My Sat. Feb. 19 Gay & Lesbian gallery tour in Chelsea will be the 90th LGBT tour I have led in 9 years, all of them showing completely different exhibits.  Highlights will include: (1) gay artist Trey Speegle, who will speak to our group when we visit his show of paint-by-numbers works that comment on creativity in society, (2) a photography show by a lesbian Aborigine artist from Australia, and (3) an internationally renowned gay Italian artist who superimposes faces of supermodels onto 16th century religious masterpieces.  These are just 3 of 7 exhibits we’ll visit that day.  Here’s more about these highlights:

Trey Speegle’s scathingly funny sensibility, combined with over-the-top aesthetics, could not be more perfect for this LGBT tour.  I know Trey only through his art, and I can’t wait to meet him in person, as will all of the tour participants on Saturday, when I engage him in a 10-minute Q & A.  In preparing for this show, Trey amassed an enormous collection of paint-by-numbers works, both finished and not.  Paint-by-numbers took the American public by storm in the 1950s, an era characterized by the conformity that this kind of artwork seemed to further encourage.  He uses most of the found works as inspiration for creating new paint-by-numbers creations that are much larger than the originals, and that include the artist’s own comments in provocative in-your-face wording.  One of the more dramatic pieces – a paint-by-numbers work of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” – is particularly powerful and sly in communicating the utter dearth of creativity in Main Street U.S.A.

I wish that the lesbian Aborigine artist, whose show we will be visiting on this same tour, could also be there to talk to our group, but she is in Australia at the time.  So her artwork will have to speak for her.  Technically she is half-Aborigine and half-white Australian, and was adopted and raised by a white family.  Therefore, her artwork looks decidedly Western.  Her show consists of photographs of plantations, Southern-style, that include Black individuals lurking in some of the scenes.  She adds bright paint to a number of the photos, adding to the sense of drama.  And a video by the artist shows a montage of scenes from American movies that depict race.  All in all, the artist uses her sense of “otherness” from her background as lesbian and Aborigine to comment on a broader sense of otherness in society.

Also on this tour: an exhibit by a jet-setting gay Italian artist, showing at one of the world’s wealthiest galleries, making him one of the planet’s most important living gay artists.  It’s amazing to think that this is only his first gallery show in NYC, after having exhibited in so many galleries and museums world-wide, though a few years ago one of his video installations did appear to great acclaim in the Whitney Biennial.  For his current show, the artist has transformed the gallery into a chapel, complete with an arched ceiling, and he has lined the walls with digitally-altered painting masterpieces of Madonna and child from the 15th and 16th centuries, but substituting the faces of the Madonnas with well-known supermodels such as Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell.  He’s not so much skewering the supermodels or Catholicism as he is our society’s non-stop idolization of celebrity.  And yet I’m not at all sure he minds that kind of campy worship.

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