Art History From Home:
Queer Belonging

Online, via Zoom

This series of online talks by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows highlights works in the Museum's collection to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present. During each thirty-minute session, participants are invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat.

This session explores LGBTQ presence and perspectives to be found in artworks in the Whitney’s collection made before 1968. Looking at a range of artists, including PaJaMa, Beauford Delaney, and Jasper Johns, this session seeks an aesthetic pre-history of queer identities and communities as we understand and celebrate them today.

Grant Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art history at the University of Southern California and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney. His dissertation, Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World, traces the first critical history of the prolific American artist, weaver, and pioneer of global contemporary art. An active curator, critic, and writer, his work has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Garage, and Performa, where he was a writer-in-residence from 2012 to 2014.