Lecture: Jonathan Katz

Event time: 
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - 3:00pm
Event description: 

Special Lecture: Jonathan Katz

Agnes Martin: The Sexuality of Abstraction

Jonathan Katz, Director and Associate Professor, Visual Studies Doctoral Program, University at Buffalo and Guest Curator, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2011 | 7 PM

LORIA CENTER, RM 351

(190 York St.)

Presented with the Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group; the Department of the History of Art; the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies.


Jonathan D. Katz, a scholar of post war art and culture from the vantage point of sexual difference, is Director of the Doctoral Program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, as well Honorary Research Faculty at the University of Manchester, UK and President of the newly opened Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, the world’s first queer art museum. Next month, the Brooklyn Museum will reinstall his groundbreaking exhibition, first shown at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture – the first queer exhibition at a major museum in US history.  Katz was the founding Executive Coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, and founding chair of the very first Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States, at City College of San Francisco.  He co-founded the activist group Queer Nation, San Francisco, and founded the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association, and the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco. He wrote the eponymous book accompanying Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, and is author, with Moira Roth, of the 1998 book Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel  Duchamp and John Cage, of a monograph on Warhol’s art and sexuality, a co-edited collection on the lesbian theorist and writer Monique Wittig, and has just completed a major new essay on Robert Indiana’s queer iconography.  His next book, for which he won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation book grant, is entitled Art, Eros and the 60s. His next exhibition, sponsored by the Tacoma Museum of Art and traveling to four other museums internationally, is entitled Art/AIDS/America.