result of Stonewall, sexual difference has became an area of open inquiry and exploration in contemporary art, whereas a mere generation ago this content was either suppressed or introduced in highly coded form.

One of the questions these interviews explore is how artists have bypassed such coding or reworked it to create a new language which is both specific to a subculture yet accessible to a larger audience. Other questions include: Is there a "gay art" or a "lesbian art"? Do such labels result in ghettoization and, if so, is this good or bad? What is the role of the gay or lesbian artist in a predominantly hetorosexual culture, one which includes the art world?

There is no doubt that much has changed in a quarter century. This is clear in the simple fact that some of the younger artist interviewed consider their sexual orientation "second nature." Yet should one move outside the protective environment of the major cities, or even to the wrong neighborhood within them, one finds cause for worry. Civil rights legislation for gay people has been passed since 1969, usually grudgingly, but it has also been withdrawn. Art has become more bold, but so has censorship, The AIDS crisis continues unabated and government funding for research remains inadequate. There is, in short, no question that should the gay and lesbian community lose its political cohesiveness, we, its members, are all at risk.

As of this writing, plans are in place for observing the 25th anniversary of Stonewall with a march to the United Nations on June 26, in a gesture of affirmation of international lesbian and gay rights. As the gay and lesbian movement identifies itself with and becomes part of the global political picture and as openly gay and lesbian artists, with their rich personal histories and their diverse and challenging work, become part of the fabric of international art, there is every reason for optimism as we approach a new century.

For William H. Martin (1950-1993)

--H. C.

Frank Moore

Born 1953, New York. Studied at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, 1970, Yale University, BA 1975; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1973; Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris (residency), 1977-79; Sundance Institute (residency), 1988. Currently lives in New York. Most recent solo show at Sperone Westwater, New York, 1993.

I was born in Stuyvesant Town on 14th Street in New York City. My father's family lived in the Adirondacks and in the summer we'd usually be shipped up there. I had a lot of cousins and we congregated at my grandfather's house in an extended family situation. That place had a big impact on my esthetic. I loved it up there. I loved the landscape, the wilderness, that whole rustic thing, that colonial American sense of everything being handmade, earth-connected. I think kids are influenced by the stuff their parents surround them with, and most of what I saw there was WPA-type imagery (prints by Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, that sort of thing) and hunting and fishing pictures. Then I started getting involved with art in a different way by going to museums, One of the first paintings that zapped me was an Agnes Martin at the Museum of Modern Art. It was just a red pencil grid titled Red Tree. I don't know how old I was when I saw it--maybe 11 or 12--or why it had such an effect. But it did. I still think she's great.

At the same time, though, I was captivated by things like Peter Blume's painting of Mussolini, which I don't see hanging at the Modem anymore. I ultimately met Peter Blume. He had a house in Connecticut, a perfect place, a paradise. He'd dug out a pond with a stream running through it and stocked it with one big fat trout and he'd trained a grape vine to grow up the side of the house and in through an attic window, so the raccoons couldn't get the fruit. His art's out of favor now, but the whole Magic Realist movement that he and Paul Cadmus were a part of has always meant something to me. They were essentially WPA Surrealists, with an emphasis on Americana, and a very moralistic tone--think of Cadmus's Seven Deadly Sins--missing in European work.