 Thank you very much. I'd like to invite our first three panelists up. Y'all want to come up? And I'll introduce them momentarily. But before I do that, I just wanted to make a few general remarks that I hope will have the opportunity to address in some measure today. And mine are not formal remarks, they're emotional ones. Because I'd hope that, in part, what this panel does is cast a refractive glare on normal museum practices in New York City, and especially in Manhattan. And I draw a self-conscious distinction between Manhattan and where we are now in the Brooklyn Museum. I alternate between disappointment, despair, and active offense in the New York art world, the Manhattan art world. I have repeatedly found that now 25 years of LGBTQ scholarship is foreclosed in the museum world. And over the last 15 or 20 years, as a professional art historian, I've been continuously struck by the degree to which, not only are they not interested in allowing this information out to the public, but they are pretending like it doesn't even exist. Go look at the bibliographies of the Akins exhibition, of the Jasper Johns exhibition, of the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition, of the Cy Twombly exhibition, of the Agnes Martin exhibition, of the Louise Nevelson exhibitions. And you will not see anything that suggests that sexual difference was, at least in part, an aspect of their careers. And at this point in American culture, that the museum world is behind international banking in terms of our political representation is horrific. And for some reason, presumably because the art world shows uncomfortable, difficult, new work, it continues to be framed as a side of progressive social engagement. But the fact is that it's anything but. And I can say this from personal experience, having tried to circulate the Hyde Seek exhibition and been quite unsuccessful, except, of course, here and at the Tacoma Art Museum. And similarly, with the new exhibition, I'm doing Art AIDS America, which, as it stands now, will not be seen in California because no museum in California is interested in taking what will be the largest exhibition ever mounted about AIDS. So we are at a curious cultural juncture, and I hope that, in part, what we can talk about today is how to change it. I'm tired of hearing my own voice bemoan the state of affairs. And it would be lovely if we could think through, collectively, some strategies for making it possible, finally, to put an end to a blacklist on sexuality that began in 1989 with the Robert Maple Thorpe exhibition and has continued largely unchanged since then. Thank you. It gives me great pleasure and narcissistic joy to introduce our panel. This is not an easy thing that these folks are doing. I wanna underscore that our representatives from the museum world are engaged with many of the institutions that I've just, in essence, mentioned. They borrow from them, they lend to them, they're part of the world, and they are well aware that what they're doing is fraught. And I owe them, I think we owe them a debt of gratitude in their courage in coming here and saying what they have to say. I wanna introduce them in seating order, and that's Tom Collins first, who is the director of the Miami Art Museum. Tom is an arts administrator, an art historian, an educator, an author. He's been 15 years as a director and a curator at several of the top museums in the United States. And in all of these things, he's worked very hard to integrate questions of sexuality into his curatorial programming. As the director of the Miami Art Museum, he's overseeing, of course, the day-to-day operations of the museum, but even more powerfully its transition from a well-respected regional institution to what will be an international institution with the inauguration of their new building, which is a fabulous design by Herzog and de Muran, and will put Miami more than Art Basel firmly on the map. It's a real pleasure to have Tom with us. Norman Clayblatt is not unknown to those of you who live in New York. He is the Susan and Eliehu Rose Curator of Fine Arts at the Jewish Museum in New York. And he has been responsible for a number of award-winning exhibitions, action, abstraction, Pollock, de Kooning, and American art, but as well, for example, John Singer Sargent, portraits of the wartimer family, as well as some exhibitions that garnered their share of controversy. Courageous in his curatorial choices. He was very much involved with the Two Jewish Exhibition and his articles as an art historian and curator of a period in Art in America Art Forum, Art Journal and Art News. Risa Puleo is a curator of contemporary and American art at the Blanton Museum, which is the beautiful museum at the University of Texas at Austin. She graduated from Bard for the Center of Curatorial Studies, and I believe Wright Blanton is your first professional position, is that correct? Museum position. Yeah, but she's also a founder of an alternative project space, the donkey show out of her home in Texas. So thank you all and I turn it over to you. Tom, do you wanna begin? Sure, good pleasure. You should all know that I had occasion to participate in this same panel that Jonathan organized at the Smithsonian. So the last time I made the comments that I'm gonna be making today in an edited fashion, Wayne Clough, the director of the Smithsonian was sitting directly in front of me, and I have to tell you, it's a great pleasure not to have to gaze at a pouty, cranky Wayne Clough for a whole variety of reasons. So it's a treat to be here today and I begin with the following, that I know to be true even though Jonathan will deny it. I know for a fact that today, as at the Smithsonian, I'm serving on this panel for one reason. It's because I am the only museum director in the American Association of Museum Directors that Jonathan could persuade to participate. But I humor myself that Jonathan could get me to agree to, excuse me, I humor myself by thinking it also has something to do with the following factors. First, that I began my career as a curator, and for more than a decade, I worked with exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in some cities that were, to put it mildly, not so hospitable to progressive content. In Cincinnati, and yet that's Cincinnati, Ohio. In Cincinnati alone, I tangled with one museum director, two boards, the vice squad, the county sheriff, the same person who had arrested Dennis Barry, for the Maple Thorpe Exhibition, Fox News and Affiliates, the Catholic Church, PETA, and the Amish Community of Northern Ohio. And that was in three years. So I have a bit of experience with censorious impulses, which I'll gloss for you in just a minute. The second reason is that for the last decade, I've been a director of modern contemporary museums, and therefore work at the pinch point between the public institution and its obligations, with its obligations, and the public at large, of course, with its entitlements. Finally, I like to think I'm an individual with a fairly balanced view of the current controversy, which is to say the Imbrolio, the Wona Rovich censorship issue that prompted the drafting of this first talk, and that conference that Jonathan organized in D.C. in the sense that I am both broadly supportive of Hyde's Seek, the exhibition, although I could and have, privately with Jonathan, offered criticisms around issues of representation, of gender, for example, or the posthumous editing of artist video. But of course, these are all sort of, I think, in some way secondary issues in this conversation, and they're technical matters that we can return to later if that seems of interest. But I'm also very, very sympathetic to the Smithsonian's secretary, Wayne Clough, at a certain level, anyway, and the people who work with him there because I understand the intensity of the pressures that they face. Nonetheless, I have to align myself with the AAMD, with this professional body, in their response to the Smithsonian's handling of the censorship of this exhibition, Hyde's Seek. And I wanted to read to you just a brief excerpt of the AAMD's public statement, you may not know this, but this is the organization that advocates regularly for museums and actually has a lobbying wing in DC and so forth and lawyers and issued the following statement, at least in part, in response to the censorship of the exhibition. Quote, it's extremely regrettable that the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery has been pressured into removing a work of art from its exhibition, Hyde and Seek. More disturbing than the Smithsonian's decision to remove this work of art is the cause, unwanted and uninformed censorship from politicians and other public figures, many of whom by their own admission have seen neither the exhibition as a whole nor this specific work. The AAMD believes that freedom of expression is essential to the health and welfare of our communities and our nation. In this case, that takes the form of the rights and opportunities of art museums to present works of art that express different points of view. Discouraging the exchange of ideas undermines the principles of freedom of expression, plurality and tolerance on which our nation was founded. The Smithsonian Institution is dedicated to the dissemination and diffusion of knowledge and essential element of democracy in America. We as members of AAMD urge members of Congress and the public to continue to sustain and support Smithsonian's activities without the political pressure that curtailes freedom of speech, end quote. And I think I include that at some length because I think it does touch upon many of the fundamental issues that we're going to be addressing today. Now having talked about some of those abstractions which both on the right and the left we tend to fetishize, I thought I would bring things down to the practicalities of museum practice and the considerations of curators and directors in addressing some of these issues. But first, I thought I would offer you a quick tour of my time in Cincinnati, a little bit of a gloss that will form a backdrop for my final comments and I hope it is also both entertaining to you. I know it will be therapeutic for me. It begins in the fall of 2000 when I mounted an exhibition called The Photographic Impulse, A Social History at the Cincinnati Art Museum then led by Timothy Rubb who is now the director of the Philadelphia Art Museum where before the exhibition opened an enterprising marketing professional took an image by David Wonorovich which I wish I had behind me from his Sex Studies series of 1988-89 which you probably know is a series of black and white photo montages that include both diaristic text elements, found fragments of photographs and in many cases, very, very small inset images of sexual activity and so forth, but printed both tiny and in the negative. So in other words, extremely, extremely difficult to read in these images. This enterprising marketing professional however took it upon herself to scan one such detail into the computer to reverse the image and print it in positive at 300 times the size of the original image. She then passed it to the director of the museum who passed it to the president of the board of the institution and suffice it to say nobody was happy. I was called to the director's office and after lengthy discussions in which I had to invoke the National Association Against Censorship, the American Association of Museums and finally and most persuasively the American Library Association because let's face it, no one is tougher about these issues than librarians, right? Librarians are the bulwark of free speech in this country when you get right down to it. At the end of the day and at great fear of negative press, the director relented and the photograph did appear in the exhibition to which the vice squad was immediately dispatched. The vice squad of the Cincinnati Police Department toured the exhibition in, and yes, this is true, brown trench coats and decided that it passed muster probably because they were not being toured around and couldn't actually find the offending fragment in the image that they were looking for. Meanwhile, they missed the excerpt from Larry Clark's Tulsa portfolio which was in another room. In the next winter, the winter of 2000, I brought Chang Hwan, a performance artist that was not so well established then but many of you know quite well now, to the United States to create a new piece for the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center where I quickly moved after the photographic impulse debacle. And Chang Hwan, for those of you who have worked with him, may know, doesn't give you a lot of information upfront when you commission a performance from him. So I can only tell you that the week before the performance, which was commissioned for the occasion of the opening of the Zaha Hadid building we built there, so it was kind of a big night. A week before the performance, I had no idea what it was about. And Chang Hwan called me on the phone and his broken English at that time asked me for a Doberman pincher, a police uniform, a police night stick, two baby dolls, and the largest flag I could find in Cincinnati. Now if you know anything about Cincinnati, you know flags don't come bigger than the flags in Cincinnati. He mounted a performance which was improvisational and very interesting. Unfortunately for the institution, the performance which went on for a little while ended with him posing with the dog on top of the flag which was on the floor. This photographed image appeared over the fold of the Cincinnati inquirer with no commentary, with no explanation and so forth. And in occasion six months of conversation on Fox News and its affiliates, Rush Limbaugh spoke about it and the calls for my resignation, the defunding of the institution, the closure of the exhibition and so forth and so on. Now had anyone bothered to ask Chang Hwan what the performance was about, he would have told them that the gesture of standing on the flag was his way of expressing his gratitude to a country that had supported him when he had been exiled from his own country. In other words, it had literally formed the platform or foundation for this portion of his life, this happier, more productive portion of his life. Of course, that's not how these sensorious activities work. This isn't about nuance as we know. In the winter of 2002, and I promise I'm almost on the tour, but I hope this is conjuring up for you an image of where I began. In the winter of 2002, I installed a work by Tsai Wo Chung called Cultural Melting Bath, which many of you know is about the ameliorative potential of the museum and in which a whole variety of healing and restorative sciences and pseudosciences from China are brought to bear. Guests to the museum are encouraged to actually take a plunge in a hot tub in the museum that is full of Chinese medicinal herbs. It's surrounded by scholars' rocks in an enclosure full of songbirds. I figured, how much trouble could I get into for this? The Vice Squad, I'm happy to report, didn't seem to care that most of our visitors chose to bathe in the nude. It was, in fact, PETA that went after me this time. They were unhappy about the way the birds in the exhibition were treated. Also boycotted the exhibition for its run and asked to have me fired. Finally, and really, I'm not nearly as naive as this makes me sound, but I decided for my swan song in Cincinnati I knew it was time. I would organize an exhibition called Crimes and Misdemeanors, American Art of the Reagan 80s. Think about this just for a minute. I further figured it would be a great idea to draw together in one gallery all of the works that had famously been censored during the 1980s. It didn't go over very well, as you might imagine. Just one piece will give you an idea of what this section was like. I featured a piece by Bob Flanagan and Cherie Rose called Toy Chest, which takes a children's toy chest and mixes together children's toys with adult toys. Some of them so sophisticated, I can tell you I've never even seen them. Kids love this part of the exhibition. Their parents not so much. This exhibition again was visited not once but twice by the vice squad and after extended negotiation with yes the district attorney for Cincinnati, a wall was built around this section of the exhibition so that it could remain open with an additional warning text and a guard checking identification. That's a brief tour of my time in Cincinnati. After all of this, to understand the evolution of my own position on the presentation of sensitive material, and by the way, you'll notice I had never been a curator since then, right? I decided it was easier to be a director after that. To understand the evolution of my position on the presentation of sensitive materials and censorship, you must know two things about me. First of all, that my theoretical orientation is a very particular one. I happen to believe that the highest value of the museum is not that which we associate with formalist modernism. It is not private reverie and transcendent meditative experience in a museum space. It is not liminality and disconnection from the world outside, but rather quite the opposite. For me personally, the highest value of the modern and contemporary museum, what we might call, is what we might call the heterotopic, which is to say, the idea that what happens inside the museum is always about offering alternative ideas and alternative experiences, alternative to those available in the dominant culture just outside the museum's doors. So that those who visit may have consciousness elevated, that they leave change, that they leave the museum thinking differently, behaving differently, and perhaps engaging the social world outside in a more progressive fashion. And the method that I bring to bear is a broadly social historical one. That won't surprise you, I'm sure. But it is a positive, positivist and objective approach to telling stories about works of art, not just as objects of perceptual challenge, but also objects of social relevance, the work of art as a social text. And this practice, the practice of positivist social history aligns what happens, and this is a little bit of a subtle point I hope you can come back to later. It aligns what happens in the art museum with the things that we know have also occurred in our partner museums, those museums like museums of natural history, of science, and so forth. Our rigorous art historical research and argumentation find their cognate, I think, in the work of our peers in the sciences. And I think there are important lessons to be learned, particularly through this Smithsonian debate about how we might address that issue. I'll return to that in closing. I offer these core principles that I take away from my experiences in Cincinnati and other places. I believe the work of art must be adequately represented to a broad public as a nuanced social product. As a product, as a public product, excuse me, as one more or less describable, recognizable social circumstances and ideological matrices, the product thereof. The second is that any art object, and I truly believe this, any art object can and should be mobilized in a presentation with a fundamentally progressive aim, no matter how quote unquote sensitive that object may be. If it is properly contextualized, it is appropriate for inclusion in an exhibition mounted in a public museum. And third, I believe it's our obligation as museum professionals to try to anticipate the sensitivities of all of our stakeholders and to offer appropriate explanations, cautions and physical safeguards in the organization of exhibitions as we plan and produce them. Though I also would argue strenuously that any museum activity, whether it be curatorial, educational or public relations and marketing that can or does actively undermine the integrity of an individual work in that larger presentation, I believe this is anathema, which is to say no individual work of art or group of works should be stigmatized. At this point I have no idea but I'm almost gonna close, I promise. And finally, I believe that public dialogue, and again, I think an important issue, I believe the public dialogue about sensitive content cannot be a purely instrumental thing, just a strategy for us to exhaust our opponents out there in the world. This kind of instrumental thinking is ultimately inappropriate if we genuinely embrace the larger heterotopic aim of museum practice. So I would say it's a central function of the museum as a heterotopia to catalyze rational, respectful dialogue like these and debate. Now the good news is that many of these ideas in a much more carefully worded fashion actually ended up appearing in the recommendation of the Regents panel that investigated the hide-seek controversy and this absolutely boring report is available to you on the Smithsonian website should you choose to read it. The bad news from my perspective, and this bad news is buried in this otherwise rather lengthy report, is that this same report enshrines something called, and this is what a geek I am, it enshrines something called the internal Smithsonian Directive Number 6 over 03, and you can look that one up too, which apparently was issued and circulated in 2003, and which reads in part and I'm quoting, museum and exhibiting units in concert with the Under Secretary for the Smithsonian must establish mechanisms to identify potential sensitive issues in museums and exhibiting units and listen to this very closely, this detail. Museums and exhibiting units should address these issues by carefully reviewing the topic and approach to determine whether changes in direction or degree of emphasis for balance are appropriate, even if the viewpoints expressed are based on solid scientific evidence or scholarly interpretation. And with this quote I return you for a moment to my analogy between our practice in the museum and our scientific colleagues. I'll close by saying I've already spoken too long and I hope we can come back to this idea, but while you were thinking about the implications of this directive number 603, which I think is terrifying, I want you to think about the implications, not just for the art museum, where these issues are fuzzy for most of the public, but rather how these issues might apply to an institution that conducts scientific research or produces scientific exhibitions and pure scientific research. And I'll close with that in the hopes that we can return to this issue in our conversation. Thank you. Tom's comments brought up my own much more modest memories of personal threats and censorship, even though most of those did not have to do with showing gay, lesbian, and queer what I call the trifecta of terms that Jonathan proposed for this, we used for this panel. We did have in the first day without art, and there's some of you in the audience who remembers that, our program at the Jewish Museum did receive threats from anonymous callers in insisting that we would be our institution and our persons would be in physical danger. But I have been under fire from threats and censorship from the general public and politicians who wanted to close down an exhibition that dealt with fascist imagery and Holocaust representation in 2002. And I know how hideously uncomfortable that is when your head of security insists that you be walked to the corner to buy your sandwich and that there be a stakeout in front of your apartment building. So this is the free country that Tom was talking about. In any event, my own comments are a little different and a little also self-reflexive. I work in a museum whose name itself, the Jewish Museum spells difference. So it would seem natural to have our culturally specific moniker embrace gender, sexuality, and queerness in art. And this is especially true for an institution that was bold enough in the very early 90s to organize an exhibition called Bridges and Boundaries, African American Jews, which willingly articulated the support and struggles between these two communities. The gender to sexuality divide took a bit more time in coming to the fore. And it was, as Jonathan mentioned before, the 1996 exhibition to Jewish challenging traditional identities that was for us the degree zero moment. Our first time offering a normative presentation of sexuality, but also an effortless representation of gender. As a curator of that show, I didn't have to hunt hard to find women who were willing to deal with identity issues or lesbians and gays who would articulate those identities that were at once complex and clear. In the context of ethnic identity, the trifecta, what I want to call the trifecta gender, sexuality, and queerness with all the problematic implications of the latter term, the two Jewish shows seem to normalize issues without necessarily making those terms appear didactic and parochial. And I think we always run the risk of essentializing, to use a data term, essentializing the complexity of this trifecta and other identities that we deal with continuously in daily life and within public institutions. While exhibitions like Jonathan's remarkable show here at the Brooklyn Museum are meant to understand queer history of important art in a near comprehensive manner, I think the issue for most curators and museum educators, queer or not, and perhaps even more importantly not, is to make these issues part of everyday museum life. And as I've said before, to naturalize them in the galleries and on museum websites. We can't just do the one show and consider we've done the job. It's Jonathan's show that's supposed to create a new sensitivity and alert our sensibilities to the fact that these issues exist and need to be articulated. Using and building museum collections are important ways to inscribe gender and sexual difference within the day-to-day operations of an institution. The Jewish Museum's double portrait by Gerrit Volheim of two unidentified lesbian women in Weimar, Germany is almost always on view. And for those of you who wanna see it, go to Gerrit Volheim on our website. We received the work as a gift and initially it was given to us as a portrait of a couple. But on closer examination, the tuxedo and monocle on one figure, the tight so-called Bubikopf Quaffur on the other became dead giveaways for the sexuality and gender of the sitters. Yesterday, I looked at the label and which I admit I didn't write or I'm perhaps even happy to admit I didn't write. It refers to lesbian culture, but does not flat out say that both members of the couple in question are lesbian. And I think our whole notion of label writing in institutions, we become so polite in our labels that I don't even think we serve the purpose of getting the points across and communicating with the audience in sort of a more vernacular language, warmer tone, a more engaging tone between the museum educator, whether that is an educator or a curator and we're all educators and the public. And we've actually tried to do workshops now on museum label writing and just to get the tone right. And I think the other flip side of that is to get the labels, the issues right. So there's a bipartite because we acknowledge the lesbian nature of the subject in this painting. But we do so in a sort of way too scholarly manner that probably doesn't communicate well. In any event, while the Metropolitan Museum's wonderful 2006, 2007 show Glitter and Doom did include, did include rather work by Volheim and did to some extent speak about the repeal of laws against gays and lesbians in Weimar Germany for whatever reason, the Met didn't ask to borrow our gorgeous revelatory and very trifecta specific picture. That said, as I mentioned before, text labels programming websites outreach for that show. And I did not have time to look into that but it might be a really good example of a show where lesbian and gay issues were at the forefront of a culture at a particularly moment. How, what did they do right and what did they do wrong? And just try to look at it, not so much casting blame but like, how could we, how could that be improved? So we learned for the next time that this is so central to the history of a period. A number of other contemporary works in our museum collection clearly express gay and lesbian themes. I'll mention but three, Ross Blackner's untitled painting, titled Untitled, Subtitled Gay Flag of 1993. And Deborah, may I call you Debbie down there, Cass's double red yantel of the same year, the latter of which is one of the museum's mascot images and it's always on view. And we talk about drag in that label. We might pump up that label a little bit after this session. And I think the issue is, again, just looking at the way we represent these representations. We also have acquired ceremonial art that deals with gay and lesbian sexuality. In fact, a Hanukkah lamb titled In Search of Miracles by Solo Rawit that commemorates the AIDS epidemic. The question is how we might be more direct, more explicit, less timid, less soft peddling in our labeling. This is one of the questions which Jonathan's show and this panel seem to beg. In the museum world, we need to think about the way we speak to publics. Likewise, we also need to realize that there are many sometimes competing agendas at any given time and gender sexuality and queerness is one of them. So how does this weave into the fabric of museum programming at any given moment? Well, the ability to present shows like Hide and Seek, especially here in, I consider Brooklyn, New York, I know some people who come from the other side of the East River don't. Yet, the lessons can be easily forgotten. For me and my colleagues at the Jewish Museum, the exhibition and its catalog were inspiring, actually inspired a little epilogue coda chamber music kind of exhibition in response to it. My colleague, Rachel Fernari and I began a conversation after my visit to Jonathan's show and I happily noted that I took the Washington bus on the weekend of the Mid-Atlantic Leather convention and so my bus was iconographically appropriate to move from the stop in Chinatown in Washington and walk over and see the Hide and Seek exhibition. In any event, my colleague, Rachel Fernari, curatorial assistant just organized an exhibition drawn mostly from our collection and indebted to Hide and Seek. The title of that show is composed. It's in our permanent collection galleries. The exhibition includes photographic works by A. A. Bronson, Adi Ness, Gloria Bornstein, Cal Yershore, Rona Yefman, Debbie Grossman and Mark Adelman and it deals with sexuality, gender, queerness, a stage and artist's photographs and importantly for our culturally specific institution the complexity and fluidity of identity. So here's a plug for those willing to leave the comforts and confrines of the Grand Borough of Brooklyn and come to the Midlands of Manhattan. Thank you, Jonathan, for making us think. Thank you, Rachel, for digging into the Jewish Museum's collection to expand upon these issues and bring them to the galleries of another institution. My comments are gonna be much briefer in part because I'm just beginning my career as a museum curator and more so because despite whatever public perception of taxes and our governor exists outside of the state, I live in my version of a utopia and it actually would be a utopia of UT, the University of Texas actually offered partner benefits. I work in a quasi-bubble with a built-in audience and community of curious, open-minded, educated people and I conceptualize and propose difficult, challenging, destabilizing, often self-identifying as pornography consistently. Whether these proposals are realized depends on what politics are at play in the museum at any given moment but they are always discussed and carefully considered. Furthermore, because of the particularities of the Blanton's collection and the idiosyncrasies, our larger project is one of revisionism and rewriting the canon and focusing on fleshing out the stories to present a much more complicated history so we embrace this and push it forward as a programmatic agenda. While I have incredible freedom at the Blanton, what I don't have is flexibility. As a museum set within a university, set within a state government, navigating these institutional channels can be quite an intense endeavor. So last year, when the Wanderovich was censored and museums and curators across the country were able to show the video in a timely manner, it took a number of months before and a number of conversations. By which time, by which time I got the approval, it was totally untimely. That said, I do have the opportunity to introduce queer artists on the regular at the Blanton and I'd like to talk briefly about having the difference between showing queer artists, showing representations of queerness and then also using queerness as a methodology which is how I approach things. I had a gallery that I named the Donkey Show because I was particularly interested in being transparent about the power exchanges and power dynamics and aspects of voyeurism and spectacle that are implicit in all presentations of works of art. And I tried to use codes of cruising or drag as a method of presentation for thinking about building exhibitions. And not only that, I think it's also really important to discuss the work of white male artists in the context of gender and race and sexuality so that we can, in addition to widening the range of representation and voices in the museum, we can also gender and start thinking about sexuality in a different way. So, thank you. We're running a little bit late but I'd like to open up discussion for maybe 10 minutes before the next panel comes up. And I wanted to ask specifically to just kick things off. If you feel that the particular, those of you who work in the museum, if you feel that the particular pressures against doing the kind of work that you've all beautifully articulated today can be located in one place in the hierarchy of the museum. In other words, is it the Board of Trustees, for example, and the presumption that Boards of Trustees as wealthy, influential people are inherently conservative that keeps this going? Is it other things, where do you locate pressure? I think the greatest pressure is often marketing and we'll something, we spend more time on will something sell to the public than will it be controversial? And there are also different things that are, as I mentioned before, different institutions have different things that raise hackles. So, the gender sexuality is less an issue at the Jewish Museum than other sacred cows. And my response would be, I would return to my suggestion that I exist sort of at a pinch point between institutional governance and the obligations of the museum and the public's entitlements. And so that means navigating Board desires and needs and interests and it means trying to do what I think is right for the public. And fortunately I've worked with very good Boards and have had occasion to educate Boards about material that I thought was relevant and important for us to present to the public and through that process of education to bring people around. And so I have to say that, I must acknowledge that all of those shows I did in Cincinnati, I did with the approval both of the director, Charles Zameray and a board that represented Cincinnati's finest and you can interpret that however you'd like. And through a process of education of explaining precisely why the material is relevant and important and so forth, it was possible in all of those cases to persuade them that it was worth investing in these projects. Thank you. And I'd like to now ask our artists to come up. And as they do so, I will introduce them in order of your program, first Harmony Hammond. Harmony is a pioneer, an artist, an art writer, a curator currently living in Galista, New Mexico. Harmony is one of the founders of the feminist and lesbian feminist art movements, a co-founder of the AIR Gallery in New York, the first women's cooperative gallery, one of the editors of heresies, a feminist publication on the arts, one of the first curators of a lesbian show, if not the first lesbian show in New York and the author of a book, Lesbian Art in America, I forget the title, Lesbian Art in America? Yes. Yes, that is literally, I mean, you can sort of say she wrote the book on lesbian art in America, right? And so it's a great pleasure to have Harmony on the panel. Her work is shown all over the world, many, many, many exhibitions. And she's represented in many museums throughout the United States. I'm also thrilled to have Jim Hodges with us, a name that I assume doesn't need much introduction. Jim is one of the leading artists in the world today, with exhibitions all over, most recently at the Pompidou, at the Camden Art Center in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. His film, Untitled and Extraordinarily Moving and Complicated Elegiac Work, was released as part of 2011's World AIDS Day. And he's shortly going to be the subject of a major retrospective, which will be both at the Walker Art Center and the Dallas Museum of Art in 2013 and 14, as well as in a participant number of other exhibitions. And finally, I want to introduce Deborah Kass, an artist I've known for a very, very long time. One of the earliest artists to articulate expressly political, even if you will, art historical takes on the relationship between fame and sexuality in her work. She's represented in collections all over the area, Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, Guggenheim Museum. And like Jim, she also works in the School of Art at Yale University, and she's prominently featured in Hyde Seek Upstairs. Thank you all. Thank you for the invitation to participate in this conversation. I'm gonna kind of read my remarks and speak primarily as an artist, and I'm reading them because I don't want to, otherwise I sort of tend to ramble. I have a lot of ideas, and I don't want to go over the allotted time, so I'm gonna try to weave my way through things that I think already touch base with a lot of issues that three of you brought up. So let me just jump in here. While art and homosexuality have always been intertwined in the public imagination, the historical and conceptual links between the two are missing. The art world, indeed most art museums, practicing a don't ask, don't tell agenda in their exhibitions, collections, and publications, have failed to acknowledge same sex desire as a meaningful constituent of art production, history, and criticism. This institutionalized silence around the relationship of homosexuality and art is a form of censorship and is ultimately about the regulation and policing or even the erasure of difference. In this case, same sex desire. While the Brooklyn Museum and the National Portrait Gallery are to be commended for chipping away at this silence by presenting exhibitions such as Hide Seek or the current show at the National Portrait Gallery, Gertrude Stein, Five Acts, these scholarly exhibitions and their accompanying publications, indeed this symposium even, read against a backdrop of heteronormativity. It is this assumption of heteronormativity that must be changed and it will only be changed when museums, because of their authority, both regularly organize and present exhibitions where same sex or queer desires are the main curatorial focus of the exhibition and regularly include queer art and artists in exhibitions with non-identity-based curatorial focus. So for me, it's important that both go on frequently, often regularly. All art participates in multiple narratives. For example, what could easily do a queer read of my recent wrapped and gromited near monochrome paintings? However, they can and should be also discussed in relationship to narratives of post-minimal concerns with material and process, feminism, modernist abstraction, monochrome painting, the body, et cetera. The conversations are multiple, nuanced and complex. Arts relationship to sexuality or same sex desire in this case is just one narrative. To overemphasize that narrative is reductive and simplistic. However, to eliminate or minimize it leaves the work without social context. Both are problematic. But aren't we post-feminist and post-queer, some might ask? Well, I prefer the terms neo-feminist and neo-queer to acknowledge a tradition of creative practice, a tradition of creative practice, and simultaneously allow for change and a fluidity. My answer is no, we're not. As long as there is hate, bigotry, sexism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia, we still need these exhibitions. We need them because they physically, and I'm emphasizing physically here, occupy time and space and thereby interrupt the heteronormativity. And then this brings me around to another current conversation about metronormativity and relationship to the parallel and at times overlapping migrations of queers and artists from rural locations and small towns to larger urban environments like say New York, San Francisco, LA. The internet and phone technologies have interrupted these migrations. It is now possible to be a queer or to be an artist or even be a queer artist in rural America and not be isolated. One can share work and get information, get feedback on your work, even participate in virtual exhibitions. However, this work does not allow for a presence in the physical community where one lives and works. Exhibitions are still extremely important because they occupy physical space and time and hopefully generate consciousness and discussion. Because museums construct and reinforce certain narratives through exhibitions, collections and archives, they are uniquely positioned. So what I'm trying to emphasize here is just the physical exhibition happening. Even though we're not isolated anymore, the fact that an exhibition happens within a community and there can be the dialogue and the discourse and the questions and everything you guys have been talking about, to me, that's crucial and must continue and go on. And so I'm just going to end here with a short quote while kind of paraphrasing a number of people, including Adrienne Rich, Richard Meyer, David Wanarovitch and others who basically have said whatever is unspoken becomes unspeakable. Whatever is unspeakable becomes unthinkable and whatever is unthinkable ceases to exist. Thank you. I want to thank Jonathan and the panel for being here today. It's a pleasure to be a part of this and it's an honor actually to be able to reflect on some of the great things that have been said today and also on a practice just thinking about my own practice and my relationship to my own queerness and where I identify that in my work and what it embodies and where it does 1.2 and say, here he's queer and here he's not. And it's a little bit like trying to find the wet part of water. It's all there. And which gets me back to the panel itself and the issues of representation and how does a work become itself in the world and from what mind or what consciousness, the object takes form and then is given birth to. And for me, this is where my interest is as far as an educator and as a practitioner and where my relationship to my own being and where I am positioning myself in relationship to my identity in a kind of ongoing investigation over time. And what I'm interested in and what I look for in a practice is always happening in somewhat after the fact that the work that comes forth through my practice is leading the way. And I follow and learn from it once it is in the world. And thinking about that object brought into the world and then finding an entry point into the greater world, the museums, galleries, collections. I always find interesting and I always find a little bit humbling in that its power is always beyond me and its meaning surpasses my understanding and that it is in the, I think, the experiencing of the object in the world that brings a kind of global universal understanding of things and that the work is looked at spherically from many different points of view, from many different understandings and speaks to all according to those kinds of points of view or people's ability to access. And access I guess is probably the issue of today and how one accesses art, what is available to us as viewers and what becomes available because of what curators and museums are willing are interested in showing us based on complicated systems of economics and politics that I think is also a question here, which I think is always a great question, who's in charge and why are we looking at what we're looking at, who's paying for it and who's in charge of it and who's talking about it. These are the issues that I find very engaging and also quite frustrating and I see as a kind of a part of a continuum of an ongoing dialogue and trying to figure out how do we break down systems that seem to hold people back. I congratulate Jonathan and the museums and curators who are here and the artists here for their efforts in trying to push out and expand. I think that's what requires of all of us is to keep expanding things and keep pushing and asking bigger questions and it's basically what the job requires. It's not for everyone, but it's certainly a job worth taking on and you know there was a question posed at the very beginning is how do we change and it's my belief that we change through education, we change through dialogue. Conversations like this one I think are very useful, especially if they're happening even in small groups in the public, not necessarily in the confines of an institution such as this one, but actually in classrooms all over the country and the necessity for art in elementary schools and the school systems is very important because it is a first opportunity where children are taught to give voice and to present something that is uniquely them and it's the importance of those elementary lessons that we are empowered and told that yes we have a voice and yes we are important, that we need to always enhance and always emphasize. For me I think that it's like listening to Tom talking about being able to mount these exhibitions with the board and the director with their approval is credit to Tom's ability to educate those he's working with and I think that that's basically what it comes down to that we all calmly are able to pull back from the rhetoric and the vitro that separates us and actually calmly have conversation about difference, about the necessity of inclusion, about the beauty of a spectrum of identity and not necessarily a singularity or a common opposition of identity but actually that we are an expanding spectrum and that's the beauty of it all. So those are my thoughts on the subject and thank you. So first I wanna thank Jonathan for bringing the show here and I wanna thank the museum for taking it and we all know it was an act of bravery and good marketing all at the same time. I wrote something first, the first thing I wrote addressed a lot of what Jim was talking about in terms of who's in charge which brought me right to the 0.1% which brought me right to trustees, museum boards who really runs things, why things get shown, how things get contextualized. I threw it out and went another direction but I think it bears, we need to acknowledge obviously it's a really important part of this conversation but frankly one I didn't know enough about to really elaborate on it but the other thing Jim said that I think is important is education and I think it's important to realize that the people who are doing the educating are the better educated younger generation. People that educated me and my generation unilaterally didn't know from women's studies, queer studies, black studies they did not exist. People in power are from my generation or older they simply don't have the vocabulary or the mindset to change things. So I do believe as we get, I'm gonna call them they cause I really don't identify with my generation but as they age out we're in much better shape. Witness, Tom Collins, Risa and Norman Yew who was way ahead of his time as you know. So that said, I'm gonna start with a quote from Jose Esteban Munez from Crossing Utopia the then and there of queer futurity. Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. To talk about a utopian concept of queerness and its relationship to museums or institutional value in the art world one must for starts pretend there is no material difference between men and women which is not the case. The art world's idea of queerness is male. This show with its emphasis on bringing the canon out of the closet emphasizes the problem. The canon, gay, straight, bi, trifecta, or queer is male. We cannot really say we're queering the canon when in fact we're just gaying the canon. As we expand the canon to be more inclusive to diversify it, it remains remarkably male. Black, white, brown, queer, et cetera, et cetera. And even in the face of mandates for diversity some others remain more valuable than other others. Even if one category of other comprises 51% of the population. If the canon won't change to include us what good is it really? The last time queerness was interesting in the art world was the early 90s during another big recession at the height of the AIDS epidemic and act up when every artist worth their salt was also called an activist. There was a flurry of gay-themed panels and shows including Around Stonewall 25. I was on and in many of them. I said at the time that my gayness would historically be inscribed in the names of Gober, Blake, and Blackner. Now I would say my queerness will be inscribed in the names of Pittman, Ligon, Gonzalez Torres, and whoever else because nothing has really changed. What investments does a museum make when diversity becomes a mandate? There is such a deep disingenuousness. Wait, I have a hard time with this word. Disingenuousness, no. Disingenuousness, you know what I'm saying. Here, really. No one should even be talking about it. Panels and museums are meaningless since they have nothing to do with acquisition policy. We should be looking at the collections pure and simple. Money talks, whose work is invested in, whose work is up on the walls permanently. The rest is the education department just doing a good job. Art's inherent worth is something we who love it except unilaterally. Well what exactly are the values of the art shown in museums for the last 30 years? We've been told over and over by museums through the art in which they invest that some identities are consistently more valuable than others. Is this really a good thing? Mounting shows by queer or black artists always with too few women in them or trotting out that old recession favorite the women in our collection will usually keep in storage does not change a thing. And I should say I am talking about New York museums. A woman speaking on a panel is not the same as a man's expensive art being purchased for the collection and shown in its galleries. Thank you Harmony. Yes. What makes her work not as valuable as her voice to an institution? What is her work if not her truest voice? During the last 30 years women's earning capabilities only rose 10 cents from 59 cents to 69 cents compared to a male dollar. Certainly in the art world it's even more dismal. Is biology still economic destiny? Evidently. So in the hip progressive world of art does it really just boil down to the thing we cannot control what we are? At the National Portrait Gallery right now another censorous fight has broken out over the show Gertrude Stein Five Stories another show in which my work appears. A battle is being waged not over the content of her work but over the fact that in representing Stein's life straightforwardly and including Alice Toklas as the essential part of Stein's life that she was, her wife or wifey as she was referred to by Gertrude the show identifies Stein as a lesbian. These are the facts. This isn't a revelation. In the cases of Maplethorpe and David Wanrovich and Hyde Seek the right wing men claim to be offended by the content of the artist's work. Something other than homosexuality itself but not with the Stein show. There's no mention of the content of her life's work in the attack on the show. Stein's work has nothing to do with the right wing argument. In fact in one fell swoop her life's work is rendered utterly irrelevant. The crime, her offense is what she was, a lesbian. A female homosexual. Therein lies the problem for all women. Lesbians in particular. At least the right wing is being honest. So let's talk about sexuality in the museum. Consider the Kanday Wiley painting that hung in the Great Hall here for a very long time. Its utility to speak to a community that has been underserved traditionally by art museums is obvious. It is a heroic picture of a beautiful young black man on a horse executed in the style of great history paintings of the past. It's clear that young men from all over can identify with and celebrate these heroic images and that in these paintings they can see their own glamorized reflections. The work of Kanday Wiley is comprised exclusively of enormous full body portraits of beautiful young black men in states of undress surrounded by decorative flora, soon to be expanded to include beautiful young Israeli men in a project to be shown at the Jewish Museum Uptown. In all the discussions surrounding the paintings, is there any of sexuality or of the sexual desire of the artist? Why not? Is there a problem with gayness in the museum, the museum did not want to address? Evidently. Frankly, these are simply some of the gayest paintings I've ever seen. Gorgeous young men. Gorgeous young men imposes as corny and as blatant as any centerfold. Yet in the six pages on the Brooklyn Museum website devoted to his show here, that was a different year, Wiley is never identified as a homosexual artist, a fact that practically shouts out from every painting, even the frames are gay. I mean, really, just look at them. It is a beautiful thing. Even within the body of one artist, there is a hierarchy of diversity, a privileging of one identity over another. Whose decision was that? One thing we know, it was a political and economic decision. One that ensures is very expensive work is easily consumable to as many collectors, audiences and institutions as possible. It's the old familiar strategy that has always worked for major artists and movie stars. Jewish ones too, I might add. How many women are given this opportunity? Even when speaking to multiple communities is the purpose of their work. And here I speak from my own experience. My work is very specifically consciously, my work very specifically and consciously addresses the following communities. Baby boomers, feminists, art history junkies, Broadway belters, painters, political junkies, show queens, people who just love Sondheim, Jews, gays, lesbians, warhol worshipers, cockeyed optimists, pessimists, New Yorkers, Brooklynites, baseball, Brooklyn baseball, and lefties in particular. The great American song book, Sandy Kofax, Barbra Streisand, drag, post-war painting, popular culture, and the aspirations of a dying middle class. I mean, this really is what my work is about. I practically dare anyone to ghettoize me. But, lest anyone forget or consider my work in any other terms, I've been identified as a Jewish lesbian in almost every review I have ever received, particularly in the last few years, usually in the first line, always written by gay men or straight women. These are reviews of shows that are made up of striped paintings with Broadway lyrics. You have to work very hard at seeing the relevance. It has served to marginalize my work in New York no less, which means it is less expensive, not seen in museums on a regular basis, except in the occasional queer show where lesbians are at a premium but still always underrepresented, or even more occasionally show about Jewish identity, always in a Jewish museum. And finally, the very rare feminist show that includes lesbians never in a major institution. I do ask to get to speak on panels a lot. I usually turn them down because I've learned that institutions like nothing less than thinking an artist is biting the hand that feeds it. But if they really fed me, maybe I would stop biting. Being on a panel is rationalized as giving an artist a platform. So I agree in a way it is a platform, just a very, very shaky one. So thanks, but the premise of art museums is that the artist's truest voice is her work. That is a platform I would be very happy and grateful to stand on. Being on the panel today is community service, pure and simple. And because I take it so seriously, it takes me days to prepare, days out of my studio where I actually do make a living, walking a tightrope, diagnosing the patient, prescribing the medicine the patient needs, but historically refuses to take. At the same time, trying to diminish the inevitable professional damage I will inflict on myself for speaking truth to power, yet again, knowing from experience that no good deed goes unpunished. I agonize that my remarks will be taken out of context, misrepresented, and that my reputation that has been established well outside of these walls might be damaged. There is no benefit really. It makes me vulnerable in a way I don't feel showing my work. And since nothing has changed since the time I was first asked to be on a very similar panel in the early 90s, gets really, really boring and depressing to keep beating the same dead horse for 20 years. So in conclusion, looking back on the canon, do gayness significantly hold back Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Twombly, or Kelly? I don't think so. Was it such a terrible bargain these men struck with their supporters and admirers by happily avoiding the subject of their sexuality altogether? In exchange for their rise to the top and all that implies, what did being a little bit in the closet hurt? Their self-esteem? I don't think so. One must reconcile the happy collusion of the many great gay and by gay, I mean male, artists who were and are delighted to have the opportunity of not only becoming fabulously rich and famous, but also having their work inscribed forever in the pageant of art history, a still decidedly homosocial enterprise. Keeping their sexuality on the D.L. was a small price to pay indeed, especially in the world of cultural royalty that they entered, where as always where as always is the case with royalty, sexuality as we in post-modern America define it has never been of any use as a category. In fact, the neighborhood of the rich and famous has always been a friendly one, filled with other men exactly like them. Women artists of any sexuality have rarely been welcomed there, unless on the arm of a man gay or straight. Well, thank you. You've been wonderfully patient and I appreciate it.