The Yeatsian Legacy
Public Talks Series 2010 at IT Sligo
Understanding Cultural Difference
JOSEPH WOLIN
What Ever Happened to Queer Art?
Tuesday 16th March, 2010 at 11.20 a.m.
IT Sligo, Room A0005 (opposite main reception). Free Admission.
Before the last decades of the twentieth century, art that explicitly engaged homosexual desires, or even existence, was rare and remarkable, usually marginalized and ghettoized, when not suppressed entirely. In the late 1980s, galvanized by the AIDS crisis and the ‘culture wars’, and spurred by identity politics, gay and lesbian art became mainstreamed, yet was quickly subsumed into an emergent ‘queer’ sensibility that was strident, unapologetic, often celebratory, and decidedly oppositional. After a decade of the twenty-first century, however, a queer outlook itself has come to occupy ever more central positions within our culture at large, to the point when it seem both unremarkable and hardly in opposition. In a world of gay marriage, gay congressmen, and gay characters on primetime network television shows, what does it mean to speak of “queer art”? Does it exist any longer? Is it a useful category for any purpose at all?
Joseph R. Wolin is an independent curator and critic in New York, a contributor to Modern Painters, Time Out New York, artforum.com, and Canadian Art. He is a visiting member of the graduate faculty in photography at Parsons The New School for Design, a visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has also taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Fordham University in the Bronx. He was co-curator of the exhibition The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust, which during 2003–2005 travelled to six venues in four countries, including The Drawing Center, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has recently curated an exhibition of the Irish artist Tom Molloy, which is currently showing at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Curated by Ronnie Hughes
Talks Series 2010 details: (071) 9111826 www.sligoarts.ie/peaceIII
The Yeatsian Legacy Project is delivered by Sligo Arts Service, IT Sligo and partners. The project is supported by the PEACE III Programme, managed for the Special EU Programmes Body by Sligo County Council on behalf of Sligo Peace and Reconciliation Partnership Committee.
