Jun 14, 2017
In July, David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe will host “ReViewing PowerPlay,” a series of work created in the 1980's examining the construct of masculinity. When Judy began this series, she went to the library to research gender; the only material available then was entirely focused on women, as if only women have gender. It would be another decade before Women’s Studies evolved into Gender Studies and Queer Studies emerged, which created a new context for PowerPlay. Judy is thrilled that the catalog essay will be written by Dr. Jonathan Katz, director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at SUNY Buffalo, president of the Board of Directors of the Leslie/Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, and co-curator of the recent (and controversial) exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," which premiered at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it created quite a stir.
In conjunction with the PowerPlay exhibition, Jonathan and Judy will hold a public conversation on Saturday, July 7th, at 3PM at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. When Jonathan and Judy first discussed the possibility of his writing for the catalog (because, as she told him, he was the perfect person for the job), he told me that even though he thought he was familiar with my work, he knew nothing at all about PowerPlay. When he perused the material, he commented that the series seemed both prescient and powerful, perhaps because it anticipated some of the theories about performing masculinity that would emerge from queer studies. It was interesting to think back about the antics of her male peers in the male-dominated Los Angeles art scene of the 1960's and realize that this is precisely what they were doing, i.e., performing their socialized notions about how a man should act.