High Museum launches LGBTQIA+ Photography initiative

The High Museum of Art has introduced its new LGBTQIA+ Photography Centennial Acquisition Initiative.

When Maria L. Kelly, the Assistant Curator of Photography on the High, thought of the museum’s assortment of over 9,000 pictures, she realized that within the museum’s almost 60 years of constructing a images assortment, LGBTQ+ artists had been underrepresented.

“While I was going through all of our works and looking at themes and thinking about what exhibitions could happen and where we should be going with acquisitions, I realized that we had inadvertently, over the decades of collecting photography, missed out on representing queer voices in the photo collection,” Kelly instructed Georgia Voice.

Nearly a year-and-a-half later, the High has publicly introduced the 4 LGBTQ+ photographers whose works have been acquired by way of the initiative: Peter Hujar, recognized for his portraits capturing ‘70s and ‘80s New York; Catherine Opie, who first got here to prominence within the ‘90s for her sequence of studio portraits depicting homosexual, lesbian, and trans folks in her social circles; Naima Greene, an up-and-coming photographer capturing her personal queer neighborhood of shade; and Martine Gutierrez, a up to date photographer celebrated her for self-portraits that query gender roles, mainstream magnificence requirements, and id.

“I always think it’s really important for people to be able to see themselves in a work, to come in and be like, ‘Oh, I recognize the subject matter, or I recognize the story that’s being told here,’” she mentioned. “…But then I also want it to be the case for the people who maybe don’t identify in any kind of way to [say], ‘Here’s a story I didn’t know about, here’s a worldview I didn’t know about, here’s a history I had no idea about.’”

While Kelly says there aren’t any plans for all these works to be exhibited collectively, Green’s “It Lingers Sweet” is presently on show in “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing,” and there shall be a brand new acquisitions exhibit subsequent summer time which can function a number of the initiative’s different acquisitions.  

Moving ahead, Kelly says she has a “long wish list” of different LGBTQ+ photographers to incorporate within the assortment and is working to lift funds to proceed increasing the scope of the identities and experiences represented on the High.

To study extra and discover the High Museum’s images assortment, go to high.org/collection-area/photography.

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