12 LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

Jacolby Satterwhite, “Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, March 10–August 13, 2023.
COURTESY DUSTY KESSLER.

Pride Month is here, and while the celebrations go on as they always do, this year’s have been shadowed by a wave of trans- and homophobic incidents as well as by a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation coming out of Republican-controlled statehouses. Elements on the right seem bent on forcing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, but unfortunately for them, they’re too late: Whether it’s in the courts or at the polls, they’re unlikely to succeed in the long run.

The spirit of Pride continues, as does the vital place of queer people in American society and culture. And there is no better evidence of that than the current slate of institutional exhibitions by LGBTQ+ artists across the country.

Below are 12 shows we recommend by a variety of artists working in multiple mediums who keep the rainbow flag flying high and proud.

Jacolby Satterwhite, “Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Photo : Courtesy Dusty Kessler.

Multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986) explores queerness (his own as well as in the general sense) through performance; sculpture; digital photography; and immersive, elaborately choreographed computer animations inspired by gaming, voguing, and the music videos of Janet Jackson, Dee Lite, Björk, the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Michael Jackson, and Madonna that he watched as a kid. Satterwhite also references art history (as in a neon-signage reimagining of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe), but it is his mother in particular who plays an outsize role as a touchstone in his work. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Patricia Satterwhite prodigiously produced drawings that covered her interests, which included consumer culture, medicine, fashion, Surrealism, mathematics, sex, philosophy, astrology, and genealogy. Satterwhite incorporates her work into his own and brings other aspects of her identity into his performative practice. “Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth,” at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, is his first major institutional survey. Through August 13.