If you’ve watched and loved Paris Is Burning, the iconic 1990 documentary about Black and Latinx ballroom culture in Harlem, this is the reading list for you. This month, delve into new books that highlight queer and trans artists — past and present — who have always shaped the realms of visual art and culture. One is a catalog about Vaginal Davis, who recently got a retrospective at MoMA PS1 after decades of influential work as a performer, curator, and filmmaker. Another is a jewel-box compendium of photographs of queer nightlife, from Sunil Gupta’s portraiture to the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina’s critical trove of images and testimonials. As fascist legislation targets queer and trans communities around the world, these are just some of the books celebrating the essential political and creative provocations of LGBTQ+ artists. Happy reading, and happy Pride!—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor.
Martin Wong: Chinatown USA, edited by Yasufumi Nakamori | Gregory R. Miller & Company, July
“I was never an outsider to anything,” Martin Wong once told art historian Margo Machida, and wouldn’t “be caught dead being an Asian American.” This new catalog on the artist — known for his thick paintings in which the Lower East Side’s red brick walls, American Sign Language (ASL), and constellations are just a few recurring motifs — accompanies an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, and consists of six newly commissioned essays and texts by Machida, Zully Adler, Lydia Yee, Vivian Lia, Lisa Hsiao Chen, and Mark Dean Johnson. It traces lesser-known connections and stages new interpretations, linking his time in New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s through ’90s to the influence of San Francisco’s, where he was raised, and exploring the tensions in his fascinations with forms of language such as ASL and calligraphy. It doesn’t resolve Wong’s contradictions so much as refract them into something even more intricate. – Lisa Yin Zhang