Current Exhibitions 2025
a field of bloom and hum
At a time when the rights of members of the queer community are under threat (the American Civil Liberties Union tracked 533 anti-LGBTQ bills in the US in 2024, for example), the Tang will present a two-floor exhibition featuring work by queer artists spanning the last century that assert their lives and stories upon the world. a field of bloom and hum brings together extensive series created over multiple decades by artists such as Steven Arnold, Dyke Action Machine!, and Robert Giard, with seminal works by David Armstrong, Joe Brainard, Tony Feher, Oliver Herring, Jim Hodges, George Platt Lynes, Catherine Opie, Mickalene Thomas, and many others. They will be presented alongside new commissions—including works made in collaboration with students—and an art and activism resource room for gatherings, workshops, dissemination, and study.
The Wachenheim Gallery groups works into intergenerational dialogues. One room, for example, brings together a newly commissioned wall painting by Edie Fake called A Prayer for a Place, which imagines a place for trans people in society, with Oliver Herring’s Queensize Bed with Coat, 1993-1994, a knit sculpture created as an homage to drag performance artist and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger, and photographs from Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1979-1986, an influential and intimate photographic diary of the life of the artist and her friends, which extends into other rooms.
Other first-floor combinations of artists include Nayland Blake with Catherine Opie; John O’Reilly with Paul M. Sepuya; and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French) with Jimmy Wright and Alice O’Malley, along with work by Steven Arnold, Lyle Ashton Harris, Wardell Milan, and Edmund Teske. The first floor also features the art and activism resource room alongside work on view by Act Up, Dyke Action Machine, General Idea, Robert Giard, Queer Ecology Hanky Project, and more.
The second-floor Malloy Wing features a salon-style wall of work by more than 140 artists that spans the early twentieth century to today. Among the artists are Berenice Abbott, Mark Bradford, Martine Gutierrez, Peter Hujar, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Shelby Sharie Cohen, and Mickalene Thomas, forming a tapestry of identity, memory, and community. The upstairs gallery features monumental works by Camila Falquez, Donald Moffett, Joel Otterson, and Joan Snyder, as well as seating and a rug by Liz Collins paired with Nayland Blake’s Ruins of a Sensibility, turntables and the artist’s album collection, which form a listening room and dance space open to all visitors.
Also upstairs is a purpose-built stage to serve as a venue for performances, discussions, class meetings, and community gatherings throughout the exhibition’s run.
The performative, abstract, and conceptual works in a field of bloom and hum exemplify one of its major inquiries: How can generous and open interpretative possibilities support new definitions of history, community, and queerness? In addition, public programs co-organized by faculty, such as films, dialogues, symposia, and workshops, will explore issues of history telling; theatricality; memory and loss; inclusion and identity formation; and the role of artists in building and defining queer communities. The exhibition’s intergenerational dialogues will serve as points of entry for new scholarly inquiry and can act as a model for novel modes of thinking and making.
