Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship

A new exhibit responds to the long practice of censorship of LGBT art.

Sexuality has been, and continues to be, used as a tool to prohibit LGBT cultural artwork. This exhibit at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, curated by Jennifer Tyburczy, includes work spanning three decades that has been censored, and in some cases vandalized.

Museum director Hunter O'Hanian says, The focus of this exhibition will be the work which has been excluded from other mainstream institutions due to its gay content. Going back to the Culture Wars of the 1980s, the exhibition landscape has changed as certain works of art have been excluded because they were considered offensive or too risky. While in some ways we live in a time which appears more tolerant, exclusion of artwork, and certain facts about some artists, are still excluded because of the persons sexual orientation.

Guest curator Jennifer Tyburczy says, The exhibition draws inspiration from the innovative responses to watershed moments in the history of censoring LGBTQ art in Canada, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States. In concept, the show is principally drawn from two events: the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpes art in the 1980s and 1990s and the more recent withdrawal of David Wojnarowiczs A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery in 2010. In practice, it seizes on the international fame of these controversies to delve deeper into the many ways that censorship functions in queer artistic life.

Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art February 13May 3 Public Opening: February 13, 2015, 68 p.m.

Zanele Muholi, excerpt from "Being" series, 2007, digital print, 48 x 39 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In the "Being" series (2007), Zanele Muholi interrogates black lesbian relationships and safer sex. On the surface, the visuals capture couples in intimate positions and moments showing their love for each other. However, Muholis photographs also critique HIV/AIDS prevention programming in South Africa, and how, in her view, it has failed women who have sex with other women. For years, Muholi has documented gay, lesbian, and transgender people in South Africa and beyond. In April 2012, Muholis apartment was broken into while she and her partner were away. The thieves took nothing but her archives, and little has been done to retrieve her works.

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Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship