Jul 15

Jul 15 Art Out: Fort Gansevoort Presents " A Look Back: 50 Years After Stonewall"

Photographs by Cid Roberts

Fort Gansevoort presents A Look Back: 50 Years After Stonewall, organized by Lucy Beni and Adam Shopkorn. The exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a six-day riot said to have been spontaneously set off byMarsha P. Johnson in protest of one of many regular police raids at The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in New York City’s Greenwich Village. This event marks the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement and the contemporary fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States.

A Look Back: 50 Years After Stonewall unites the work of queer artists living and producing in and around New York City beginning around the time of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 and leading into the 1980s. This is only a portion of the story, an incomplete history, most especially given that the Gay Liberation movement and its coinciding contemporary art market had not placed transgender voices nor people of color at the forefront of the conversation.

The work made during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, beginning in 1981, becomes entangled in death and remembrance, an epidemic defining this decade most especially in the New York City queer community and resulting in a tremendous amount of loss. Peter Hujar, Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz’s work all reflect this tragic time.