June marks Pride Month, a time when communities around the world celebrate LGBTQIA+ identities while reflecting on the history of the movement and the ongoing fight for equality. Its origins are often traced to June 28, 1969, when a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Lower Manhattan was met with resistance from patrons and local community members. The six days of protests that followed, known as the Stonewall Riots, became a turning point in the struggle for LGBTQIA+ rights and helped galvanise a new era of activism. More than five decades later, Pride continues to honour that legacy while creating space for visibility, solidarity and celebration. Art has long played a vital role in this story, offering a platform for self-expression, protest, remembrance and joy. This season’s exhibitions and events bring together artists whose work explores identity, community and belonging, highlighting both the challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ people and the creativity, resilience and joy that continue to shape queer culture today.
Del La Grace Volcano: Sensual / Mutual
Auto Italia, London | Opens 17 July
For the past 50 years, Del LaGrace Volcano has consistently challenged normative constructions of gender and the body, producing work that is intimate, defiant and historically vital. Their images are not only portraits but acts of visibility and urgent interventions that insist on the inclusion of gender non-confirming presence within cultural memory. Now, Auto Italia presents Sensual / Mutual, foregrounding Volcano’s practice across the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition brings together unseen works from their iconic images of Scott’s P.I.T., a legendary lesbian bar in 1970s San Francisco. Also on display is a series produced at the Goodman Building, an artist hotel on rent strike against the city, and ART (Asylum for Rowdy Females and dogs), Womyn’s land in the mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Walker Art Gallery takes visitors through centuries of history, exploring gender identity and self-expression. Catherine Opie’s photograph The Gang (1990) captures a group of the artist’s friends in Los Angeles – part of the queer community she has spent her career documenting with warmth and dignity. Grayson Perry’s vase Difficult Background (2001) depicts 1950s children playing with gendered toys, while Zanele Muholi’s Miss Lesbian VII, Amsterdam (2009), from the Walker’s collection, is part of their series addressing beauty, race and the Black gaze. Gender Stories is a complex and nuanced exhibition that examines how gender is defined, redefined, rejected and expanded in modern life.
A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit brings together an intergenerational group of artists who explore how magic, spirituality, and esoteric knowledge have shaped queer art and culture in the 20th and 21stcenturies. Drawing on the meaning of arcana — hidden and mystical knowledge — the exhibition considers how queer artists have turned to obscure spiritual practices as sources of connection and transformation. The works on view reflect a wide range of spiritual traditions and practices, including Western occultism, witchcraft and goddess worship, Christian mysticism, New Age beliefs influenced by Eastern philosophies, and shamanic traditions rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Many artists explore and combine diverse traditions, constructing through their work idiosyncratic and intricate worlds.
The Unfinished Business of Living Together
Swiss Pavilion, Venice Biennale | Until 22 November
The Swiss Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale centred on archival television as a site of political struggle, collective memory and ongoing negotiation. The exhibition takes a 1978 episode of the Swiss public TV programme, Telearena, as a point of departure, in which the so-called “problem of homosexuality” was debated live on air. This broadcast marks one of the first moments in Swiss history when people identifying as homosexual spoke for themselves on mainstream television. Curated by Gianmaria Andreetta and Luca Beeler with British artist Nina Wakford, and developed in a working group with Laura Leonardi, Lithic Alliance and Yul Tomatala, the project activates broadcast archives through video installation that combines original footage with newly produced images, sound and reenactments of talk-show formats.
Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art features works by Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Leilah Babirye, Jim Chuchu, Ṣọlá Olúlòde, among many LGBTQ+ artists from across Africa and its diaspora. Through their eyes, the viewer can experience their worlds and explore themes of identity and belonging. Visitors will experience more than 60 artworks, each one speaking to issues that unite everyone: the importance of family, spirit, standing up for oneself and others, imagining the future, making intimate connections, finding belonging, embracing potential and, above all, experiencing joy. Through studio visits, interviews and ongoing dialogue with artists from across the continent, the curators have fostered meaningful relationships built on trust and mutual respect.
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1&6. Severance of Ties, Jim Chuchu, digital video (still), 2014 National Museum of African Art.
2. My (X) girlfriend Sylvia McFarlane with her Nana and Gramps in our leather jackets. Edinburgh 1989
3. Gender Stories – Installation view of Gender Stories at Walker Art Gallery. Credit: © Pete Carr c/o National Museums Liverpool.
4. Steven Arnold, Inventing Infinity, 1990. Gelatin silver print. (sheet) 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm), (image) 13 7/8 x 14 1/8 in. (35.2 x 35.9 cm). Palm Springs Art Museum, gift of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archives, Los Angeles. © Steve Arnold Museum and Archives.
5. The Unfinished Business of Living Together. Swiss Pavilion. Venice Biennale.
