Moving from a casual acceptance of homosexuality in the above to the oddly closeted text of Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art by Deloris Tarzan Ament (Seattle: U. of Washington Press, 2002, 416 pp., $40.00 cloth, ISBN 0-295-98147-4) can be jarring. If you want to make sense of the queer players in this text -- painters Mark Tobey (1890-1976), Guy Anderson (1906-1998), Morris Graves (1910-2001), and Leo Kenney (1925-2001) -- you need to read “Prometheus Ascending: Homoerotic Imagery of the Northwest School” by Matthew Kangas in the sadly out-of-print Homosexuality and Homosexuals in the Arts (ed. by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, New York: Garland, 1992). What Iridescent Light does offer are photographs of the artists and their work, cleansed biographies (which are better than no bios), chronologies, and suggestions for further reading (although Kangas’ essay is not mentioned).
Since the 2004 CAA conference will be in Seattle, and some session preference is usually given to regional content, Kangas’ research seems especially relevant for QCA members organizing sessions and planning papers. Other gay Northwest artists mentioned by Kangas include ceramic sculptor Howard Kottler (1930-1989), painter Sherrill Van Cott (ca. 1922-1943), Wayne Douglas Quinn, Galen Garwood, and Malcolm Roberts.
The Black Female Body: A Photographic History by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, is beautiful, informative, and includes a prominent (but too brief) section on “The Lesbian Body.” I wish they had included work by African American lesbian photographers like Lola Flash (b. 1969), H. Lenn Keller (b. 1951) or Leigh Mosley (b. 1945), but think the Catherine Opie images they reproduce are well-chosen. I want, however, to emphasize how important the authors’ inclusion of a discussion of lesbian imagery is. Most photo histories, still, leave queer subjects out altogether. Philadelphia: Temple U. Press, 2002, 240 pp, $60.00 cloth, ISBN 1-56639-928-9.
African American Writers: Portraits and Visions by Lynda Koolish, with an introduction by Cynthia Tucker, presents sixty b&w photographs combined with the life story of each writer, approximately one third of whom are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Subjects include Jewelle Gomez, Essex Hemphill, Angela Y. Davis, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Samuel R. Delany, and Sapphire. In the 1970s, Koolish (b. 1946) was a major figure in U.S. West Coast lesbian and feminist photography. Jackson: U. Press of Mississippi, 2001, 136 pp., $40.00 cloth, ISBN 1-57806-258-6.
The Second Coloring Book for Big Girls: Spirits and Goddesses by Sudie Rakusin is filled with delightful feminist utopian line drawings. Rakusin is the favored illustrator of Mary Daly, and numerous lesbian, feminist, and goddess-oriented periodicals and books. $11.95 paper, ISBN 0-9664805-2-X, Winged Willow Press, POB 92, Carrboro, NC 27510. Also available is The Coloring Book for Big Girls ($9.95 paper, ISBN 0-9664805-0-3). Add $2 for mailing.
Andy Warhol, ed. by Annette Michelson with essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, Annette Michelson, and Rosalind E. Krauss, and a previously unpublished interview with Warhol, reads like a series of good conversations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002, 133 pp., $14.95 paper, ISBN 0-262-63242-X. (October files, 2)
Robert Mapplethorpe: Autoportrait, text by Richard D. Marshall starts with a photograph of the photographer’s bare arm, leather cuffed wrist, and hand holding a squeeze-release bulb from which dangles the tube connecting bulb to camera. The Polaroid photos date from 1972-73 and show Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait as masturbator, as erotic subject as well as object, sometimes with s/m gear, sometimes without. Santa Fe: Arena Editions in association with Cheim and Read, 2001, 64 pp., $55.00 cloth, ISBN 1-892041-41-3, dist. by Publishers Group West.
Gradiva's Mirror: Reflections on Women, Surrealism and Art History by Betty Ann Brown includes lesbian photographer Claude Cahun and bisexual painter Frida Kahlo (her female as well as male lovers are mentioned in the text) in a quentioning, questing exploration of twelve artists’ lives interwoven with imagined conversations with them. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2002, 302 pp., $27.00 paper, ISBN 1-877675-37-7; $34.00 cloth, ISBN1-877675-44-8, dist. by Baker & Taylor.
In Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism, ed. by Jane Arms, much is made of the presence of her husband, Rivera, and his infidelities. Frida’s male lovers (among them Isamu Noguchi and Leon Trotsky) are discussed, but not her female lovers. Canberra: The National Gallery of Australia, 2001, 96 pp., $27.95 paper, ISBN 0-642-54153-1, dist. in the U.S. by U. of Washington Press (in U.K. by Thames & Hudson).
F. Holland Day by Pam Roberts, Edwin Becker, Verna Posever Curtis, and Anne E. Havinga, along with presenting an evocative selection of the pictorialist photographer's (1864-1933) images, discusses assumptions about his homosexuality and the homoeroticism in his work. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum; Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 2002, 144 pp., $70.00 cloth, ISBN 90-400-9525-6, dist. by U. of Washington Press.
Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. by Norma Broude, is new enough that I haven’t yet received a copy. I understand, however, that there is major queer content in this collection of essays on Callebotte (1848-1894). Picataway, NJ: Rutgers U. Press, 2002, 272 pp. $35.00 paper; ISBN: 0-8135-3018-0.
Not new, but still available and very lush is Compound Fracture by Robert Flynt, dreamily colored, multiple-exposed images of male bodies underwater, sculpture, old prints, and more. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 1996, np, $50.00 cloth, ISBN 0-944092-42-X. A catalog of this publisher’s titles, many of which deal with homo-aesthetic themes, is available free of charge in the U.S., $3 Canada, $5 elsewhere. Write Twin Palm 401 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501.
I also want to mention that my new book, Intimacies, Photos by Tee A. Corinne, text by Tamsin Wilton and T.A. Corinne and foreword by Jonathan D. Katz, has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Exploring a lesbian-centered aesthetic, it is a compilation of erotic, solarized photographs. San Francisco: Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2001, 92 pp. $29.95 cloth, ISBN 0-86719-526-6.
Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000, ed. by Hilary Robinson, is a fabulous compilation with a number of significant lesbian reprints including Monique Wittig’s “The Straight Mind,” Terry Wolverton’s “Lesbian Art Project,” Jan Zita Grover’s “Framing the Question: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs,” Shonagh Adelman’s “Desire in the Politics of Representaiton,” Ann Gibson’s “Lesbian Identity and the Politics of Representation in Betty Parsons’ Gallery,” and Harmony Hammond’s “Against Cultural America.” Robinson calls for a rethinking of the feminist art canon and has collected 99 essays that offer a variety of directions that thinking might take. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001, 912 pp., $34.95, ISBN 0-631-20850-X.