<em>Coyote Park.</em> River and Coyote, <em>2022. Courtesy Leslie Lohman and the artist.</em>
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COYOTE PARK I Love You Like Mirrors Do Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
Feb. 3–July 16, 2023
NEW YORK CITY’S Leslie-Lohman Museum has focused historically on LGBT art since its founding in 1969, when Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman held an exhibit of gay artists for the first time in their SoHo loft. Today, the museum continues these values by “preserving, diversifying, and making accessible the artworks in its collection, as well as to the representation of an evolving constellation of queer experience,” which means expanding LGBT history into the queer intersections we think of today. The Leslie-Lohman even had a name change in 2019, when they dropped “of Gay and Lesbian Art” from their name. Like many LGBT collections, the Leslie-Lohman continues to expand their historical focus from white, cisgender men and women to a wider spectrum.
Coyote Park. River and Coyote, 2022. Courtesy Leslie Lohman and the artist.
The exhibition Coyote Park: I Love You Like Mirrors Do, curated by Stamatina Gregory, is the inaugural project for an initiative called “Interventions,” which “engages queer artists and cultural producers to dive into the museum’s extensive collection and creatively present their research, building new narratives and interpretations from diverse subjectivities.” Within Coyote Park, L.A.-based artist Coyote Park (he/they) brings their vision into the collections to remind us that “we are always looking for ourselves in art.” Park brings queer love and intersectional trans futures into their multidisciplinary work while bringing a needed lens from their lived experience as a Two-Spirit, Indigenous (Yurok), Korean-American, transgender person. The exhibit offers a space in which to reflect on the last few years of rapid change in ways that may be unfamiliar or disconcerting for many LGBT people.
Park delved into the Museum’s sizeable collection in search of figurative pairs with themes of togetherness and liberation. Within the show, there are largescale photographs showing queer bodies holding each other. A video piece whispers affirmations into the viewer’s ears while imagery of a peaceful day outside plays before them. Works from Park are in dialog with the collection works on display. Work from Marcelina Martin adds a tone of self-reflection that acknowledges a historic tone of white, cisgender women in landscapes in many classic paintings. At the entrance to the space is a group of photographic works from South African artist Zanele Muholi. This exhibition provides a framework for contemporary queer artists to build culture today while still honoring their predecessors and others surviving outside the visible LGBT world.
At first, I was suspicious of the title’s inclusion of “mirrors” in fear of narcissistic sensibilities. However, in 2023, as we see drag performance bans, transgender healthcare bans, and continuous systemic webs of discrimination against people of color, and more, even under a liberal presidency, this metaphor feels correct. Within Coyote Park: I Love You Like Mirrors Do, the exhibition asks: We are all in this together, are we not?
Tannon Reckling is an arts laborer, writer, curator, and teacher who engages concepts of shadow cultural labor and messy queer ontologies.
