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Thesis/Dissertation
Date
2024-05
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Art History
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10214
Abstract
Queering the Museum: Utopian Futurity in Contemporary Exhibitions expands the history of American art beyond its tightly policed borders to include curators, viewers, artists, and artworks as key players in contemporary queer exhibition surveys in U.S.-based museums. Exhibition histories are not the sole domain of museum or curatorial studies, and are as much a part of art history as artists and art objects yet they remain understudied and under-analyzed within the field. I posit that a queer art history not only analyzes the relationship between works of art, but it also engenders the potential to queer the visitor (through the viewing of artworks), considers the production and circulation of artworks within the institution, and disrupts a normative experience of time and space in the museum. Working interdisciplinarily through queer, feminist, and critical theory, my intervention offers an analysis of exhibitions, not as a history per se, but as a constellation of projects that unfolded across U.S.-based museums located in Philadelphia and New York from 2017 through 2019. Placed within the longer context of queerness in the museum I analyze three case studies: Johanna Burton’s, Sara O'Keeffe's, and Natalie Bell's Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Nayland Blake’s Tag: Proposals on Queer Play and the Ways Forward (2018) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; and the collectively curated (Margo Cohen Ristorucci, Lindsay C. Harris, Carmen Hermo, Allie/ A.L. Rickard, and Lauren Argentina Zelaya) exhibition Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years after Stonewall (2019) at The Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center. I parse what this particular constellation of exhibitions did at that specific moment in time, one right after the other, all clustered together both physically (within the northeast corridor) and also conceptually. While institutional critique has primarily been applied to the production of artwork by artists who intervene in and critique various artworld structures from museums to galleries, my dissertation proposes the term to encompass the entire exhibition as a critique of normative exhibitions and the institutions that present them. The curators of these queer exhibitions engage in deterritorializing traditional museum spaces thereby reterritorializing them with nontraditional artists and artworks. In doing so, the curators construct queer sites of discourse as heterotopias both within and outside of the museum structure offering glimmers of hope, if only momentarily, for ways of being in the world.
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