The Whitney Museum Biennial is one of the art world’s most anticipated events, so I’m thrilled to announce that my Gay & Lesbian gallery tour in Chelsea on Sat. April 12 will include shows by not one but TWO queer artists that are also showing right now at the Whitney Biennial.  One is a gay male artist whose sculptures a NY Times art critic called “wonderfully, campily funny,” and the other is a dynamic lesbian artist who shoots canvases with paint from a hose, whose work a NY Times critic called “exciting and awake.”  Any time an artist shows at the Whitney Biennial, it confers rising-star status.  So it’s exciting to see these two artists’ works in commercial galleries, where the art is actually for sale.  In the museum, of course, the art is shown but not sold.

The gay male artist’s exhibit we’ll see on the tour explores gay issues, among others.  One particularly moving piece consists of a glass skeleton interacting with a jukebox.  The artist has substituted all the records that he found in the jukebox with records that were favorites of a close friend of his, who died of AIDS.  While this piece is a bit on the somber side, another more fun piece is a “coffee table museum” consisting of an assemblage of coffee tables and the kinds of knickknacks people put on them, as a way of riffing on the shallowness of the coffee table environment.

The lesbian artist’s work that we’ll visit on this tour is more or less abstract, though she doesn’t use the word herself.  What’s exciting about using a hose to spray paint is that the force of the pressure causes the paint to bleed through the canvas, and the gallery is displaying the paintings on both sides, so we see front and back.  She also incorporates a limited number of objects into the paintings, such as cheesecloth and hard acrylic plastic.  Her technique harks back to “action painting” from the 1960s and ’70s, though I’m not aware of any of those artists showing double-sided works.

And if that’s not enough, our tour will include several minutes of a rare LIVE performance in a gallery, created by a gay male couple.  The topic is relationships, and the performers are 6 pairs of people, not acting professionals, who have real-life relationships.  One example of a pair is two gay male exes, who go over their relationship backwards in time, through words and choreographed movement.  These artists are not represented by the current Whitney Biennial, though it may just be a matter of time, as lately the Whitney has begun to incorporate live performances in their biennials, to great acclaim.

As always, there will be a total of 7 stops on this tour, all exhibits completely different from previous LGBT tours.  I’m looking forward to a great turn-out.  Spring is finally here, and it’s time to get out of the house.

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