Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Collection - Hardcover

"[Charles Leslie's] wide-ranging collection cogently illustrates the changing landscape of public gay life and the civil rights advances incrementally gained since he began discreetly buying homoerotic art in the 1950s. Leslie has borne witness to the many injustices and indignities faced by the LGBTQ community, but has also played a distinguished role in civil rights advances, moments of progress and hope. . . . As a collector and community builder, Leslie has been a linchpin in the process of normalizing queerness in art." --Artsy

Founded in the context of social movements of the late 1960s, The Leslie - Lohman Museum is dedicated to preserving art that speaks to the LGBTQ experience and fostering the artists who create it. Queer Holdings aims to reclaim scholarship from a queer perspective by surveying 200 works from the Museum’s permanent collection. A selection of essays by scholars, artists and archivists, explore the Museum’s possible futures by tracing its visual, cultural, and political evolutions in parallel with 50 years of shifting social conditions for LGBTQ communities.

The collecting origins of the Leslie-Lohman Museum can be traced to 1969, when its founders hosted their first “homosexual art fair” in New York. Evolving from gallery to foundation to museum in five decades, Leslie-Lohman’s collection mirrors shifting histories of LGBTQ social movements in the United States. Queer Holdings presents 200 objects from the Museum’s vast permanent collection, and gathers texts that explore history and provenance, genre and subject matter, and engage in critical conversations about gender and race in the Museum's collection. Queer Holdings offers an institution’s possible futures by revisiting its past.