Pride Month is here, and while the celebrations go on as they always do, this year’s have been shadowed by a wave of trans- and homophobic incidents as well as by a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation coming out of Republican-controlled statehouses. Elements on the right seem bent on forcing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, but unfortunately for them, they’re too late: Whether it’s in the courts or at the polls, they’re unlikely to succeed in the long run.

The spirit of Pride continues, as does the vital place of queer people in American society and culture. And there is no better evidence of that than the current slate of institutional exhibitions by LGBTQ+ artists across the country.

Below are 12 shows we recommend by a variety of artists working in multiple mediums who keep the rainbow flag flying high and proud.

Between 1900 and 2000, performance art evolved from a fringe practice to a global divertissement. Its history divides into two periods: the first half of the 20th century, when performative practices by the avant-garde weren’t formally categorized as art, and the postwar era, when they eventually were. Moreover, these activities were confined largely to Europe and America before spreading worldwide after 1950.

Performance before and after midcentury was also distinguished by its increasing reliance on the camera, first for documentation, and later as an element integral to the work. The genre became increasingly bound up with photography, film, and video, which transformed a transitory medium into an art object after the fact.

Moreover, by the 1990s, film and video had achieved production values commensurate with mainstream movies, which had the effect of turning performance art into another form of cinematic mise-en-scène disconnected from live action in front of an audience.

The most salient development for performance art after 1950, though, was the sheer number of artists who embraced it. What follows, then, is a necessarily abridged account of this fascinating chapter in art history.

Read “The ARTnews Guide to Performance Art, Part One: 1700s–1920s” here.

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The Headlines

SETTLING HIS AFFAIRS. The estate of the late antiquities dealer Douglas A.J. Latchford has agreed to forfeit $12 million in a deal with U.S. officials, who claimed in a civil case that Latchford trafficked in looted Cambodian artifacts, the New York Times reports. Latchford was criminally charged in 2019 with dealing stolen material, but died the next year at the age of 88, before any trial. Since then, Latchford’s daughter and heir, Julia Copleston, has been repatriating scores of artifacts that the Cambodian government has said were illegally taken out of the country. The deal also calls for the estate to surrender a seventh-century bronze statue from Vietnam that was improperly obtained. In a statement quoted by Bloomberg, an agent with Homeland Security Investigations termed Latchford “a prolific dealer of stolen antiquities.”

THE STAR TREATMENT. September will see the release of Dumb Money, a film version of Ben Mezrich’s eponymous book about the mayhem around GameStop in 2021, and art types might want to consider booking a ticket. During that episode, retail traders poured money into the videogame seller’s stock, inflicting pain on firms that were shorting it. As some many recall, a couple art-collecting hedge-funders were involved in the affair, Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen, who provided financing for an embattled colleague, and so the big question is . . . who will play them in the movie? Bloomberg’s Katia Porzecanski has the details.Cohen will be played by Vincent D’Onofrio, of Law & Order fame, and Griffin by Nick Offerman, of Parks and Recreation. And yes, the script apparently features Cohen sitting near his famous Damien Hirst shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), as the action unfolds.

The Digest

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Archaeologists have uncovered a mysterious sanctuary in the central Netherlands made of burial mounds and ancient offerings of human and animal bones that has striking similarities to Stonehenge.

The 4,000-year-old site was discovered in the town of Tiel and, like prehistoric stone circle Stonehenge, tracked the position of the sun on the solstices.

“The largest mound served as a sun calendar, similar to the famous stones of Stonehenge in England,” the municipality of Tiel said in a statement. “This sanctuary must have been a highly significant place where people kept track of special days in the year, performed rituals and buried their dead. Rows of poles stood along pathways used for processions.”

The site previously yielded significant archaeological finds. In 2017 excavators unearthed several graves, one of which held the remains of a woman buried with a glass bead from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). It was the oldest bead ever found in the Netherlands and finally proved that the region was, to some degree, in contact with far-flung civilizations.

A selection of the discoveries from the site will be exhibited in a local Tiel museum and in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.

Henry Shum paints under dim overhead light in his childhood bedroom. His parents’ home, where he started painting at age 14, is in the eastern New Territories of Hong Kong. He left the island for a few years to study at the Chelsea College of Arts in London, then returned in 2020 as the pandemic broke out. Given the subdued radiance of his paintings, the poorly lit studio is surprising. But Shum likes it this way, reasoning that “if you can see the painting well in a harsh environment, then in a setting where the light is proper and the wall is clean, it should look good.”

Shum always intended to move back to Hong Kong, mostly because his family is there. It helped that he was offered a debut solo show from Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery after a representative saw his thesis work. During a series of strict lockdowns over the last three years, Shum developed a distinctive working process. He begins by laying down thin layers of primer. As those layers build up, they invite a certain unpredictability to the surface. Suffused with lapis atmospheres and often accented with scarlet or chlorophyll green, his paintings feature silhouettes that appear to liquify into their surroundings; oil paint appears to bleed like watercolors. In Dream Construction (2020), two glowing cyan figures perch in front of an amber anthropomorphic fire. The surface is finished with a dry brush, which gives the faces a dusted quality.

Despite his clear skill, Shum believes the best paintings are out of his control; they have “a mystery that allows you to go in, discover, maybe reveal the painting.” Painting, he said, is “about not knowing what you’re doing. It’s about allowing the process to take over. It’s a constant exploration in the dark.” Because of lockdown, Shum lived with those paintings for an unusual length of time. “Sometimes it’s very painful, living with your work,” he told me. “It means that you’re thinking about it all the time.” The paintings appeared in a solo exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York this past November.

Lately, Shum has been experimenting with various finishes, combining dull and glossy surfaces on the same canvas. A new painting depicts one figure leading another through a marshy grove. Only from a certain angle can one see that two bands of unprimed canvas runs across the composition. There, the landscape appears gently interrupted, at once more saturated and palpable. But the ground they stand on is laid in dry, disassembling swaths, as if the whole scene is still a landscape of the mind.

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In 1929, flying pioneer Alan Cobham launched his Municipal Aerodrome Campaign to encourage Town Councils to build local airports. He wrote to Oxford City Council’s Planning Committee but no action was taken at that time. Three years later, in 1932, an Oxford Times editorial argued that the City Council dealt with the question of a municipal aerodrome to serve the City of Oxford. The editorial suggested that, with the development of civil aviation, cities with aerodromes would benefit from mail and internal airline services.

It wasn’t until 1933 that Town Planning Committee recommended that the City Council approve, in principle, the establishment of a Municipal Aerodrome. In 1935, £20,000 was set aside for the purchase of land near Kidlington, 8 miles north of Oxford City centre, for development into an aerodrome. Three parcels of land were purchased; one from the Duke of Marlborough and two from farmers Frank Henman and G J E Bulford. In 1936, the Council formed an Aerodrome Committee under the Deputy Mayor, Councillor G C Pipkin.

Although the aerodrome was intended to serve civil aircraft, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was under pressure to train pilots and the Air Ministry was offered a lease for a RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) flying training school. By 1938, the building of the aerodrome was proceeding well and the formation of No. 26 Elementary and Reserve Flying Training School was announced by the Mayor, Councillor Dr H T Gillett in the Assembly Room in Oxford. The first aircraft allocated were Miles Magisters, Hawker Hinds and Hawker Audaxes.

The City Engineer arranged for a circular concrete landing circle and applied to the Air Ministry for an aerodrome license as “Oxford (Campsfield) Civil Aerodrome”, Campsfield being close to Kidlington.

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