SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College presents a field of bloom and hum, a landmark exhibition featuring works by more than 150 queer artists. Opening February 14 and on view through July 20, 2025, the exhibition fills two floors of the museum with work that spans the last 100 years and explores the power of art to assert queer identities and communities.
Numerous related public events offer multiple opportunities for people to engage with the art and exhibiting artists. Talks, tours, screenings, performances, workshops, and a two-day symposium emphasize the exhibition as a space for belonging.
“In a time of threat, a field of bloom and hum reveals an incredible breadth of artistic expression to forge new understandings of the resilience, creativity, and joy that underpins the assertion of queer identities and community formation over multiple decades,” said Dayton Director Ian Berry, who is organizing the exhibition in collaboration with artists and Skidmore College faculty members. “This exhibition creates a space where art becomes a catalyst for connection and conversation, allowing visitors to engage with the profound power and legacy of these artists' works.”
The Wachenheim Gallery groups works into intergenerational dialogues. One room, for example, brings together a newly commissioned wall painting by Edie Fake called A Prayer for a Place, which imagines a place for trans people in society, with Oliver Herring’s Queensize Bed with Coat, 1993-1994, a knit sculpture created as an homage to drag performance artist and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger, and photographs from Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1979-1986, an influential and intimate photographic diary of the life of the artist and her friends, which extends into other rooms.
Other first-floor combinations of artists include Nayland Blake with Catherine Opie; John O’Reilly with Paul M. Sepuya; and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French) with Jimmy Wright and Alice O’Malley, along with work by Steven Arnold, Lyle Ashton Harris, Wardell Milan, and Edmund Teske. Another area of the first floor will feature an art and activism resource room for gatherings, workshops, dissemination, and study, with work on view by Act Up, Dyke Action Machine, General Idea, Robert Giard, Queer Ecology Hanky Project, and many others.
The second-floor Malloy Wing features a salon-style wall of work by more than 140 artists that spans the early twentieth century to today. Among the artists are Berenice Abbott, Mark Bradford, Martine Gutierrez, Peter Hujar, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Shelby Sharie Cohen, Mickalene Thomas, and many more, forming a tapestry of identity, memory, and community. The upstairs gallery will also feature monumental works by Camila Falquez, Donald Moffett, Joel Otterson, and Joan Snyder, as well as a combination of Nayland Blake’s Ruins of a Sensibility, which features turntables and the artist’s album collection, and seating and a rug by Liz Collins, forming a listening room and dance space open to all visitors.
