"Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights From NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection” is a tale of two intertwined histories. Each is remarkable.
Drawing from the esteemed holdings of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern art from the Abby Weed Grey collection, this show will include between 30 and 40 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from multiple countries, exploring nuances of heritage and identity. Among the artists included are Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Nevzat Akoral.
Untrained in either art or art history, Abby Weed Grey was a globalist ahead of her time. Around 1960, this well-off Midwestern widow decided to collect non-Western contemporary art and began acquiring postwar modernist works in Iran, Turkey and India, as well as Japan.
It’s late June 1969, and the young people clustered on Christopher Street look giddy, some performing, others a bit shy before the camera. Neither they nor Fred McDarrah, the Village Voice photographer who shot Celebration After Riots Outside Stonewall Inn (1969), could have known that the riots—the spontaneous result of a few Stonewall patrons deciding to disrupt “business as usual” during a routine shakedown of the Greenwich Village bar—would come to be seen as having sparked a revolution in the gay rights movement, but that spark seems to light their bodies and faces.
With recent major museum retrospectives from Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz and Hockney, LGBTQI art seems to be having more than a moment. But while museums have traditionally honored single artists, large survey shows of queer art are rarer than you might think. The Columbus Museum of Art’s new traveling exhibition, “Art After Stonewall, 1969 – 1989,” is a welcome remedy to that.
In honor of Stonewall’s 50th anniversary, here are seven exhibitions, screenings and gatherings to check out to show your support for the queer community and to acknowledge this historic milestone.
Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is included in SVA Continuing Education's Summer Museum Preview.
Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 included in Museum Previews for the August 2018 issue of Art in America.
Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 previewed by Francesca Aton in the April 2019 issue of Art in America.
Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 included in The New York Times weekend art listings.