In June, as Pride Month rolls around, institutions across the world remember that they have queer artists in their archives. The rainbow logos come out, the emails flood in, and the urgency to showcase solidarity through scheduling becomes palpable. However, for many Black queer artists, Pride Month doesn’t feel like a celebration; it feels like an extraction.
Year after year, project after project, Black queer artists are asked to share their stories, submit their pain, perform their resilience, and trust that someone else will decide how to frame it all. This pattern of asking marginalized artists to show up and perform their identities is not new; it has a long and calculated history.
In the Renaissance, artists worked for patrons like popes and aristocrats, who commissioned art to cement their power. In the 1980s, artists like Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat saw their work aestheticized, monetized, and stripped of its radical edge. The erasure of queerness and HIV/AIDS in institutional settings continues to be a point of contention, as seen in a recent exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Even well-intentioned omissions or relocations of meaning in exhibitions suggest that certain truths remain too “difficult” for institutional framing. This lack of clarity and responsibility in presenting marginalized narratives highlights the need for genuine representation and understanding.
Black queer artists often find themselves forced into aesthetic code-switching, performing professionalism, pain, and pride to fit institutional expectations. This performance becomes part of the work itself, reflecting a larger struggle for visibility and autonomy in the art world.
The rise of celebrity curators and the outsourcing of care by institutions reveal a hierarchy that prioritizes consumption over artistic integrity. However, there are models for change, like Rashaad Newsome’s documentary “Assembly,” which centers Black queer creativity on its own terms.
As corporations pull back from Pride sponsorships, it becomes clear that support was never unconditional but strategic and commercial. The reminder that marginalized communities have always been here, fighting against erasure and exploitation, speaks to the resilience and defiance of those who continue to advocate for genuine representation and accountability.
This Pride, instead of empty gestures and performative allyship, Black queer artists are calling for decision-making power, funding without strings attached, and the freedom to exist in all their complexity. True solidarity means building a world where marginalized voices can exist on their own terms, rather than being reduced to a spectacle for others’ consumption.
