Gemma Rolls-Bentley still remembers the first time she saw work by a queer artist. She was in her early 20s and had just moved to London when she came across an exhibition of Catherine Opie’s black and white photographs at the Stephen Friedman Gallery. By this point, she had two art history degrees under her belt but nothing she had been taught about had been contextualised as queer. “Then I saw all these pictures of dykes on bikes and leather daddies – in a blue chip gallery, in Mayfair!” she recalls. “It was something that I’d never seen endorsed or validated in that way. It was like: they’re my people and they’re hanging in a gallery!”
The encounter prompted a devoted interest in researching and platforming queer art. For almost two decades now, Rolls-Bentley has produced exhibitions and built collections of work by LGBTQ+ artists across the world. In 2022, she curated the Brighton Beacon Collection, the largest permanent display of queer art in the UK. Last year, she curated Dreaming of Home at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, an exploration of the comforts and complications of queer and trans domestic life.
Rolls-Bentley’s new book, Queer Art: From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between, is the latest step in her mission to fill in the gaps in art history. Designed in “sexy coffee table book” format, it aims to provide an accessible introduction to the field with short biographies of almost 200 artists making work between the late 1960s and the present day. Established queer artists such as Tom of Finland and Keith Haring sit in conversation with up-and-coming contemporary artists, including Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, who specialises in interactive video games, and photographer Clifford Prince King. Presented in themed chapters rather than chronological order, the book encourages readers to connect the dots between different moments in the queer art timeline.
Much of the work included stretches far beyond traditional painting and photography, from the public art project of Dyke Action Machine! to Andrew Logan’s ongoing Alternative Miss World event series, which reimagined the eponymous competition through drag and cabaret. “For queer people, the pathways to existing have not been straightforward, and so the art of the community is not always going to be found in a gallery or a museum, or the traditional places where you might find art,” she says. “It might be in the street, at a protest, on a dancefloor, on a podium.”
Ensuring that the project had an intersectional and global outlook was key. As well as drawing on her existing reference points as a veteran in the industry, Rolls-Bentley adopted a thorough research process to ensure that “no stone was left unturned”, working with galleries, museums and research assistants, and trawling through archives of queer art shows dating back to the 1970s. Ghada Khunji, an artist from Bahrain she discovered at a group show over a decade ago, was hard to trace but was eventually tracked down through Facebook. Working with artists from countries where homosexuality is still criminalised meant she had to tread carefully in order to make the experience both constructive and safe for them. “The telling of queer art history that we have had has tended to focus on cis, white, gay, male versions of queerness,” says Rolls-Bentley. “It felt extremely important to me that more than half of the artists in the book were not cis male and not white. I really wanted to communicate that the queer and trans experience is multifaceted; there is not one version of what that looks like.”
Settling on what constitutes “queer art” was equally tangly. Is it all art made by queer people? Or does it have to explicitly depict LGBTQ+ themes? “I don’t think those are easy questions to answer. There are a couple of examples in the book of art made by people who don’t identify as LGBTQIA+ but they felt like really important parts of this story so I’ve included them,” she says, pointing to Chantal Regnault’s photo series of Harlem House Ballroom scene drag queens from 1989 to 1992. “For me, queer art is art that reflects the queer experience in one way or another.”
Does she worry that grouping artists based on their identity is reductive? “I think because queer artists have been lacking from art history, there is still a need for a book called Queer Art that brings these artists together. However, as a curator, I feel very strongly that if we’re grouping artists, it needs to be about more than their identity. With any labels, there’s always a risk of pigeonholing, and so when we talk about queer art as a categorisation of artists, it should just be one of the available lenses through which we can look at their work. That artist could still be a Black artist, an abstract painter, a landscape photographer.”
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Rolls-Bentley hopes the book will nurture a shift in the art world and in society more generally. A foreword by Isaac Julien notes the “transformative power of art to challenge norms, provoke thought and spark change”, a sentiment Rolls-Bentley agrees with. “I did not know that the life I have now was a possibility,” she says. “It would’ve made a big difference if I had a book like this where I could see people like me being memorialised and celebrated.”
Despite key progressions like “equal marriage and lesbians on Coronation Street”, and a growing movement of queer artists, there’s still plenty of work to be done for the community, Rolls-Bentley says, especially for many Black, brown and trans people, who are “still facing the biggest challenges”. “I really want this book to give people an opportunity to consider a different perspective. I want to remember all of the artists who were lost too young and I want to give space to those who use their art to imagine a better future. I really believe that that is the power of art and I hope that that’s what comes across in this book.”