Queer Histories
12.13.2024 – 4.13.2025
MASP closes the year dedicated to Queer Histories with a group exhibition that will occupy three of the museum’s exhibition spaces from December 13 to April 13, 2025. The LGBTQIA+ Histories exhibition brings together more than 150 national and international works and documents, demonstrating the diversity of LGBTQIA+ production and narrative, especially after the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1990s.
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, MASP; André Mesquita, Curator, MASP; Leandro Muniz, Assistant Curator, MASP, and Teo Teotonio, Curatorial Assistant, MASP, the exhibition is divided into eight sections: Love and Desire; Icons and Muses; Spaces and Territories; Ecosexualities and Transcendental Fantasies; Sacred and Profane; Abstractions; Archives; and Cuir Library.
“The current global landscape for queer and trans people is uneven: acceptance, solidarity and visibility exist side by side with hatred, censorship and outright legal prohibition in different parts of the world. So, on the one hand, greater attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other minority (LGBTQIA+) issues is creating more opportunities for queer and trans artists and thinkers. On the other hand, LGBTQIA+ people around the world – affected differently by their race, class, gender, age, and nationality – continue to face oppression. In this context, LGBTQIA+ Histories brings together works that thematize queer topics or are made by LGBTQIA+ artists, activists, and researchers. The show celebrates the richness and multiplicity of queer creativity in the visual arts,” say Julia Bryan-Wilson, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, MASP, and Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director. Queer, in the English language, originally meant “strange,” but at some point, it also meant “sexually deviant.” Since the end of the 20th century, however, it has been reclaimed by lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people as a broad term to identify themselves.
Juxtaposing the past and the present, the exhibition presents works from different periods and artistic currents, highlighting visions of LGBTQIA+ histories that transcend time and space, as well as pointing to strategies of resistance. In O beijo 20 (2024), from the series Álbum dos desesquecimentos, Bahian artist Mayara Ferrão uses artificial intelligence to reveal erased narratives and imagine new futures, creating images that simulate old photographs to invent an iconography of Black lesbian histories.
“We present a diversity of representations, groups, and experiences beyond the images of subalternity, dehumanization, and hyper-sexualization that have been historically imposed on LGBTQIA+ people. We also have an enriching diversity of artistic styles to think about this experience from the point of view of art and possible historical revisions,” says Leandro Muniz, MASP Assistant Curator.
The exhibition features contemporary works that critique and reflect on art canons. In Duas Fa'afafine (2020), Yuki Kihara, an artist of Japanese and Samoan descent, photographs people from the trans community using the compositional schemes of Paul Gauguin (France, 1848-1903), in a critique of the Frenchman’s famous paintings of Polynesian women. Another example of a dialogue with artistic tradition is A sculpture for trans women... (2022) by the American artist Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki-Olivo). The work, made of bronze, a classic material in the history of art, reproduces the artist’s body on a one-to-one scale using a three-dimensional scan.
The exhibition also explores the stereotypes and contradictions of the LGBTQIA+ community. One of the works in the exhibition is the photograph Night Stage Raising Crew, Listening (2006), by Angela Jimenez, which documents the setting up of the stage at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Founded in 1976, the annual event was organized by lesbian feminists and ended in 2015 due to tensions over its policy of excluding trans women.
Bringing together historical records of the LGBTQIA+ community, the ‘Archives’ section includes documents from self-organized community groups in Brazil – such as MUTHA (Museu Transgênero de História e Arte), Instituto Brasileiro de Transmasculinidades (IBRAT-SP) and Arquivo Lésbico – and the Global South, including 12 other countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Arab world.
LGBTQIA+ Histories is part of MASP’s annual program dedicated to Histories of LGBTQIA+ Diversity. This year’s program also includes exhibitions by Francis Bacon, Mário de Andrade, Catherine Opie, Lia D Castro, Leonilson, the Gran Fury and Serigrafistas Queer collectives, the MASP Renner collection, as well as shows in the Video Room by Masi Mamani/Bartolina Xixa, Tourmaline, Ventura Profana, Kang Seung Lee, and Manauara Clandestina.
The exhibition is part of a series of projects around the plural notion of “histories,” a word that encompasses fiction and non-fiction, personal and political accounts, private and public narratives, with a speculative, plural, and polyphonic character. These histories have an open, procedural quality, as opposed to the more monolithic and definitive character of traditional historical narratives. In this sense, among the annual programs and previous exhibitions, MASP has organized Histories of Sexuality (2017), Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories (2019), Dance Histories (2020), Brazilian Histories (2021-22) and Indigenous Histories (2023).
ACCESSIBILITY
All MASP temporary exhibitions are accessible, with free admission for people with disabilities and their companions. Visits are offered in Libras (Brazilian Sign Language) or with descriptive texts and subtitles in large print and audio-visual productions in easy language – with narration, subtitles and interpretation in Libras that describe and comment on the spaces and works. The content can be used by people with disabilities, school groups, teachers, non-literate people and the general public. The content is available on the museum’s website and YouTube channel.
ANTHOLOGY
On the occasion of the exhibition, an anthology will be published, organized by Adriano Pedrosa, André Mesquita and Julia Bryan-Wilson, with the support of Teo Teotonio. The book brings together essays, interviews, poems, manifestos, reports and statements on issues such as body politics, social inclusion, artistic practices in contexts of crisis, necropolitics and conflict, and histories of sexual and gender dissidence movements, with a special focus on experiences in the Global South.
MASP SHOP
In dialogue with the exhibition, the MASP Shop presents special products of LGBTQIA+ Histories, including bags, magnetic postcards, posters, and bookmarks.
LGBTQIA+ Histories
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, MASP; with the collaboration of André Mesquita, Curator, MASP; and the assistance of Leandro Muniz, Assistant Curator, and Teo Teotonio, Curatorial Assistant, MASP.