Queer Art, by curators Mollie E. Barnes and Gemma Rolls-Bentley, isn’t afraid to ask questions: what queerness is, what queer art can be, and why queer art matters.
The book’s introduction states that “queer art is not a genre but a gesture; a refusal to be pinned down by fixed identity categories”. Queerness in art can appear both openly and subtly, often through coded, abstract or unconventional forms that challenge heteronormative expectations.
The opening chapter asks “why talk about queer art?”, which is akin to asking why queer art matters. The book answers this in subtle and varied ways. Because queerness exists as a marginal identity, it offers alternative perspectives and forms of freedom that are often shared and experienced collectively.
The word “queer” was first reclaimed in the late 1980s among the homosexual or gay and lesbian community, as it then defined itself. As professor of gender studies Heather Love put it, the word evoked the “long history of insult and abuse – you could hear the hurt in it”.
Queer Art manages to avoid reductive framing. Although sexual content is an important aspect, queer expression goes far beyond this, and the book reflects that range.
It covers a wide variety of subjects presented in different styles, from figurative work to collage and abstraction. This diversity is expanded through multiple mediums including painting, photography, film and even computer games.
A prime example is the paintings of Julie Mehretu, who resists labels such as “queer artist” or “Black artist”, instead framing her practice as a fluid commitment to complexity, multiplicity and resistance to hierarchy.
The book also includes a broad account of queer history, from Greek mythology to the present day. Contemporary and historical artworks are shown side by side, allowing earlier works to be reinterpreted through a queer lens.
In doing so, queerness is brought into focus within art history, while historical works gain renewed relevance. Queerness as a marginal perspective encourages us to rethink past, present and future.
Inside queer art
The variety of artistic practices presented offers a carefully curated recognition of different aesthetic approaches. These often contrast but also complement each other across time periods and geographies.
For example, Tamara de Lempicka’s painting The Girls (1930), depicting a lesbian embrace, feels both contemporary and timeless. Salman Toor’s The Green Room (2019) suggests a tension between desire and prohibition.
Each chapter focuses on a theme, discussed in a two-page mini essay with an artwork and reading list – a format typical of Thames & Hudson publications. Each artist is then given a double-page spread combining image and text. These thematic groupings create space to explore queer subjectivity in more layered ways, broadening the dialogue between artwork and identity.
The selected artists are international and often already well known within queer art discourse. The images are bold, striking and diverse.
The final chapter focuses on queer futurism – an approach that uses speculative storytelling to imagine futures where queerness is centred. It notes that: “Queer artists often explore the future, because the present feels insufficient, constricting or even hostile.”
Quoting critical theoriest José Esteban Muñoz, it states: “Queerness is ‘not yet here’ – it exists not only in lived experience but also in the realm of possibility.”
What connects queer futurism and Afrofuturism is their response to absence in dominant historical narratives. Afrofuturism draws on science fiction, history and African diasporic culture to reimagine Black identity across time. Both movements use imagination and fiction to fill gaps left by “official” histories.
Two artists working across these ideas are Zanele Muholi and Isaac Julien. Julien’s film Looking for Langston (1989) blends archive, fiction and historical reconstruction to address the absence of queer lives within accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. It reimagines Black cultural life through a speculative lens, filling gaps in the historical record.
Muholi’s project Faces and Phases (2006–present) presents over 600 portraits of Black LGBTQIA lives, described as “participants” to emphasise agency. Their work forms a living archive, extending into their self-portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama II (2015) – where their gaze confronts the viewer, reflecting experiences of racial and queer violence while refusing easy consumption of suffering.
The queer futurism chapter emphasises that this is “not an escapist fantasy”, but one of “soft revolutions, radical propositions and acts of survival”. It includes new media such as gaming – for example, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work reconstructing Black trans histories through interactive digital archives.
As the book states: “Trans and non-binary artists are at the forefront of queer futurity, with works that challenge fixed categories and imagine new forms of embodiment.”
The final statement in chapter one sums up the book’s aim: queer art history has often been shaped by white men, excluding people of colour, women and trans people from its definitions. The book expands this narrative to include a much wider range of queer identities and practices.
The front cover reflects this shift too. Following Barbara Kruger’s feminist work Untitled: Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (1981), Del LaGrace Volcano’s The Boxer Johnny Berlin (1996) shows an androgynous boxer wearing lipstick that matches their glove.
This image holds ambiguity between seduction and confrontation, desire and resistance. Meaning is carried in the boxer’s gaze, but interpretation is never fixed. This complexity captures the central premise of the book: queer expression as fluid, open and resistant to definition.
The result is a broader, more inclusive account of queer art.
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