DISPLAYING DIFFERENCE:QUEER EXHIBITION PRACTICE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1988-2011

This project considers three landmark art exhibitions that, each in their own way, aimed to make visible different aspects of queer identity: “The Perfect Moment” (1988), “In a Different Light” (1995) and “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” (2010). My goal is to analyze how these exhibitions, which spanned three decades, informed and helped to constitute the emerging discipline of queer museology. My analysis highlights, on the one hand, the means through which each of these shows successfully undermined the implicit heteronormativity of museum spaces; on the other, I show that these exhibits also failed in some regards to challenge the white, straight, masculinist systems of privilege that underpin mainstream art venues. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that queer museology is itself a fluid, complex concept. The process of curating queer exhibitions has changed dramatically from the 1980s to the 2010s, a period of shifting ideas about museums and their relationship to the public as well as concepts of queer identity. Queer museology is also dependent upon multiple factors, including individual decisions about curatorship and broader socio-historical, political, and art-institutional contexts. However, the fact that certain issues raised in the exhibitions under scrutiny in this thesis—such as spectatorial and display concepts that facilitate LGBTQ or queer visibility—continue to be of primary concern to curators and artists indicates that they provided important models for “queering” institutional spaces of art.