This portrait, titled Valley Waterfall (Erin), is part of Portland artist Lorenzo Triburgos series Transportraits, featuring transgendered people posing in front of oil landscapes the artist painted using the instructions of Bob Ross.
  • The Stranger
  • This portrait, titled Valley Waterfall (Erin), is part of Portland artist Lorenzo Triburgo's series Transportraits, featuring transgendered people posing in front of oil landscapes the artist painted using the instructions of Bob Ross.

Seattle has a whooooooole lot of prominent gay/queer artists and art workers. A short list might include Wynne Greenwood, Jeffry Mitchell, Rock Hushka, C. Davida Ingram, Robert Yoder, Roy McMakin, Adrain Chesser, Timothy White Eagle, Steven Miller, Susanna Bluhm, Rafael Soldi, Molly Landreth, Joey Veltkamp, Gail Gibson, Greg Kucera*, James Harris, and Stephen Lyons.

Right now there are at least three local exhibitions overtly given to exploring sexual and gender identity: Hide/Seek, the large historical American exhibition visiting Tacoma Art Museum; Under the Rainbow at Greg Kucera; Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography at the Photo Center Northwest.

And this weekend there's a symposium on the subject. It's called Queering the Art Museum, and it begins Friday at 5:30 with a reception and 6:30 keynote address (details), and continues Saturday at 10 am with a panel including, among others, Greenwood and Hide/Seek co-curator Jonathan Katz (and warning: some jerk who works for The Stranger), to be followed by a performance and events in Seattle and Tacoma (details).

Seattle native Charles LeDrays framed fragments of wrinkled white mens shirts on black backgrounds, painstakingly made by hand like all the artists fabric sculptures, are a testimony to the absence in the lineage between My Hands, My Fathers Hands. This piece is at Greg Kucera Gallery. Here is a classic by LeDray, a finger that has become nothing but a bone waiting for gay marriage to become legal.
  • Greg Kucera Gallery
  • Seattle native Charles LeDray's framed fragments of wrinkled white men's shirts on black backgrounds, painstakingly made by hand like all the artist's fabric sculptures, are a testimony to the absence in the lineage between My Hands, My Father's Hands. This piece is at Greg Kucera Gallery. Here is a classic by LeDray, a finger that has become nothing but a bone waiting for gay marriage to become legal.
The question posed by the symposium is how art museums can "address and engage queer culture in a non-tangential manner." Not with tokenism, outsiderism, exoticism, or novelty, but with regularity, consistency, intelligence, and a sense of history. Katz has proposed several, one example being: The Metropolitan Museum of Art must start to include information about same-sex love in its Greek galleries, which currently include none, unless you take the scheduled "gay" tour.

In honor of the symposium, I'm declaring this Queering the Art Museum Week on Slog. Each day, I'll post a piece of art showing locally, and write about the tactics it uses to address ideas about queerness. The point is not that these artists should be reduced to one part of themselves, but to try to kickstart the discussion about sexual difference, sexual defiance, and forms of expression in advance of this weekend's events.

*I'm told that when the afternoon sun hits the front window screenprinted with "Greg Kucera Gallery" at a certain angle, it casts a shadow that just spells "GAY," from the last letter in each word lining up vertically. And they try to say gay's not natural.