Best Museums in NYC to see Queer Art
As of 2022, the Museum Hack listed 145 institutions currently opened in New York City to preserve the memory and history of all kinds of subjects. The list includes Poster House, Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, Girl Scout Museum, The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, and Museum of Sex. There is a gallery for every single interest you can possibly imagine, and finally, the Gay Rights Movement will get its own place to be preserved and celebrated.
The New York Historical Society's building located in Central Park West, right in front of the American Museum of Natural History, is being updated to welcome the American LGBTQ+ Museum. The institution should open its doors in 2024. Artifacts, posters, images, and other memorabilia showcasing the history of the Gay Rights Movement, from the Stonewall protests to the HIV/AIDS activism of groups, will be kept there.
While the new institution is still under construction, there are other museums and sites that you can visit to learn more about queer art and history.
This list features works from the following artists (click to jump): Caravaggio (1571-1610), Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Andy Warhol (1927-1987), Catherine Opie (b. 1961), Zoe Leonard (b. 1961), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), Roni Horn (b. 1955), Wu Tsang (b. 1982), Gilbert Baker (1951-2017), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), Neel Bate (1916–1989), and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
Museums: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and The Brooklyn Museum.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Price: $25 for adults; $17 for seniors; $12 for students - For New York State Residents and NY, NJ, and CT students, the amount you pay for tickets is up to you.
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Address: 82nd Street with Fifth Avenue
Subway: 86th Street, lines 4, 5, and 6.
This is the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere, with a collection of more than two million items, and the most-visited museum in the United States. The Met attracts over 6 million people per year and covers the history of humanity from ancient times to the present. You will find masterpieces referencing same-sex love in the Met's collection, such as "The Musicians" by Caravaggio, "The Horse Fair" by the queer cross-dresser Rosa Bonheur, and "Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus" by Poussin.
"The Musicians" by Caravaggio
Early in his career, Caravaggio (1571-1610) crafted three paintings for his patron, the cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Musicians being one of them. They have been interpreted by critics as “portraits, concerts, or allegories of music, showing lyrical momentariness, theatrical performances, classical enactments, and homoerotic allegories of love.” For some historians, Caravaggio might actually have painted himself as the cornetto player in the back of the Musicians.
“Caravaggio’s bisexuality can be established with some certainty,” and there “is a strong likelihood that Cardinal del Monet was homosexual…this may have influenced his tastes in the art he commissioned.”
"The Horse Fair" by the queer cross-dresser Rosa Bonheur
Bonheur’s best-known painting shows the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined. Each horse represents an aspect of animal nature – from rebellion to submission.
In 1836 Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) met and married Nathalie Micas, with whom she stayed together until the end of her life. While painting The Horse Fair, Bonheur asked permission for travestissement from the Paris police to wear male peasant clothes saying it would help her work better with animals and to avoid drawing attention to herself at the Horse Fair in 1850s Paris.
"Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus" by Poussin
Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus is a representation of the ancient myth about King Midas. According to the story, Midas was granted his greedy wish that everything he touched would be turned to gold, but he quickly realized that he could neither eat nor drink. To reverse what had become a curse, the god Bacchus instructed Midas to wash in the Pactolus River.
This painting was among the first completed by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) after arriving in Rome and was among the first paintings to enter The Met in 1871. Poussin produced a series
of mythological paintings that depict women looking at passive men. Poussin often portrayed the relationship between masculinity and femininity in society. Although it’s not possible to confirm his sexuality, Poussin is rumored to have had affairs with other gentlemen. Midas Washing at the Source of the Pactolus is considered by some as a composition that was clearly intended for a homoerotic.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Price: $25 for adults; $18 for seniors; free for youth (under 18 years old). Museum admission is Pay-What-You-Wish on Fridays, 7–10 pm.
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Address: 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014
Subway: 14 St/8 Av on C & E.
The Whitney is considered the country's leading venue of the most recent developments in American art. The institution often purchases works from artists before they are even recognized nationally. Its collection has over 25,000 pieces created by American artists during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The museum focused on modern artists, and it's constantly organizing tours and exhibitions concentrated on queer history and exploring the work of influential artists like Andy Warhol, Catherine Opie, and Zoe Leonard.
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (1927-1987) was an American artist, film director, and producer, mainly known as one of the leading figures in the Pop Art movement. His work explored different artistic languages, mixing advertising, and celebrity culture. Warhols’s first commission had been to draw shoes for Glamour magazine in the late 1940s. In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine.
In May 1962, Warhol was featured in an article in Time magazine with his painting Big Campbell's Soup Can with Can Opener, which became Warhol's first to be shown in a museum at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in July of the same year. He also was praised for his portrait series of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor.
Warhol lived openly as a gay man before the gay liberation movement. Throughout his career, he produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his films premiered in gay porn theaters in New York City.
Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie (b. 1961) requested a camera for her ninth birthday and since then never stopped taking pictures. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1988.
Her early series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–97) depicted her friends in the lesbian and gay community in Los Angeles. The theme followed her during her awarded career. Opie has investigated aspects of the communitity, making portraits of many groups including the LGBT community. In Portraits (1993–1997) she presents queer identities such as drag kings, crossdressers, and FTM transexuals. In Domestic (1995–1998) she portrays lesbian families engaging in everyday household activities across the country.
Zoe Leonard
Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. She explores themes like loss and mourning, urban landscapes, gender, and sexuality.
Leonard wrote “I want a president” in 1992, the same year that Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot, and Eileen Myles. ACT-UP was acting up and thousands of queer loves were already dead.
In 1995 she staged an exhibition at her studio on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which featured the work Strange Fruit, an installation of various fruit skins she sewed together by hand. The exhibition was a tribute to her friend David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 after fighting AIDS. Strange Fruit was a reference to mortality and loss.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation
Price: $25 for adults; $18 for seniors and visitors with disabilities. Museum admission is Pay-What-You-Wish on selected Saturdays, 4-6 pm.
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Address: 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128
Subway: 86th Street on 6.
Right in the middle of the Upper East Side, you will find this institution dedicated to promoting the understanding of modern and contemporary art. Its collection is famous for having masterpieces from Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. You will also find the work of artists who are constantly discussing gender and sexuality, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, and Wu Tsang.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) was a Cuban-born American visual artist, openly gay and activist. From 1987 to 1991, he was part of Group Material, a New York-based art collective whose members worked collaboratively to initiate community education and cultural activism.
In 1992, Untitled (1991), a black-and-white photograph of Gonzalez-Torres’s empty bed was installed on 24 billboards throughout the city of New York. The image was a celebration and a memorial to the artist’s lover, who had recently died of AIDS.
Roni Horn
Roni Horn (b. 1955) explores drawing, photography, installation, sculpture and literature in her works. She has created several public artworks, including You Are the Weather—Munich (1996–97), a permanent installation in Munich.
Horn's first photographic installation, You Are The Weather (1994-1996), is a photographic cycle featuring 100 close-up shots of the same woman. In Her, Her, Her & Her (2002–03), she created a collage of black and white photographs shot inside a women’s locker room. In 2009, Roni openly discussed her androgyny. "When I was young I decided that my sex, my gender, was nobody’s business."
Wu Tsang
Wu Tsang (b. 1982) is a filmmaker, artist, and performer based in New York and Berlin. She mixes art and activism, exploring the area “in-between” binary genders. His work often addresses issues in the transgender and LGBT community.
In 2012, Tsang was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film". In 2018, Tsang received a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her best-known documentary, Wildness, documents the Los Angeles trans bar "Silver Platter".
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Price: $25 for adults; $18 for seniors and visitors with disabilities.
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Address: 11 W 53rd St, New York, Y 10019
Subway: 5 Avenue-53 St Station on E & M
In the late 40s, the Museum of Modern Art was criticized for having a high number of gays and lesbians on the staff. In fact, the LGBTQ+ community was always represented inside the MoMa, where highly influential curators of the American art scene made a name for themselves, like the architect Philip Johnson, William S. Lieberman, Frank O'Hara, and Arthur Drexler.
Gilberto Barker
Since 2015, MoMa is also home to one of the first rainbow flags created by Gilbert Baker (1951-2017) in 1978 - Baker led a group of 30 volunteers at the Gay Community Center in San Francisco to hand-dye and stitch rainbow flags for the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade on June 25 of that year. He believed the rainbow was a natural flag in the sky and, just like that, created the official pride symbol.
"I was a big drag queen in 1970s San Francisco. I knew how to sew", Baker told Moma in 2015. "It was necessary to have the Rainbow Flag because up until that, we had the pink triangle from the Nazis—it was the symbol that they would use [to mark gay people]. It came from such a horrible place of murder and holocaust and Hitler. We needed something beautiful, something from us. The rainbow is so perfect because it really fits our diversity in terms of race, gender, ages, all of those things. Plus, it's a natural flag—it's from the sky!"
Baker's rainbow flags featured eight stripes in different colors: pink to represent sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, blue for serenity, and purple for spirit. Later, the color pink was excluded from the color scheme because it was too expensive for mass production.
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
Price: Admission is free with a suggested donation of $10
Address: 26 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013
Subway: Canal Street on A & C.
In 1987, during the height of the AIDS pandemic, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman decided to create the world's first museum dedicated to LGBTQ art. Thus, the Leslie Lohman Museum was born with a mission of embracing and fostering queer artists. The institution now has more than 25,000 pieces from more than 1,9000 LGBTQ+ artists. Its permanent collection includes work by Catherine Opie, Robert Mapplethorpe, Neel Bate, and Andy Warhol.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was an American photographer known for his black-and-white portraits and for documenting New York's S&M scene. Mapplethorpe lived with his girlfriend Patti Smith from 1967 to 1972. After that, he met art curator Sam Wagstaff, who would become his mentor and lover.
In 1989 the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment sparked a debate in the United States concerning both uses of public funds for "obscene" artwork and the Constitutional limits of free speech.
Mapplethorpe died at the age of 42 due to complications from AIDS. Before his death, he helped found the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which raised and donated millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection.
Neel Bate
Neel Bate (1916–1989) was an American underground artist known for his gay erotic art. He is best known for his 1948 series of drawings The Barn, inspired by farm boys. In many of his works, Bate portrayed the relationship between young men with older men.
Before joining the Marines in World War II, Bates burned all his drawings, fearing that they would be discovered. In the mid-1970s, his work appears under the pseudonym Blade in the new explicitly gay publications of the time.
Bate began a relationship with model Ernest Henry in 1950. The two continued to live together until Bate's death.
Brooklyn Museum
Price: General admission is suggested; pay what you wish. We strongly recommend purchasing tickets in advance.
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Address: 200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Subway: Eastern Pkwy Brooklyn Museum on 2 and 3.
The Brooklyn Museum is constantly promoting events and exhibits to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. The institution hosts events such as LGBTQ+ Teen Night, focusing on queer youth, and the program InterseXtions: Gender & Sexuality, a paid internship for the New York City LGBTQ+ youth to explore gender and sexuality in art through an activist lens.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat are often the inspiration for new exhibits at The Brooklyn Museum. In fact, Basquiat started studying art as a Junior Member of the Brooklyn Museum when he was six.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work became popular during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. The cultural scene of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s had a huge influence on his work. At 22, Basquiat (1960-1988) was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York.
Unfortunately, Basquiat died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose in 1988. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million.
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