Queer art faces widespread museum censorship, curators say

When artist Amy Sherald canceled her LGBTQ-inclusive Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery show “American Sublime” last month, it was just the latest in a series of censorship episodes involving LGBTQ art at major American museums this year

When artist Amy Sherald canceled her LGBTQ-inclusive Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery show “American Sublime” last month, it was just the latest in a series of censorship episodes involving LGBTQ art at major American museums this year.

In February, Washington, D.C.’s Art Museum of the Americas canceled “Nature’s Wild With Andil Gosine” just weeks before the exhibition’s scheduled opening in March, without saying why. The group show was to have included works inspired by Gosine’s 2021 book, “Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean,” which reflects on art, activism and homosexuality in the region.

The same month, Arizona’s Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art made eleventh-hour edits to a traveling exhibition of women, queer and trans artists, which had previously been called “transfeminisms,” altering the title of its condensed show to “There are other skies.”

Marinna Shareef with Andil Gosine's "God of Whimsy"https://www.paulpetro.com/exhibitions/674-nature-s-wild-with-andil-gosineIn April, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art postponed a group exhibition of works by LGBTQ African artists titled “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art,” which had been scheduled for a late May opening to coincide with WorldPride. The D.C. museum cited budgetary reasons for postponing the show to 2026, but the timing was hard to miss on the heels of Trump administration directives to the Smithsonian to remove “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its museums — as well as the forced and pre-emptive relocation of other WorldPride cultural events after Trump administration firings at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

“There’s something about the combination of art and sexuality that still remains the third rail in the American museum world,” art historian Jonathan D. Katz told NBC News. Katz was the lead curator for “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939,” the vast and successful historical survey of LGBTQ art that ran through early July at Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 Gallery.