Artnet Gallery Network Highlights Five Queer Artists for Pride Month

Artnet Gallery Network has curated a selection of five queer artists for Pride Month, showcasing the diversity of queer artistic practice. The group includes William Gedney (1932–1989), an American documentary photographer known for his 1960s-70s series on rural Kentucky, San Francisco, India, and New York, who remained largely unknown during his lifetime due to hiding his homosexuality; his archive was inherited by Lee Friedlander. Julie Mehretu (b. 1970), a MacArthur Fellow and International Medal of Arts recipient, creates large-scale abstract works integrating architectural drawing, maps, and historical imagery, exploring migration, geopolitics, and collective memory. Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) works across photography, performance, video, and sculpture, interrogating Indigenous, queer, and trans representation through fashion and pop culture, notably in her self-published book Indigenous Woman (2018). Michela Griffo (b. 1949), a founding member of Radicalesbians, Lavender Menace, and the Gay Liberation Front, creates paintings, drawings, and photographs informed by her activism, now gaining renewed institutional recognition. Nan Goldin (b. 1953), influential photographer known for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), documents intimacy, sex, addiction, and the AIDS crisis through a diaristic lens, including her series Drag Queens, Berlin (1993). These artists are available on the Artnet Gallery Network year-round.