Agnes Martin A Closeted American Painter

Agnes Martin’s paintings was presented at Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, USA October 2010 – February 2011, where themes such as queer sexuality and fluidity of gender and identity for the first time was addressed at a national art institution in USA. The queer story of these artists and their artworks had been hidden in plain sight for many years… Now this exhibition has put some light on a selection of queer American artists, which might be called the Canon of Queer American Art.

The Two Stories
As Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004) was a closeted painter, who made it in the mainstream art world, at least two kind of stories can be told about her. The mainstream non-sexual story, and the (hidden) queer story about her life and art projects.

Agnes Martin was part of a generation, which questioned abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s. Curator Leah Dickerman says that Agnes Martins works are “A commentary on the ambitions of a technological society in which regularity and standardization are key… And here she uses the grid and yet, what she gets you to focus on are the subtle variations in making the grid. She is drawing attention to the very ability, which is inherent in human production.”

The Sexuality of Abstraction: Agnes Martin

In the above video Jonathan D. Katz, is presenting his paper “The Sexuality of Abstraction: Agnes Martin” on January 29, 2011 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, USA. His presentation was part of the scholarly symposium “Addressing (and Redressing) the Silence: New Scholarship in Sexuality and American Art” in conjunction with the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.”

Jonathan talks about Zen as a key to Agnes Martin’s model of personal liberation. She was a part of the Zen/minimalist movement in American art and culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Agnes Martin got her career breakethrough in the art world in the early 1960s while sharing her life with a group of queer friends. Though Agnes Martin was not a Buddhist, Jonathan describes her as an enligtend heremit, who in a very positive way used Zen as a philosophy and strategy to deal with the ‘closet’. Agnes Martin created a transcendentalism by combining the spiritual and her lesbian sexuality.

About Jonathan Katz
Jonathan D. Katz is director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York—Buffalo; an honorary research faculty member at the University of Manchester, UK; co-curator of the exhibition ―Hide/Seek‖; and co-author of its accompanying book. He was founding director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and founding chair of the very first department of lesbian and gay studies in the United States, at City College of San Francisco. Here, he also co-founded the activist group Queer Nation, San Francisco, and founded both the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association and the Harvey Milk Institute.