Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s

Imaging practices within LGBTQ+ movements of the late 20th century ignited processes of learning. Alternative schools, photography workshops, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshows, and community-based archive projects produced and distributed images throughout North America, though the context of this photography’s collective emergence is often lost.

Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s presents an extraordinary range of intentions, practices, and geographies where photography was a tool for self-determination within interconnected lesbian, feminist, trans, gay and queer grassroots organizing. Self-determination arises not merely in iconic visuals of a historical past, but also by revisiting the ongoing spaces for learning through which photography was created and circulated. From art photography to snapshots, protest and conference documentation, low-fi newsletters and personal correspondence, image cultures of queer life have sustained the educational work of liberation movements and offer lineages of resistance to inspire a future defined by an abundance of resources as opposed to violence and repression. The exhibition invites viewers to study image-makers and archivists who have created spaces to do the work of building a political consciousness, defying a public hostile to their very existence.

The exhibition challenges what we might know—from our contemporary vantage point—of social justice movements through photographs and propels us to the active processes of learning with persistent struggles to resist systems of power across and beyond the so-called United States.

Artists & Archivists: Allan Bérubé, Ben Power Alwin, JEB (Joan E. Biren), Georgia Brooks, Loren Rex Cameron, Lola Flash, Allen Frame, Frank Franca, Paula Grant, Morgan Gwenwald, Saskia Scheffer, Diana Solís, among others

Collectives: Art + Positive, Electric Blanket AIDS Projection Project, GLBT Historical Society, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Sexual Minorities Archive

Download the Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s Gallery Guide as a PDF.