I'm not going to review Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the traveling exhibition that opened last month at Tacoma Art Museum and is on display through June 10.

It's not that I don't think the exhibition is important. In fact, I have written more about it than any other single exhibition since it first opened and was censored at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in late 2010. (Three full articles are here, here, and here; there have also been various Slog posts, including this conversation with Dan Savage after he visited the show in D.C.)

In the most recent article, I mentioned only briefly that "the exhibition leaves one wanting even more explanatory text."

But a local architect/artist/friend emailed me just one line after reading the piece: "what did you think of the show?" he wrote. It's a fair question. I'm an art critic. And basically, the reason I didn't review the show is that other ways of approaching it seemed more important given the limited time and space I had.

But I'll tell you what I told him, and then I'll tell you what he told me, which also feels right to me.

I wrote: "some great pieces. overall so far behind where the discussion is, it needed to make its case better."

He wrote: "i agree. i was really impressed and enjoyed several individual pieces, but it felt nostalgic in tone."

It got me thinking about the role of nostalgia not in art itself, but in curating and presenting exhibitions of art. I wanted from this show more direct information about what I was looking at and why it was selected over something else, and why it was hung where it was hung. I almost wanted the book of it, which I recommend. Maybe that's wanting too much.

Either way, there is nothing I want to say that would discourage you from going and seeing Hide/Seek. The individual works you will find, and many of the aspects of the curating (the fact of the show itself, wall labels with some poetic interpretations, and even the great banner on the side of the museum essentially pronouncing the museum out and proud), are gems and gifts.

Plus, your perspective will depend on where you are in your thinking and experience about the lives and rights and history of gay men and lesbian women. (I put gay men first in that order because, in fact, the show is more focused on gay men than lesbian women, for various reasons. It's something I should have pointed out in my most recent piece. The secondness of women is almost always the case, but it still almost always needs pointing out, in my view.)

There are also two other, related exhibitions now up (I haven't seen them yet): Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography at the Photo Center Northwest (details and images), and Under the Rainbow: Images By and About Gay Men and Women at Greg Kucera Gallery (details and images).

Under the Rainbow is particularly touching because it was cooperatively created by Seattle dealers Gail Gibson, James Harris, Greg Kucera, and Stephen Lyons from their own personal collections, gallery inventories, and the private collections of their clients.

Huffington Post has a refreshingly candid take on the Western migration of Hide/Seek from David C. Ward, its co-curator and a historian at the National Portrait Gallery who had really no idea what he was getting into when he started it all by showing a photograph of Walt Whitman and his lover back in 2006. Read it here.