LGBTQIA+ Artists at VMFA

Explore a selection of works by LGBTQIA+ artists at VMFA.

Collection: American Art, Modern and Contemporary Art Culture/Region: America Subject Area: Fine Arts Activity Type: Resource Set

Stadia III

2004 , American Medium: ink and acrylic on canvas Accession ID: 2006.1

"I’m interested in describing this as a system. . . a whole cosmos, and that is the overall painting, while the little minute detail marks act more like characters, individual stories. Each mark has agency in that sense—individual agency."—Julie Mehretu

Mehretu’s monumental paintings address contemporary themes of power, colonialism, and globalism with dramatic flair. She adopts imagery from architecture, city planning, mapping, and the media. At the same time, her bold use of color, line, and gesture makes her works feel like personal expression.

Stadia III belongs to a series of three Stadia paintings dealing with the theme of mass spectacle. Conceived in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the series reflects Mehretu’s fascination with television coverage that transformed the war into a kind of video game—as many at the time commented—and in the spectrum of nationalistic responses that she witnessed during travels to Mexico, Australia, Turkey, and Germany. The series also reflects her interest in the international buildup to the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Interior: Two Chairs and Fireplace

2011 , American Medium: acrylic and oil enamel with rhinestones on panel Accession ID: 2014.371

"What’s so great is that Matisse looked at Manet. And Romare Bearden looked at Matisse and Manet. And I’m looking at all three; it’s a lineage."—Mickalene Thomas

Thomas explores traditional notions of femininity and beauty, as well as female empowerment, through paintings portraying provocative, glamorous African American women. She begins her three-part process by building sets redolent of 1970s domestic interiors, where she then poses and photographs her model. Finally, she paints the image on a much larger scale, incorporating materials such as glitter and sequins.

Thomas’s dialogue with art history is evident in this painting, which, unusually for her, presents a setting without the figure. The rich profusion of patterns plays on Henri Matisse’s paintings, while the illusion of torn and pasted fragments recalls Romare Bearden’s collages.

Marian Anderson

1965 , American Medium: oil on canvas Accession ID: 2012.277

Beauford Delaney painted this iconic portrait of the acclaimed American contralto Marian Anderson two decades after Greene Street, his inventive cityscape that hangs on the other side of this gallery. Although completed in Paris, the portrait is imbued with the artist’s awareness of the contemporary civil rights movement in America. Marian Anderson was an African American cultural hero whose artistic talent and moral courage inspired a generation. A symbol of perfection and transcendence, the vibrant yellow palette simultaneously mediates the artist’s exploration of painterly abstraction while radiating the sitter’s brilliance.

Franconia Notch (Mt. Lafayette, Franconia Notch, N.H.)

1930 , American Medium: oil on canvas Accession ID: 2012.19

Painted by Marsden Hartley on his return to America after an extended stay in Europe, Franconia Notch is a quintessential expression of the leading modernist’s self-proclaimed “Americanness”at a time of growing cultural nationalism. It also marks a critical juncture for the New Englander who (like his artistic hero Paul Cézanne) had long embraced mountains as a persistent motif and a spiritual and creative metaphor. Hartley dubbed the enduring and intensely personal associations with such scenes his “mountain madness”; more than one-third of his production consists of such imagery.

Triple Elvis

1963 , American Medium: Silkscreen ink, silver paint, and spray paint on linen Accession ID: 85.453

“In my art work, hand painting would take much too long and anyway that’s not the age we’re living in. Mechanical means are today . . . Silkscreen work is as honest a method as any, including hand painting.”—Andy Warhol

Warhol based this macho signer-turned-gunslinger portrait of Elvis Presley on a publicity photograph for the 1960 western Flaming Star. This public persona, as carefully packaged as Campbell’s Soup, was ideally suited to Warhol’s aims and to his focus on surface appearance rather than psychological interpretation. Warhol’s repetition of identical images and his silkscreen technique often allude to the pervasiveness of consumer culture. The overlapping multiple figures here also suggest individual film frames and cinematic motion, while the work’s metallic background evokes Hollywood’s silver screen.

Synopsis of a Battle

1968 , American Medium: Commercial oil-based paint and wax crayon on canvas Accession ID: 85.451

“What I am trying to establish is that Modern Art isn’t dislocated, but something with roots, tradition and continuity. For myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary).”—Cy Twombly (From the 1952 fellowship application to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

The vibrant, freewheeling compositions of Virginia-born Cy Twombly often allude to historical and mythological subjects. In Synopsis of a Battle, what appear to be random, chalklike scrawls on a slate gray blackboard are actually drawn and painted signs and symbols that refer to a specific event—the Battle of Issus (333 BC), in which Alexander the Great defeated Darius of Persia’s much larger army.

Among the work’s cryptic, graffiti-like markings, the words “Issus” (top left) and “flank” (left and right) provide clues to the painting’s military subject. The radiating, or flanking, form suggests diagrams of troop movements.

Twombly combines the energy of Abstract Expressionist gesture with the simplifying urges of Minimalism. The painting also reflects the inquiring attitude of Conceptual Art. Twombly is interested in language as both a visual form and a mental construct, here capable of bringing the past vitally into the present.

Willem van Heythuysen

2006 , American Medium: oil and enamel on canvas Accession ID: 2006.14

"A big part of what I'm questioning in my work is what does it meant to be authentic, to be real, to be a genuine article or an absolute fake? What does it mean to be a real black man? Realness is a term applied so heavily to black men in our society."—Kehinde Wiley Wiley’s lavish, larger-than-life images of African-American men play on Old Master paintings. His realistic portraits offer the spectacle and beauty of traditional European art while simultaneously critiquing their exclusion of people of color.

Wiley’s Willem van Heythuysen quotes a 1625 painting of a Dutch merchant by Frans Hals, whose bravura portraits helped define Holland’s Golden Age. Wiley’s model, from Harlem, New York, here takes the name of the original sitter from Harlem, the Netherlands, whose pose and attitude he mimics. Despite the wide gold frame and the vibrantly patterned background whose Indian-inspired tendrils encircle his legs, this subject’s stylish Sean John street wear and Timberland boots keep him firmly in the present and in urban America.