There is SO much to see on our L.G.B.T. gallery tour in Chelsea on Sat. March 19.  The talk of the city’s art scene is a gay Chinese artist who has been doing a LIVE performance art piece in a Chelsea gallery 8 hours a day for 5 weeks, and his performance ends on March 19, just in time for our tour to visit.  Other highlights of this tour: (1) a British lesbian artist whose porcelain breast creatures were called “lascivious” and “subversive” in a NY Times art review, (2) gay artist David Wojnarowicz’ headline-making video that was recently removed from the Smithsonian after demands by Washington’s religious and Republican leadership, and (3) gay artist Tim Saternow, who will speak to our group when we visit his show of paintings of some of the decayed sections in Chelsea.  These are just 4 of 7 exhibits we’ll visit that day.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that live performance art is the very rarest type of exhibit in art galleries and museums, especially performances that are designed to take place continuously from doors opening to closing each day.  In the 9 years that I’ve led gallery tours, I’ve been able to bring my groups to live performance artworks a total of only 3 times.  One of the seven extraordinary exhibits we’ll visit March 19 will be a live performance that happens continuously for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, with no food breaks, no bathroom breaks, and no sick leaves.  The artist, who is gay and Chinese, has been there the entire time that the gallery has been open, for the entire 5-week run of the exhibit, performing his creative task.  You’ll see him silently and continuously interacting with an enormous rock salt mound.  The second you enter the space, one of Chelsea’s more prestigious galleries, you’ll feel you have entered an alternate universe, with a vibe that will catapult you from your everyday experience.

We’ll also be visiting a British lesbian artist’s show of new porcelain sculptures that consist of bizarrely shaped creatures sporting breasts in all directions.  Porcelain has been a traditional British art medium for centuries, but its subject matter has typically on the demure, pastoral side.  Not so with the works we’ll be seeing, which are intensely and surreally lesbo-sexual.  Lately budget cuts have forced the New York Times to scale down their art gallery reviews to just 3 or 4 a week (out of NYC’s 600 galleries), so it was an incredible honor for this lesbian artist that one of the Times’ art critics recently reviewed her show – quite favorably – calling it “lascivious” and subversive.”  See for yourself if you agree with the review.

You may have heard about the controversy that erupted earlier this winter at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where a video piece by gay artist David Wojnarowicz was removed from a group show, first at the request of the Catholic League, and then through added pressure by Washington’s Republican congressmen.  Well, you’ll be seeing this video on our March 19 LGBT tour, along with other paintings and sculptures by the same artist.  Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications not long after he finished creating this video, and the work certainly contains intimations of death, religion (he was born Catholic) and politics throughout.  It’s practically your duty to see work by a gay artist that the right wing declared is not suitable for public consumption, and then went ahead and censored.

If all of that is not enough, we’ll also be meeting gay artist Tim Saternow for a 10-minute Q & A session when we visit his painting exhibit.  Saternow lives in Chelsea – widely considered to be the gay epicenter of the city, besides containing 300 contemporary art galleries – and his watercolors are scenes of some of the sections of the neighborhood that have yet to be gentrified.  I look forward to hearing his personal connection to this increasingly important area, as well as his artistic process.

This tour is going to be a whirlwind of queer culture!

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York Gallery Tours