Queer Contemporary Art

1998

In 1998, Opie traveled cross-country in her motor home for two months in order to photograph lesbian couples. This series, called Domestic—of which Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina is an example—presents these couples involved in everyday, household activities: relaxing in their backyard, hanging out in their kitchen, playing with their children. There is no sensationalism here. Much like the formal studio portraits before them, these intimate photographs speak both to Opie's identification with her subjects and to the overwhelming absence of such images in mainstream representations.

Guglielmo Plüschow

Holly Hughes After A Fashion

Holly Hughes Dress Suits to Hire "In DRESS SUITS TO HIRE, a heady mixture of erotic fantasy and hard-boiled pulp drama, two "sisters" who live in a rental clothing shop use the merchandise to try on various facets of their personalities. Created by Holly Hughes, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, DRESS SUITS TO HIRE is a haunting and hilarious look into a room where one woman embodies a dark and predatory sexuality while the other one struggling against lesbian desires and her autonomous and abusive right hand. DRESS SUITS TO HIRE, which won OBIE Awards for both Shaw and Hughes (Shaw for her performance in the original 1987 production and a special citation for Hughes for the 1993 revival), is a mellifluous ode to lesbian eros and a joyful, literate send-up of all romantic fantasy." - LAMAMA

Excerpt from her interview with Union Weekly

Robert Rauschenberg Winter Pool, 1959 Combine painting: oil, paper, fabric, wood, metal, sandpaper, tape, printed paper, printed reproductions, handheld bellows, and found painting, on two canvases, with ladder

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to one of our favorites! Robert Rauschenberg "Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg imagined himself first as a minister and later as a pharmacist. It wasn’t until 1947, while in the U.S. Marines that he discovered his aptitude for drawing and his interest in the artistic representation of everyday objects and people. After leaving the Marines he studied art in Paris on the G.I. Bill, but quickly became disenchanted with the European art scene. After less than a year he moved to North Carolina, where the country’s most visionary artists and thinkers, such as Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller, were teaching at Black Mountain College. There, with artists such as dancer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage, Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic revolution. Soon, North Carolina country life began to seem small and he left for New York to make it as a painter. There, amidst the chaos and excitement of city life Rauschenberg realized the full extent of what he could bring to painting." - PBS