Join us for a two-day symposium expanding on the groundbreaking exhibition The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939.

The symposium will be held at the Alliance Française de Chicago—54 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60610—on Friday, May 9, and Saturday, May 10.

The rigorous program features leading and emerging scholars in queer art history from around the world, many of whom have contributed to the exhibition catalog. The symposium will begin with a keynote lecture by Jonathan D. Katz, curator of The First Homosexuals, followed by five panels organized by geographic region. Presentations will range from discussions of the Indigenous cultures of Latin America and Meiji period reformations in Japan to examinations of lesbian subcultures across Canada, France, and Poland. Each panel will be followed by a brief Q&A session with the audience. Guests of all backgrounds are welcome, including academics, artists, students, and the general public.

Are you in need of an ASL interpreter to fully take part in this event? If so, let us know at info@wrightwood659.org by May 1st! We’d be happy to arrange one.

Friday schedule

Check-in
5:15 pm

Keynote Lecture
5:45 pm-6:45 pm
Speaker: Jonathan D. Katz

Revisions and Inversions: Modern Latin American Art and Sexuality
7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Speakers: Esther Gabara, Eduardo Carrera, Joseph Shaikewitz

Reception
9:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday schedule

Breakfast
9:00 am

The Birth of a Binary: Homosexual/Trans Art and Identity in Western Europe
9:30 am-12:00 pm
Speakers: Ty Vanover, Kirstin Ringelberg, Patrik Steorn, Ara Merjian

Out of the Margins: Queer Narratives in Central and Eastern European Art
12:15 pm-1:35 pm
Speakers: Pavel Golubev, Pawel Leszkowicz

Lunch break
1:35 pm-2:30 pm

Re-Orienting: Art and Homosexuality in Colonial Asia
2:30 pm-4:30 pm
Speakers: Niharika Dinkar, Patrick Carland-Echavarria, Thadeus Dowad

On Our Gaydar: Modernisms in Britain, Canada and the United States
4:45 pm-7:15 pm
Speakers: Simon Martin, James Smalls, Johnny Willis, Jonathan D. Katz

Speaker Bios

Eduardo Carerra is a curator, art historian, and cultural manager based in Philadelphia. He specializes in decolonial and queer approaches to art practices, history, and writing. Currently a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, Eduardo focuses on Latin American, Latinx, and queer art. He holds a Master’s in Cultural Management from the International University of Catalonia and served as the Director and Curator at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito – CAC, where he curated the annual exhibition program from 2017 to 2022.

Patrick Carland-Echavarria (he/him) is a PhD Candidate in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the intersection of Japanese queer cultures and artistic and literary production in the postwar period. He is currently working on his dissertation, provisionally titled Finding the Rainbow World: Literary Translation and Transnational Queer Cultures in Cold War Japan.

Niharika Dinkar (she/her) teaches art history at Boise State University and works on nineteenth century South Asia. She is the author of Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India (University of Manchester Press, 2019) and is currently working on an archaeology of media practices involving the animal in colonial visual culture.

Thadeus Dowad (he/him) is the Crown Junior Chair of Middle East & North African Studies and Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Esther Gabara (she/her) is professor of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, and author of Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke UP) and Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism (U Chicago Press).

Pavel Golubev (he/him) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Potsdam, Germany. His research focuses on queer art history and the life writings of queer artists from the Russian Empire and the USSR. A leading scholar on Konstantin Somov who brought the homosexual dimensions of his art to the forefront, he worked as an independent researcher in Russia, at the Odesa National Fine Arts Museum in Ukraine, and pursued further studies in art history at the University of Pennsylvania through their At-Risk Scholars Program.

Jonathan D. Katz (he/him) is an art historian, curator and queer activist. Professor of Practice in Art History and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz is a pioneering figure in the development of queer art history, as author of a number of books and articles, and curator of many exhibitions, including the first queer exhibition at the Smithsonian, which won multiple awards. The first full-time American academic to be tenured Queer Studies, Katz also founded Yale University’s queer studies program, founded the Queer Caucus for Art, co-founded Queer Nation and the GLBT Town Meeting, which won queer anti-discrimination statutes in Chicago and is President Emeritus of The Leslie Lohman Museum. Katz is curator of The First Homosexuals at Wrightwood 659, and author/editor of About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art (Monacelli, 2024).

Paweł Leszkowicz (he/him) is a professor of contemporary art and curatorial studies at the Academy of the Arts in Stettin/Poland. He is a researcher and freelance curator specializing in global contemporary art, curatorial, and LGBTQ+ studies. He is the author of Ars Homo Erotica (2010) exhibition and catalog at Warsaw’s National Museum and numerous pioneering queer exhibitions, symposia, and publications on queer art in Central Eastern Europe.

Simon Martin (he/him) is Director of Pallant House Gallery, a modern art museum in Chichester UK. He has curated many exhibitions of 20th and 21st century British art, including monographic shows of Edward Burra, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, John Minton, Keith Vaughan, as well as thematic surveys such as Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art, Conflict and Conscience: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, and Drawn to Nature: Gilbert White and the Artists. In addition to the catalogues for these exhibitions, he has contributed essays to numerous others including Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War I for Tate Britain, Moral dis/order: Art and Sexuality between the Wars for IVAM in Valencia, and Gluck: Art & Identity. His monograph Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit was published in 2022 to coincide with the first major exhibition on the artist in 40 years.

He has served on the Board of the Charleston Trust, Chichester Cathedral Fabric Advisory Committee and Artists Collecting Society.

Ara Merjian (he/him) is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and Comparative Literature. He is the author and editor of ten books, including Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s ‘Other America’ (Verso, 2025).

Kirstin Ringelberg (they/them) is Professor of Art History in the Department of History & Geography at Elon University, where in 2023 they were the 51st recipient of the university-wide Daniels-Danieley Award for Excellence in Teaching. Their book Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space was re-released in paperback in 2017; recent articles include “Reading Cisheteronormativity into the Art Historical Archives” in Arts, spring 2024; “Interventions: The Politics of French History in Times of Crisis,” co-authored with Jacqueline Couti, Corinne Gressang, Sarah Horowitz, and Terrence Peterson in the Journal of the Western Society for French History in winter 2024; “Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtable” co-edited, with Jill Casid and Cyle Metzger, in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2022, and “Prismatic Views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies,” co-authored with Cyle Metzger in the Journal of Visual Culture in 2020. Ringelberg provided wall text on “Gender Visibility” for the Young Picasso in Paris exhibition at the Guggenheim, and in spring of 2024 was the Every Page Foundation Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, for work on their book-length project on Lemaire, gender, and genre in late nineteenth-century France.

Joseph Shaikewitz (they/them) is a writer and PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, focused on histories of modern art, performance and visual studies, and theories of gender and sexuality.

James Smalls (he/him) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research considers the intersections of race, gender, and queer sexualities in European visual art of the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as in modern and contemporary visual culture of the Black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006). He is currently working on a research project tentatively entitled Queer Links in the Harlem Renaissance: Art, Gay Networks, and Interracial Sociability.

Patrik Steorn, PhD (he/him) is the Director of the Gothenburg Museum of Art and Associate Professor of Art History at Stockholm University. He was formerly director of the Thielska Galleriet in Stockholm and senior lecturer and researcher at the Center for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University. Areas of expertise include art history, visual culture, fashion studies, gender and queer studies.

Ty Vanover (he/him) is a professor and researcher in the department of Art & Art History at Dickinson College. His research interests include queer art and visual culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and Austria, Symbolist art, and the relationship between the visual arts and the sciences in early twentieth-century Europe. With Camilla Smith, he is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Erotic Art in Modern Germany: Visual Cultures of Sex, 1871-1945, to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in Spring 2026. His work has appeared in the Oxford Art Journal, Arts, and Ikonotheka. He is the 2025 recipient of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association’s Emerging Scholars Prize, and his research has been supported by the Humboldt University’s Zentrum für transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien and the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

Johnny Willis (he/they/she), a non-binary art historian, began working on The First Homosexuals as a curatorial assistant and was quickly elevated to Associate Curator. An honors graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who earned their MA at the University of British Columbia, Willis is now serving as Curatorial Fellow at Wrightwood 659.

Official Website

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