Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-lohman Museum Collection

The collecting origins of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York--the only museum dedicated to preserving and fostering LGBTQ art--can be traced to 1969, when its founders hosted their first "homosexual art fair" in New York. Evolving from gallery to foundation to museum in five decades, Leslie-Lohman's collection mirrors shifting histories of LGBTQ social movements in the United States, from the Stonewall riots to the AIDS epidemic, when the founders often rescued the work of dying artists from families who wanted to destroy it.
This volume presents two hundred objects from the museum's vast permanent collection, gathers texts that explore history, provenance, genre, and subject matter, and engages in critical conversations about gender and race in the museum's collection. At once a wide-ranging survey of queer art and a critical glance at contemporary museum collecting practices, Queer Holdings plumbs an institution's possible futures by revisiting the milestones of its activist past.

Gonzalo Casals is executive director at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Noam Parness is assistant curator at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.