NYAB Event - Jonathan Weinberg "A Retrospective"

Jonathan Weinberg "A Retrospective"

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

This event has ended.

Jonathan Weinberg (b. 1957) grew up in Greenwich Village, not far from the abandoned piers that became New York’s gay erotic playground and, not coincidentally, one of the earliest themes of his art. Orphaned by the time he was 15, he found surrogate parents in the celebrated artist and children’s book illustrator, Maurice Sendak, and his partner of 50 years, psychiatrist and art historian Eugene Glynn. Weinberg received a BA at Yale in painting and Ph.D. in art history at Harvard, writing one of the earliest dissertations on a gay topic: homosexuality in the art of Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley. He has gone on to publish several influential books and articles on queer art. Currently, Weinberg lives with his partner, Nicholas Boshnack in New Haven, Connecticut, teaching classes on art and art history at Rhode Island School of Design, and at Yale University.

That rare painter with an art historian’s command of the medium and that rare art historian who understands painting as a painter himself, Weinberg has elected to work in a notably rough-hewn style, a mode often associated historically with artists who seek to challenge mannerist over-refinement. In his hands paint slows and thickens, congealing, like sculpture, into forms seemingly carved out of the surrounding medium. Weinberg refuses the seductive facade and fetishistic clarity of much current figurative gay art in favor of a notably more tactile surface, informed by such defining early 20 th century gay artists as Marsden Hartley, a subject of his landmark 1993 book, Speaking for Vice. You have to look at Weinberg’s work, really look, for at times the paint seems more like a baffle or screen, concealing as much as it reveals. In this sense, true to so much of gay life today, Weinberg’s art asks us to mistrust our initial impressions, to pierce the surface of the social, and excavate the pulse of desire running through the everyday.

Curated by Jonathan David Katz
with Assistant Curator, David Kaiser