{"id":633807,"date":"2026-09-23T20:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/633807\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T20:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:16:09","slug":"lesbian-artists-celebrated-in-three-new-california-exhibitions-long-overdue-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/633807\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesbian artists celebrated in three new California exhibitions: \u2018long overdue\u2019 | Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the late 70s, when the LA-based artist Monica Majoli was 12, she began spending her afternoons at Sisterhood Bookstore, a feminist bookstore in Los Angeles<\/a> that has long since closed. She would stay all afternoon \u201csearching for my tribe\u201d, she says. One day, she found a photograph of the Ovulars, a group of feminists who held photography workshops at a lesbian commune in rural Oregon between 1979 and 1983. Through photography, the Ovulars were documenting and self-fashioning a vision of lesbian life in real time.<\/p>\n

They are at the center of Monica Majoli: Countervision, which brings the artist\u2019s new drawings into the June L Mazer Lesbian Archives, presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (Land), alongside material from Sisterhood and the Ovulars. Some of Majoli\u2019s drawings sit in a five-drawer flat file for visitors to handle; others are embedded within the Mazer\u2019s holdings.<\/p>\n

The exhibition is one of three currently giving lesbian artists a more prominent institutional presence in Los Angeles, alongside the Museum of Lesbian Dreams, the first retrospective of Millie Wilson\u2019s four-decade project, and Diving into the Wreck, Susan Silton\u2019s first major survey, which takes its name from a 1972 Adrienne Rich poem of the same name.<\/p>\n

As a child, Monica Majoli spent afternoons at Sisterhood Bookstore, a feminist bookstore in Los Angeles that has long since closed, \u2018searching\u2019 for her \u2018tribe\u2019. Photograph: Monica Majoli<\/p>\n

All three artists have spent decades working in relative isolation from the institutional recognition now being afforded them. Wilson exhibited frequently in the 1990s and taught at CalArts for nearly three decades, yet curator David Evans Frantz describes her as \u201cunderrecognized\u201d. Silton\u2019s survey, comprising more than 150 works across photography, performance, text, sound, design and participation, has been described by its curators as \u201clong overdue\u201d. Majoli, meanwhile, has spent decades making paintings that examine sex, power and queer history, while her work has also become a record of lesbian life and its disappearing histories.<\/p>\n

Taken together, the three exhibitions are responding with some mischief to the question: what happens when an institution finally recognises artists whose work has, for decades, questioned the institutions that failed to recognise them in the first place?<\/p>\n

Millie Wilson\u2019s work Red Top from 1992. Photograph: Millie Wilson, courtesy of the artist<\/p>\n

Lesbian artists have, in part, been seldom canonized in art history through the sheer fact of their being women. They, too, have often fallen awkwardly between neat categories: feminism and queer art, sexuality and identity, art and activism. Lesbianism could be treated as too specific to represent anything universal, or too politically charged to be taken as an aesthetic subject. Even when it was recovered, certain versions of lesbian history proved more acceptable than others.<\/p>\n

Through their exhibitions, the artists resist visibility for visibility\u2019s sake, instead challenging the flattened, institutional version of lesbianism and expanding it into something as varied and contradictory as lesbian life itself. \u201cWe aren\u2019t all just out playing golf,\u201d says Silton.<\/p>\n

In 1989, Wilson invented the Museum of Lesbian Dreams, an fabricated institution that exists through her paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations \u2013 at least one critic believed was real. Its foundational work, Fauve Semblant: Peter (A Young English Girl), imagines a retrospective for a fictional lesbian artist whose work has supposedly been lost. Inspired by Romaine Brooks\u2019s portrait of the real lesbian artist Gluck, Wilson creates the remains of an artist who never existed.<\/p>\n

The word \u201cmuseum\u201d holds a particularly charged meaning in this case, with its almost alchemical ability to grant objects immediate legitimacy. With Wilson\u2019s winning sense of humour, she made those objects lesbian pulp and lowbrow literature.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was frowned upon very actively by some more snooty lesbian art historians as well,\u201d says Frantz. They questioned why, Frantz says, \u201cWilson was bringing out a tawdry part of our community history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Susan Silton\u2019s survey, comprising more than 150 works across photography, performance, text, sound, design and participation, has been described by its curators as \u2018long overdue\u2019. Photograph: Courtesy of Metro Art (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority)<\/p>\n

Silton has spent decades resisting precisely that kind of packaging through her work. \u201cInstitutions, I think, really fail us in their being so simplified about identity,\u201d she said. If you \u201cbox people and things up into neat little packages\u201d, she added, they become easier to \u201cconvey as a package. .\u201cIt\u2019s like golden for the corporate sponsors.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her 1994 work mutatis mutandis, she examined \u201cthe perception of lesbian as mutant; mutation being both anomalous and often necessary to the survival of a species\u201d. In one iteration, participants look through a stereoscope at two images that become three-dimensional but never perfectly coalesce into a single image. It offers a fitting metaphor for how Silton sees lesbianism. She thinks \u201cnarratively and in layers\u201d, she told me, rather than through the \u201cliteralisation of an idea\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mutatis mutandis was on loan to the survey by Gillian Anderson, who came to Silton\u2019s house herself to collect it in the early 2000s. Silton is pleased to be regarded, then or now. \u201cI haven\u2019t really quite felt that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Monica Majoli\u2019s work Ovular (couple) 3 from 2026. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND)<\/p>\n

Her, Majoli and Wilson\u2019s exhibitions go beyond correcting their underexposure, but make plain the difficulty of correction itself. These lesbian artists are now being given something resembling institutional space, but they have already spent decades questioning what that space means, whom it serves, and what it asks them to become.<\/p>\n

Looking back at the photographs of the Ovulars, Majoli says, feels like trying to recover \u201ca kind of courage to seize the moment\u201d. She contrasted that spirit with the \u201cfatigue and fear\u201d she sees governing so much of contemporary life. The Ovulars were constructing an image of lesbian life before it could be comfortably contained by an institution; decades later, Majoli, Wilson and Silton continue to work in that space between self-definition and representation, producing forms of lesbian history that resist settling into a single image. They insist on keeping sexuality and identity unruly.<\/p>\n

Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams is on display at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State LA from 24 October to 10 April. Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck is on display at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery until 22 November. Monica Majoli: Countervision is on display at June L Mazer Lesbian Archives until 22 November<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the late 70s, when the LA-based artist Monica Majoli was 12, she began spending her afternoons at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-633807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}