Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900–1969 at the New Mexico Museum of Art exhibits work by and about queer artists working in New Mexico.
Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900–1969
November 11, 2023–September 2, 2024
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe
Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900-1969 at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe collects work by and about queer artists working in New Mexico in the first half of the 20th century. The time period chosen spans roughly from New Mexico’s territorial period, through statehood and the proceeding huge influx of Anglo Americans, until the year of the Stonewall Riots, when the political presence of queerness (and queer art) exploded in the U.S.
Many of the artists represented here are in something of a canon of New Mexican artists—the most notable being the painter Marsden Hartley, whose painting El Santo is practically a state icon. Other artists whose work is represented are Cady Wells, Agnes Sims, Russell Cheney, R.C. Gorman, Manuel Acosta, and others. There is also some material that documents the artists themselves: an Ansel Adams portrait of Witter Bynner, the gay writer who rubbed shoulders with Georgia O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence; several photos of We’wha of Zuni Pueblo, a weaver and lhamana—the Zuni term for one who lives and/or dresses in the roles of multiple genders. The breadth of historical material and background given helpfully contextualizes this collection that, otherwise, doesn’t have much of a thematic throughline: very little of the artwork itself is explicitly queer in content.
If the exhibition suffers from anything it is compression: there are relatively few artworks, few artists represented. I suspect that at least some of this compression is due to the erasure of queerness in the historical record—artists who never left the closet, or whose queerness was simply not known or documented. Still, Out West makes necessary strides toward amending that gap in the record, and towards expanding that long-standing canon of New Mexican artists.
