The show offers almost a hundred pieces, including major works by George Bellows, Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol. There are no plans for it to travel anywhere else.
Ward, one of the two curators, calls the show “a groundbreaking, epochal exhibition.” “Amazingly,” writes Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, “this is the first major museum show to tackle the topic.” Titled “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” the exhibition will be featured at the gallery through Feb. The museum is as Washington establishment as any can be: the federally funded Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, a museum noted more for exhibitions about presidents than shows on the cutting edge.ĭavid C. Now, a Washington museum is pioneering a show that celebrates gay and lesbian art and delineates its place in the history of American painting and photography. The controversial banning made the Washington art establishment seem philistine, intolerant and spineless. In 1989, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art, battered by threats from Congress and worried about future federal grants, canceled an exhibition by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that included male nudity and homosexual scenes.
