For Jonathan David Katz, the Story of American Art Is a Queer One
Observer ·
The scholar and curator argues that a list of the nation's greatest artists would largely mirror a list of its greatest queer ones. Through exhibitions, education and a grant-funded cohort of graduate students, he is working to make institutions admit it.
In 1995, art historian and critic Jonathan David Katz was commissioned by the Village Voice to attend a lecture by Robert Rauschenberg at the Guggenheim; he showed up early to get a front-row seat. But Katz had written on the homosexual relationship between Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns , and the Guggenheim did not want there to be any public discussion of that topic. “The head curator, whom I knew, identified me to security and threw me out,” Katz told Observer. “I was often in those days tossed out of things,” he added, laughing.
Katz today at 68 has a winning smile, stylish glasses and a shock of white hair; sitting in his office with bookshelves behind him, he doesn’t look like a dangerous threat to the art establishment. But his pioneering scholarly work on the history and ongoing relevance of homosexuality in art led to repeated efforts to censor him. That has extended to this day, as gallery after gallery has resisted hosting traveling versions of his stunning exhibition “ The First Homosexuals ,” which showed the formation of homosexual identity in visual art from prehistory to the 1930s spread across three floors of Wrightwood 659 in Chicago.
Born in 1958, Katz cut his teeth on street activism; he jokes that his arrest record was longer than his publication record until he was 40. As to why he made the move to scholarship, “I felt like one of the most powerful but uncredited bases of cultural norms was academia,” he says. “And it had not yet allowed for the existence of queer people. And homophobia was rife.”
That homophobia could also be blatant. At the University of Chicago, one professor told Katz he couldn’t invite him to his house because he had young children and was afraid that Katz, as a gay man, was a danger to their safety. Later the chair of the art history department told him he had to work on less “marginal” topics—that is, less gay topics—or they would cut his funding.
He left the University of Chicago and was forced out of Yale and Johns Hopkins as well before receiving his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1996. Rather than focusing on books and publications, however, he decided that the best way to broaden acceptance and understanding of queer art and queer perspectives was through curation and exhibits. “Academia moves in response to public pressure, not the other way around,” he says. “So I needed to take my case directly to the people and then that would increasingly create a space for queer scholarship.”
The politics of curation though aren’t easy either. Museums and galleries, Katz says, are run by the very wealthy, and the very wealthy “sit at the top of the social hierarchy, so they don’t want to change that social hierarchy. And yet what I’m trying to do is change it.”
Katz says that while queer repression in the art world has shifted over time, that shift mostly just means “that the repression is more sophisticated. So rather than doing something that could get them called out as homophobic, they give other reasons.” When he was trying to travel “The First Homosexuals,” he says, some galleries claimed they had scheduling conflicts, though he has strong reason to believe they did not. One curator said they couldn’t show male nudity—though female nudity was fine. The show itself had artwork loans canceled when a conservative government came to power in Slovakia; in the U.S., some donors were worried about the safety of queer artwork under the homophobic Trump administration.
To confront this prejudice, Katz entered into a fruitful partnership with Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. In 2019, he curated “About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art.” In 2025 he showed “The First Homosexuals,” and this year he and Eduardo Carrera curated “Dispossessions in the Americas,” focusing on Latin American artists—especially queer Latin American artists—whose work addresses colonialism.
Wrightwood 659, Katz says, “is a space that is intended as a corrective to American museology. It emphasizes that which most museums constitute as marginal, whether that be architecture, Asian or Latin American art, whether it be queer or feminist art.” Many museums, he says, are run by and for the 1 percent. Wrightwood is also run by a wealthy founder— Fred Eychaner , a Democratic megadonor. But it is, he says, “trying to do the exact opposite.”
Another reason he works with Wrightwood, Katz says, is that, “to be completely frank, they have budgets that dwarf those of most major museums. So I get to do really ridiculously expensive shows. ‘The First Homosexuals’ cost a ton.”
Looking ahead, Katz is hoping to place “The First Homosexuals” at a museum in Hamburg. He is also working on a version of “Dispossessions in the Americas” at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a professor. And he is just beginning work on a Wrightwood 659 show called “Trans.” The exhibit “looks at trans in a transhistorical global frame, and begins to think about what I’m essentially claiming, which is that the notion of gender as a naturalized binary is a product of essentially Western culture that was globalized via colonialism.”
Focusing on trans work is important, according to Katz, because of the disinformation and prejudice targeting the community. “I’ve found the idea that trans is a recent formation troubling. I’m convinced that queer and trans were born together and joined at the hip. I mean, if you talk about same gender desire, the first question one must ask is what gender are we talking about and how we determine that gender. So I’ve always felt like trans and queer are fellow travelers.”
In addition to his curatorial work, Katz is hoping to continue to advance the study of queer artwork through his teaching. The foundation that runs Wrightwood 659, Alphawood, gave the University of Pennsylvania a substantial grant to fund graduate students doing queer art historical scholarship. “I’m training a generation of scholars who will take over from me and get jobs in the museum world or even in the academic world,” he explained. Those students “will begin to change things from within. And it is only from within that you can make that change because again museums are impervious to public pressure because they take directives from the 10 or 12 or 15 people in their boards.”
Change is important, Katz argues, because without acknowledging or understanding queerness, we can’t understand much of our art. “If you were to make a list of the great American artists and you were to make a list of the great queer American artists—they’d pretty much be the same thing.”
Beyond critical honesty and insight, though, Katz says his goal is “to create an exhibition in which a young lesbian sees herself reflected off a wall in an authoritative way that she’s never grasped before.” He often thinks about a study he saw a decade or so ago which found that more Americans encountered questions of sexuality in professional sports than they did in museums. It shook him to his core. “As a power center in our culture. I felt it was absolutely necessary to make the museum reflect queer politics as well.”