In a recent New York Times art review, “Art Once Shunned, Now Celebrated in ‘Found Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction,’” co-chief art critic Holland Cotter discusses two exhibits on display at The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and the place occupied by John Burton Harter in the queer art tradition.
Mr. Cotter describes Expanded Visions: Fifty Years of Collecting as a deep view into the collection’s extensive holdings and evolving thinking in new acquisitions, from canonical works to myriad queer creations.
“At any point over the past several decades,” he writes, “you might have found, hanging on Leslie-Lohman walls, a circa 1900 photograph of Sicilian youths by Wilhelm von Gloeden, or George Bellows’s 1923 print of a men’s bathhouse, or one of John Burton Harter’s academic 1980s nudes. You would have been far less likely to find the equivalent of Zanele Muholi’s portraits of the black South African lesbians, or Chitra Ganesh’s feminist mash-ups of South Asian comic strips, or anything at all resembling the doll-like hand-stitched sculptures of the transgender artist Greer Lankton — all of which have recently arrived in the collection and look completely at home in the show.”
Harter is known for his exquisite figure studies and compositions of the classical male form. Expanded Visions includes an untitled acrylic painting of a young male nude by the artist.
The exhibit is on view from March 10 through October 29, 2017.
