Beautiful Queer Art Coffee Table Books

Feminine Moments recommends the following landmark queer art books.

 

Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between
by Gemma Rolls-Bentley and Sir Isaac Julien
Hardcover: ‎240 pages
Dimensions: ‎20.14 x 2.16 x 24.64 cm
ISBN-10: ‎0711282676
ISBN-13: ‎978-0711282674
(Frances Lincoln; 1st edition, 2024)

Celebrate the LGBTQI+ community with this vivid collection of artworks that charts queer voices from around the world. With nearly 200 artworks selected by leading LGBTQI+ curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley, this book mixes the high-brow with the low, gallery stalwarts with Instagram stars, and the racy with the fabulous.

 

Photography – A Queer History – How LGBTQ+ photographers shaped the art
by Flora Dunster and Theo Gordon
ISBN-13: 9781781578698
ISBN-10: 1781578699
(Octopus Publishing Group, 2024)

Photography – A Queer History is the essential guide to queer photography. It examines how photography has been used by artists to capture, create and expand the category Queer. This art book includes the work of 84 artists, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Deborah Bright.

 

Contemporary Queer Chinese Art
Format: Hardback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 248
Illustrations: 50 colour
Series Queering China: Transnational Genders and Sexualities
ISBN 9781350333512
(Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)

Contemporary Queer Chinese Art is the first English-language academic book that explores the intersections of queer culture and contemporary Chinese art from the mid-1980s to the present. This book brings together 15 internationally renowned artists, activists, curators and scholars to explore heterogeneous expressions of Chineseness and queerness in contemporary art from China and Chinese diasporas in Asia, Europe and North America. Examining contemporary visual art, performance and activism, this book offers a rich archive of queer Chinese artistic expressions.

 

Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989
Edited by Jonathan Weinberg, Contributions by Tyler Cann and Anastasia Kinigopoulo and Drew Sawyer
Format: Hardcover
Trim Size: 7-1/2 x 10
Pages: 304
ISBN: 978-0-8478-6406-5
(Rizzoli Electa, 2019)

With over 200 works from the last 20 years, Art after Stonewall, 1969-1989 tells the stories of American artists such as Nan Goldin, Harmony Hammond, Lyle Ashton Harris, Greer Lankton, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, as well as the ways in which artists such as Diane Arbus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Karen Finley engaged with the queer subcultures of their time.

 

Queer British Art 1861 – 1967
Edited by Clare Barlow
ISBN-10: 1849764522
ISBN-13: 978-1849764520
(Tate Publishing, 2017)

This publication focuses exclusively on British queer art. It is the catalogue of the landmark Tate Britain exhibition Queer British Art 1861 – 1967 in 2017. It features sections on ambivalent sexualities and gender experimentation amongst the Pre-Raphaelites; the new science of sexology’s impact on portraiture; queer domesticities in Bloomsbury and beyond; eroticism in the artist’s studio and relationships between artists and models; gender play and sexuality in British surrealism; and love and lust in sixties Soho. It features works by major artists such as Simeon Solomon, John Singer Sargent, Clare Atwood, Ethel Sands, Duncan Grant, John Minton, Angus McBean, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, alongside less well-known material, such as ephemera, personal photographs, film and magazines.

 

Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community
by John Chaich (Author), Todd Oldham (Author)
Hardcover: ‎192 pages
ISBN-10: ‎1623261058
ISBN-13: ‎978-1623261054
(AMMO Books, 2017)

Queer Threads is not just an exploration of fiber art and crafts, but also a celebration of the creativity, diversity, and vibrancy of contemporary queer culture. Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community spotlights an international, intergenerational, intersectional mix of thirty artists who are remixing fiber craft traditions, such as crochet, embroidery, quilting, and sewing.

 

Art & Queer Culture
Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer
Format: Paperback
Size: 232 × 171 mm (9 1/8 × 6 3/4 in)
Pages: 304 pp
Illustrations: 300 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714878348
(Phaidon, 2013 and 2019)

Art & Queer Culture is an unprecedented survey of visual art and alternative sexualities from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beautifully illustrated and clearly written, this 2nd edition (2019) has been updated to include the art and visual culture that has emerged since its acclaimed first edition in 2013.

 

Art History: Monographs About 20th Century Lesbian and Bisexual Women Artists

 

Too Good to Get Married – The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen
(Fordham University Press May 6, 2025)
Explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of lesbian photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful and witty photographer.

Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris
(Yale Press, 2024)
Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris offers a long-overdue reassessment of the career of the Parisian-born artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) who moved seamlessly between the Cubist avant-garde and lesbian literary and artistic circles, as well as the realms of fashion, ballet, and decorative arts.

The Secret Art of Dorothy Hepworth AKA Patricia Preece
(The Court Gallery, 2024)
This fully illustrated monograph is published to coincide with the major exhibition, Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story at Charleston Lewes (UK) and tells the extraordinary story of the artist duo and romantic couple in detail for the first time.

Tamara de Lempicka
(Yale Press, 2024)
This gorgeous survey presents the full arc of Lempicka’s career in the context of her life and her evolving identity, including her Polish and Russian origins, her marriages and other (bisexual) relationships, and her time in France, Italy, and the United States.

Bonsoir: Ithell Colquhoun
(Tate Publishing, 2022)
This beautiful and exciting book brings British artist Ithell Colquhoun’s previously unseen story to life, with texts from leading experts on Colquhoun to contextualise the work: Colquhoun’s fictive Surrealist film.

Romaine Brooks: A Life
(University of Wisconsin Press; 1st edition, 2015)
In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks’s aesthetics and experimentation as an artist―and of her entire life; her creative achievements and her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney in the center of a creative milieu of talented, independent, and liberated women in Paris in the 1920s.