10 LGBTQIA+ exhibitions and festivals to see this summer

A New York City queer institution for more than 40 years, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (The Center) opened Young Lesbians, On Selfhood in its galleries this spring. A group exhibition that focusses on the art and material culture of 35 young lesbian women, it grew out of the oral history project On Selfhood: Young Lesbians within the Margins from 2022–2023. The project and exhibition explore lesbian identity within communities typically excluded from mainstream archives, aiming to expand what is deemed historically significant in lesbian history.

By spotlighting marginalised artists — including many who felt their ‘lives are too mundane’ to be recorded in the historical narrative — the show seeks to recast how we think about identity and significance in queer art spaces. Works from the participants include poetry, photography, illustration and mixed-media, many of which are accompanied by a QR code that links to the artists’ oral histories.

In 2022, Mighty Real/Queer Detroit organised the nation’s largest exhibition of LGBTQIA+ artists, which centred on the underground queer art scene in Detroit in the 20th and 20st centuries. This year MR/QD has expanded their reach, launching the first biennial of Queer art. Their 2024 exhibition, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Reflections of the Contemporary Queer, encompasses more than 170 artists from the United States, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

Sprawling across more than ten galleries throughout the city, the biennial includes artists working in photography, painting, collage, sculpture and more. The show aims to surface ‘artifacts of Queer life’ from the early 20th century to the present, as it presents works by artists ranging from A.L. Steiner and Lyle Ashton Harris, to Wayne Koestenbaum, Edie Fake, and Clifford Prince King.

Started in 2006, the Xposed Queer Film Festival brings queer films old and new to venues throughout Berlin each June. The festival aims to highlight queer cinema ‘in all its forms, glory, shame, distaste, trash and beauty’. This year’s selections span films by directors from the United States, Vietnam, Thailand, Germany, the Czech Republic and more.

This June’s programme ranges from Klára Tasovská’s solo directorial debut — Ještě nejsem, kým chci být (I’m not everything I want to be), a quasi-documentary which traces the rise and fall of the Soviet Union through Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková’s creative work and life — to Jim Chuchu’s Stories of Our Lives, which is an anthology of short films that depict queer stories from his native Kenya. In addition, there are screenings of films by Juliana Rojas, Katernia Gornostai, Mohamed Soueid and Patiparn Boontarig, among many others.

Pope of Trash is the first comprehensive exhibition to trace John Waters’s contributions to film. Together, the ephemera of his career — from costumes to scripts, props, photographs and more — demonstrate how, through his films and life, he has relentlessly unsettled social norms and questioned the status quo. Amongst the highlights of the exhibition are an original script from Pink Flamingos, Waters’s 1972 cult film starring actor Divine in the lead role, as well as the exploding wig Debbie Harry wore during Hairspray (1988).

Waters’ oeuvre comprises many cult films, primarily due to their overt outlandishness. Collaborating often with his friend Divine — a gay drag queen who, like him, grew up in Baltimore’s counterculture circles — he pushed social conventions of censorship through various exaggerated, often absurd plotlines, as well as portraying crossdressing and homosexuality alongside. He is one of the most significant directors that used themes of camp in his work, and is well-known for his willingness to express what others would not.

Jean Cocteau was one of the most influential French artists of the 20th century and one of the major figures associated with Dada and Surrealism. His life in art knew no bounds, comprising media ranging from the visual, the written and the musical. His disregard of social convention — including his open bisexuality and opium addiction — established his reputation as the enfant terrible of 20th-century French art.

Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge represents his complicated and important legacy. The largest retrospective of the artist ever held in Italy, the exhibition presents 150 works including murals, textiles, jewellery, and drawings, which emphasise precisely why he’s often called the avant-garde generation’s ‘Renaissance man’.

Mickalene Thomas is best known for her mixed-media paintings, often embellished with a variety of materials from paint to paper to rhinestones. All About Love at the Broad in Los Angeles is the opening stop of the artist’s first major international touring exhibition, which will travel to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and then conclude in London’s Hayward Gallery in early 2025. Spanning two decades of the artist’s output, it includes collage and installation, as well as photography and painting.

All About Love presents themes that are echoed throughout her oeuvre. From her use of portraiture to subvert common standards of beauty, to her representations of a variety of queer subjects in a visually fragmented, but thematically harmonious compositions. With a range of references from Matisse to Romare Bearden, she is one of the great luminaries pushing the bounds of the art world today.

Alongside the 88 national pavilions of 60th edition of the Venice Biennale is curator Adriano Pedrosa’s main exhibition, titled Stranieri Ovunque. Translating to ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, it seeks to reveal ways in which people are always foreigners, and always surrounded by foreigners as well. The exhibition as a whole centres around indigenous and queer artists, centring around the role of craft in their practice.

Included in the exhibition are artists such as South Korea’s Kang Seung Lee, who presents a collection of objects in a reference to artists who died in the AIDS epidemic, as well as the transsexual artist Manauara Clandestina, from Brazil, whose video Migranta tells a story of her family’s migration.

There are many ways to approach an exhibition of queer art. In I’m a thousand different people—every one is real, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art takes the prismatic, as it approaches queer art, offering many perspectives and eschewing traditional notions of legibility in favour of the plural and the not-so-easily-defined. These newly acquired works come together to form a cohesive narrative around queerness and the multifaceted outputs of their makers.

Including both historic and contemporary works, the exhibition represents the multidimensionality of queer and trans life, echoing the lives and artistic output of the numerous artists whose works are included. From Baseera Khan to Candy Darling, Jeffrey Gibson to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the comprehensive exhibition is a who’s who of LGBTQIA+ trailblazers from then and now.

Zanele Muholi describes themself as a visual activist, portraying the lives of queer communities in their native South Africa. Their exhibition at Tate in London encompasses a variety of series they made over more than two decades, including Only Half the Picture, which focusses on moments of queer intimacy in the face of traumatic events, and Somnyama Ngonyama — Hail the Dark Lioness — in which they turn the camera on themself.

In South Africa, LGBTQIA+ people are often the subjects of violence and prejudice, and Muholi’s work aims to bring the experiences of these communities to global attention. Even as their work expands into other media, it remains grounded in the representation of marginalised communities in their homeland.

The multidisciplinary maker Michael Sylvan Robinson has made a name for themself as a contemporary fiber artist. Having been exhibited in Rome and San Francisco, their wearable work Identity Is…, now on display in the lobby of the Museum of Arts and Design, was designed for the theater producer Jordan Roth to wear at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala in 2021.

Entirely maximalist, the gown employs a tapestry of beadwork and patterned fabric to embolden fragments of text and queer imagery, reminding viewers, in Robinson’s words, ‘of the fragility of our world,’ while provoking ‘a call to healing, to action, to remembrance.’