LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer. The “plus” represents other sexual identities including pansexual and Two-Spirit. The first four letters of the acronym have been used since the 1990s. Love is love, it has no gender but in recent years there has been an increased awareness of the need to be inclusive of other sexual identities to offer better representation. 

Desire, love, identity: LGBTQ histories trail

The British Museum

Ongoing

The British Museum has organized two thematic tours to appear at objects that have a special connection to LGBTQ+ history: a 15-object trail which will be completed in 60-75 minutes, likewise as a 30-minute trail that spotlights three objects. Audio commentary enriches items ranging from a plaque of the Mesopotamian deity Ishtar who had the flexibility to assign gender, to a pair of 18th-century chocolate-cups owned by people couple Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby.

Open through 28 August 2022, the museum’s exhibition Drawing attention: emerging British artists incorporates a robust LGBTQ+ presence, including the Turner Prize-shortlisted artist, Sin Wai Kin. Over 20 new acquisitions are visiting be shown for the first time alongside variety of the foremost celebrated works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Michelangelo from the museum’s collection.

The British Museum

Raúl de Nieves: The Treasure House of Memory

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

Through 24 July 2022

This solo exhibition of latest York-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and musician Raúl de Nieves marks his first presentation in Boston. The artist’s multifaceted practice ranges from heavily adorned figurative sculptures that reference traditional costumes in Mexican culture and modes of dress from drag, ballroom, and queer club cultures to stained-glass-style narrative paintings.

All de Nieves’s works share a selected visual language that draws from Mexican craft traditions, religious iconography, mythology, and folktales to explore the chances of decoration and thus the mutability of identity. For the ICA, de Nieves has created The storehouse of Memory, a body of interconnected works that are rooted in memory and explore themes of personal transformation.

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

Through 14 August 2022

Christie’s is proud to sponsor a fellowship for LGBTQ+ artists at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, whose mission is to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ+ art and foster the artists who create it. Lorenza Böttner: Requiem for the Norm is that the primary US presentation of the work of Chilean/German artist Lorenza Böttner. Böttner lost both arms in an accident at the age of eight and she born in Chile. Institutionalized in Germany, she moved along with her mother for treatment and rejected prosthetics intended to complete her disability.

In conservatoire, she started presenting as female and assumed the name Lorenza. Although her career spanned just 16 years, Böttner created many individual works, painting along with her feet and mouth and using dance, photography, street performance, drawing, and installation to celebrate the complexity of embodiment and gender expression.

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection

National Gallery of Victoria

Through 21 August 2022

QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection includes approximately 400 artworks from antiquity to the present day, making the exhibition the foremost historically expansive thematic presentation of its kind ever presented by an Australian art institution. Media ranges from painting and photography to fashion and so the ornamental arts.

The exhibition explores the NGV Collection from a queer perspective, presenting and interpreting queer concepts and stories rather than attempting to provide a definitive history of queer art. Many works within the exhibition are by artists who identify as queer, while others have a connection to queer histories. Beyond exploring new layers of interpretation and reinvestigating conventional narratives, this exhibition also considers absences within the NGV Collection itself, by excavating queer history where it has been omitted or eclipsed, through oversight or intent.

National Gallery of Victoria

Blurred Boundaries: Queer Visions in Canadian Art

Art Gallery of Ontario

Through September 2022

The gallery of Ontario is one among numerous institutions spotlighting pieces by the 2SLGBTQIA+ community within its permanent collection. during this tightly curated show, 13 works by the likes of General Idea, Will Munro, Frances Norma Loring, Cassils, and David Buchan encourage visitors to contemplate how queerness is understood and visualized within the landscape of Canadian art and therefore the way for several, the term ‘queer’ has transformed from a slur to a badge of honor.

While variety of the artists saw their private lives criminalized, others suffered the implications of prejudice and discrimination on their own health, or that of their partners. Spanning 150 years of creation and various media, the works are united in their artists’ desire to challenge and redefine the societal rules of their time.

Art Gallery of Ontario

Michaela Yearwood Dan: Let Me Hold You

Queercircle

Through 8 September 2022

This month, Queercircle, an LGBTQ+ charity functioning at the intersection of arts, culture and policy, opened a different permanent home for LGBTQ+ artists. Recognizing the disappearance of artist studios and also the closure of over 50% of dedicated LGBTQ+ spaces in London within the past decade, Queercircle will support the LGBTQ+ community through a participatory artist residency and a public programme.

The exhibition programme opened with a solo show titled, Let Me Hold You, presenting new site-specific work by London-based painter, Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Yearwood-Dan’s signature botanical-inspired motifs provide a visual exploration that expands our understanding of what it means to be queer and to love. In Queercircle’s room, the inaugural archive exhibition, The Queens’ Jubilee, celebrates the unconventional drag queens of the Gay Liberation Front coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first Pride march within the United Kingdom.

Queercircle