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Clifford Chance

Clifford Chance
Arcus Pride Art Exhibition 2019<br />

Arcus Pride Art Exhibition 2019

New York & Washington, D.C.

Stonewall 50 is Arcus Americas' thirteenth annual Pride art exhibition in the Firm's New York office and the fourth in Washington, DC.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a violent police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village in New York City, erupted into a series of spontaneous demonstrations by queer and trans people for their safety, survival, and right to exist. As the rebellion progressed over the course of three days, an international LGBT+ civil rights movement was born. In celebration and recognition of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall and World Pride, Stonewall 50 explores the far-reaching art and activism the uprising spawned: the artists and activists whose influence and contributions have been historically overlooked and the history of Pride, which began with the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970 and has expanded city by city into a worldwide phenomenon. The exhibition includes historical and contemporary artwork that traces these histories: photographs of early Gay Pride marches and pioneering activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera; works by contemporary and underrepresented historical artists who reflect on queer experience and visibility; and documentation of the increasingly intersectional focus of contemporary LGBT+ activism. 

Lolita Beckwith

Lolita Beckwith (Lolita Lens Photography) is a New York–based professional sports, concert, and street photographer. Her series of photographs and corresponding oral histories included in our exhibition were originally commissioned for Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives & Activism, an exhibition at the New York LGBTQ Community Center that explored community-based responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis. For the project, Beckwith photographed and interviewed HIV/AIDS activists, focusing on how the disease transformed and impacted their lives.

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Portrait of Nathylin Flowers Adesegun, HIV/AIDS Activist

2019, Exhibition print: Digital print mounted to Gatorboard, 25 x 20 in

© and Courtesy Lolita Beckwith/Lolita Lens Photography

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Portrait of Kiara St. James, HIV/AIDS Activist

2019, Exhibition print: Digital print mounted to Gatorboard, 25 x 20 in

© and Courtesy Lolita Beckwith/Lolita Lens Photography

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Nicholas Buffon

Nicholas Buffon is a painter and sculptor who lives and works in New York. His paintings of LGBTQ businesses, bars, and establishments in New York are part of an ongoing series that illustrates social spaces. In these paintings, Buffon fuses his own photographs with images from Google Street View, then renders the composite image in acrylic paint. Foreground and background coalesce, making every detail appear tightly in focus.

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Stonewall in the Rain

2017, Pilot G2 pen, acrylic paint, carbon transfer on Bristol, 12 5/8 x 8 in

© Nicholas Buffon; Courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, NY

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Big Gay Ice Cream

2017, Pilot G2 pen, acrylic paint, carbon transfer on Bristol, 7 x 9.5 in

© Nicholas Buffon; Courtesy of the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, NY 

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Liz Collins

Liz Collins is a New York–based artist who employs the materials, processes, and techniques of fiber and textile media. She incorporates vivid palettes and dynamic patterning to create work that varies in scale, from the object-based to the immersive and architectural, and straddles the divides between the functional, the decorative, and the expressive. Embracing optics, textures, color, and dimensionality, Collins re-creates her experience of the world as a place of stupendous wonder and cosmic energy.

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Memphis 2

2019, Needlepoint with assorted yarns, 12 x 19 in

© Liz Collins; Courtesy of the artist and LMAKgallery, NY 

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KNITTING NATION PHASE 4: Pride, Performance Documentation

2013, Exhibition Print: Digital print mounted to Gatorboard, 10 x 15 in

© Liz Collins; Courtesy of the artist and LMAKgallery, NY

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Janet Cooling

Golden Girl

1980, Mixed media on Gatorboard, 48 x 48 in

© and Courtesy Janet Cooling

Janet Cooling is a painter based in Richmond, VA. "Cooling's paintings made between 1978 and 1982 were painted a decade after Stonewall, in the first years of the AIDS crisis, and during the last major nuclear scares of the Cold War. In the drawings and paintings from this period, Cooling constructs psychological narratives in which symbols function as deeply personal memories projected into cosmological scale and importance."
– Ashton Cooper

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Hoesy Corona

Hoesy Corona is a Baltimore, MD, and Tulsa, OK, based multidisciplinary, queer Mexican artist who considers what it means to be a latinx immigrant. Reoccurring themes of queerness, race, class, gender, nature, and celebration are present throughout his work. Corona's Climate-Ponchos are a series of wearable sculptures central to his ongoing performance and site-specific installation, Climate-Immigrants, a project that considers the impending plight of climate-induced migration worldwide and its effects on people of color.

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Climate-Immigrants Performance, Siren Arts, Asbury Park, NJ 

2017, Exhibition Print: Digital print mounted to Gatorboard, 16 x 10.5 in

© and Courtesy Hoesy Corona

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Climate-Poncho (Series)

2017, cut vinyl on clear film with plastic rope, 36 x 54 inches

© and Courtesy Hoesy Corona

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Gordon Hall

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who examines the personal, relational, and political effects of the ways we relate to objects and architectural and social space. DETAILS is a series of photographic prints and a 48-page color zine that isolate moments from Hall's performance work focusing the viewer’s attention on the way bodies are performative, recognized, and gendered.

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DETAILS (37), (detail)

2017-2018, Inkjet print, 15 x 10.5 in

© and Courtesy Gordon Hall 

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DETAILS (38), (detail)

2017-2018, Inkjet print, 15 x 10.5 in

© and Courtesy Gordon Hall

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DETAILS (29), (detail) 

2017-2018, Inkjet print, 15 x 10.5 in
© and Courtesy Gordon Hall

 

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DETAILS (29), (detail) 

2017-2018, Inkjet print, 15 x 10.5 in
© and Courtesy Gordon Hall

 

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Leonard Fink

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries at the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, June, 1973

1973; 2019 Exhibition print: Digital print, 10.5 x 14 in

© and Courtesy The LGBT Community Center National History Archive, NY

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Richard C. Wandel

C.R.A.S.H. March Against the Family Protection Act, July, 1981

1981; 2019 Exhibition print: Exhibition print: Digital print, 14 x 10.5 in

© and Courtesy The LGBT Community Center National History Archive, NY

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Jim Marks

Rainbow History Project's mission is to collect, preserve, and promote an active knowledge of the history, arts, and culture of metropolitan Washington, DC's diverse LGBTQ communities. The organization engages individuals of all backgrounds – particularly those from underrepresented groups. Since its founding, the project has recorded oral histories, recognized community pioneers, conducted research projects and public panels, and amassed a collection of documents, manuscripts and photographs for permanent storage at the Historical Society of Washington, DC.

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The Gay Men's Chorus of Washington D.C. in The 1985 Washington D.C. Pride Parade

1985; Silver gelatin print, 7 x 5 in

© Jim Marks; Courtesy Jim Marks and Rainbow History Project, Washington, D.C.

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First Presentation of the AIDS Quilt on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, October 11 1987

1987; Silver gelatin print, 7 x 5 in

© Jim Marks; Courtesy Jim Marks and Rainbow History Project, Washington, D.C.

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LJ Roberts

bricks and stone

2016-2017, Exhibition print: Digital print mounted to Gatorboard, 21 x 13.5 in

© and Courtesy LJ Roberts

LJ Roberts creates large-scale textile installations, embroideries, artist books, and collages to investigate overlaps of queer and trans politics, activism, protest, and craft. bricks and stone is composed of collaged photocopies of text and images from articles in The New York Times that present wildly differing accounts of the Stonewall Riots. Roberts considers the function(s) of monuments, imagines alternative ways to move through cities, constructs (im)possible architectures, and explores how narratives shape space.

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Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York–based poet, writer, and performance and visual artist. In her collages, Sneed explores the relationship between word and image, figure and ground, color and shape to address her larger experience of the intersection of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Sneed's Mourning Series is a response to the ongoing culture of gun violence in America, the magnitude of which reminds the artist of the level of loss experienced during the AIDS crisis.

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Tribe 2

2018, Mixed media on paper, 10 x 8 in

© and Courtesy Pamela Sneed

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Hands Up

2018, Mixed media on paper, 14 x 11 in

© and Courtesy Pamela Sneed

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Martin Wong

Pedro Rodriguez

c. 1984, Acrylic on canvas, 35 x 14 in

© The Estate of Martin Wong; Courtesy The Estate of Martin Wong and P·P·O·W Gallery, NY

Martin Wong (1946–1999) was a Chinese-American painter whose work addresses his multiple ethnic and racial identities, cosmic and spiritual themes, and cross-cultural elements, demonstrated multilingualism, and celebrated his queer sexuality through his meticulous blend of social realism and visionary art styles. He lived and worked in New York from 1978 until he returned to San Francisco in the late '90s where he worked in his parents' care while fighting his battle with AIDS.

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