Summer 2024: LGBTQIA+ portrait photography 

Portrait photographs celebrating LGBTQIA+ experiences explore themes of identity and place in exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on view through September 8, 2024. Across three spaces, these exhibitions illuminate how portraits are a powerful tool for LGBTQIA+ self-discovery and community-building. 

In the Hostetter Gallery, On Christopher Street: Transgender Portraits by Mark Seliger brings together 32 portraits of trans individuals taken on New York City’s Christopher Street, an icon of trans and queer culture. Photographer Mark Seliger is best known for his images of celebrities and public figures from the pages of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and GQ. Between 2013 and 2016, Seliger documented the gentrification of his West Village neighborhood as a personal project that evolved into a poignant series reflecting trans stories and experiences. In nearby Calderwood Hall, the Museum will screen Christopher Street Stories, a 20-minute film by Seliger that includes interviews with several sitters. 

Also on view in the Hostetter Gallery is a case of letters and photographs from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s archive. Isabella’s social circles included individuals who pushed against cultural norms of romance, attraction, and gender in ways that were often criminalized in her lifetime. These personal items draw a historic connection between the LGBTQIA+ community and the Museum. 

“Traveling with colleagues to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) a few years ago, we encountered an exhibition of ‘Christopher Street’ portraits by Mark Seliger. It was the first time these photos had ever been shown in a museum,” shares Peggy Fogelman, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “We knew that this body of work needed to be seen by Boston audiences and are thrilled to be able to present them, along with a new exhibition of Boston-area photographers capturing the LGBTQIA+ experience closer to home.”

The exhibition Portraits From Boston, With Love, on view in the Fenway Gallery, highlights the work of Boston-based, gender-expansive artists Jaypix Belmer, Ally Schmaling, and Olivia Slaughter, who each take their own distinctive approach to capturing family, friends, and LGBTQIA+ community members. These exhibitions are joined by a newly-commissioned self-portrait by Gardner Artist-in-Residence Hakeem Adewumi. Inspired by mythology and Adewumi’s belief in the right to conceal parts of our authentic selves, Hakeem Adewumi: Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream, 2024 will be displayed through October 1 on the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. 

On Christopher Street: Transgender Portraits by Mark Seliger was organized by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Support for the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, as well as for Portraits From Boston, With Love and Hakeem Adewumi: Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream, 2024, is provided by the Barr Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Barbara Lee Program Fund, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

The Artist-in-Residence program is directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way. 

The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Learn more about these exhibitions and related programs.

For press inquiries, please email Dawn Griffin, dgriffin@isgm.org.

Other inquiries: information@isgm.org