PINK & BENT : Art of Queer Women

Artists: Prinny Alavi, Lauren Anderson, Shez Arvedon, Jude Benzell-Sidney, Joan E. Biren (JEB), Becca Bradley, Deborah Bright, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Cassandra, Gaye Chan, Judy Chicago, Phyllis Christopher, Cynthia Consentino, Jenn DeWald, Elizabeth Jefts Dowd, George Dudley, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, fierce pussy, Lola Flash, Pilar Gallego, Guerrilla Girls, Gail S. Goodman, Harmony Hammond, Lorraine Inzalaco, Angela Jimenez, G.B. Jones, Althea Keaton, Cora Lambert, Molly Landreth, Dusty Lombardo, Patsy Lynch, Sonia Melara, Allyson Mitchell, Grace Moon, Alice O’Malley, Sheila Pepe, Phranc, Marion Pinto, Heidi Pollard, Twiz Rimer, Susan Robinson, Hinda Schuman, Tuesday Smillie, Tiersa Sommerling, Diane Tanchak, Aurea Trindade, Maria Tsaguriya, Sophia Wallace, Tara White, Haejin Yoon, Lisa Zilker

Flash Back/Fast Forward: Pink & Bent at the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation
By Jennifer Edwards a.k.a. JEN/ed
(From THE ARCHIVE: No. 27: Spring 2008)

As the Foundation prepares for its eighth Lesbian Exhibition, curators Pilar Gallego and Cora Lambert are focusing on creating visual dialogue.

Flash Back: Picture your perfect walk though early 1990s New York City: the Guerilla Girls have wheat pasted SoHo again, protesting the lack of parity for women in the visual arts. Harmony Hammond is showing at A.I.R. Gallery, which she helped to create. Phyllis Christopher is in from San Francisco, showing photos of the lesbian leather scene to intrigued audiences in a friend’s loft. Now, if this were my fantasy, I would be living in Jersey, having no idea what I was missing or that I was growing into a lover of women and women’s work. Where were you? And where were you when the work of the aforementioned plus more than 40 other Pink & Bent artists opened at the Foundation on May 20th?

Fast Forward: How will you experience this exhibit in the future? Through Grace Moon’s lens over the Velvet Park Media Vlog? On “Our Chart?” Perhaps captured by documentary photographer Angela Jimenez or illustrator/painter Jenn DeWald? Maybe you will simply hear about it in a poem by Stacey Ann Chin or read an article by yours truly.

From the “old guard” pioneers to the torch carriers and emerging innovators, the question does not seem “what message” but “what media”. The list of artists put forth in the gallery’s upcoming exhibition, reads as a virtual “who’s who” in the world of feminist/woman-ist/lesbian herstory: past, present and future.

Her-story: In a conversation with one of three curators of the first of the Foundation’s lesbian exhibitions, Gail S. Goodman illuminated several important points. As a photographer working to document the AIDS crisis and gay and lesbian life in the 1980s and 1990s, Goodman worked hard and PUSHED to have her work shown. Spaces like the Duplex, (the now closed) Creative Visions Bookstore, and Leslie/Lohman were among the first to let her in. This was certainly not an “easy row to hoe,” and when she and over twenty other women opened the lesbian show in the former home of the Foundation, a basement space on Prince Street, it was, for most, a first showing of their work.

“There was always a sense of apprehension in the air,” confessed Goodman. “We all felt that a bomb could go off or a hostile visitor could walk though the door at any moment. The fact that the gallery has moved to a space so visible is a HUGE step,” she emphasized.

Goodman and I shared in the sat sf action of reviewing several of the resumes of the artists in Pink & Bent. The Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC, Chicago Art Institute, Museum for Women in the Arts DC, Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Museum of Contemporary Art, LA F