Artsy Celebrates Pride Month with a Daily Spotlight on 30 Leading LGBTQ+ Artists
Artsy, the world’s largest online marketplace for discovering and buying art, is delighted to announce that it will celebrate Pride Month with Queer Art Now, an editorial, social media, and curatorial feature spotlighting 30 LGBTQ+ artists at the forefront of contemporary art. The featured artists were nominated by fellow artists, curators, and tastemakers—such as Legacy Russell, Catherine Opie, Gemma Rolls-Bentley, and Racquel Chevremont. Artsy will spotlight one artist per day throughout the month of June on its social channels.
Launching Sunday, June 1, 2025, Queer Art Now spans an editorial feature on the 30 artists; an
essay by writer and curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley titled “What Is Queer Art Now?”; a curated
collection of available works by the featured artists, ranging in prices from $160 up to $18,000; and a takeover of Artsy’s Instagram, including videos with the artists. Discover the full feature here
Rolls-Bentley has identified several notable themes present across queer art today, including:
Tackling the Archive; Owning Narratives; Bodily Tension; Tenderness and Sensuality; and
Hopeful Futures.
Tackling the Archive:
The archive, work by queer artists from previous generations, has always been central to queer
artmaking—both its absence and its potential. Today’s queer artists are confronting the failure of
traditional archives to reflect our histories, and instead are forging their own visual records.
American artist Zoe Walsh, nominated by Artsy’s senior editor Josie Thaddeus-Johns, reclaims the visual codes of gay porn, a site of both fantasy and violence, by translating its language into paint, making space for queer desire on the canvas.
The archive isn’t only a backward glance, it is also a tool for imagining. In her paintings, British artist Lulu Bennett, nominated by Rolls-Bentley, builds the fictional persona of Samantha Pepys (a cheeky twist on the name of the famous London diarist). Here, this character stands in for all the people who were never recorded, never documented, and yet shaped the world in which we live.
Price on Request.
Owning Narratives:
At a time when queer lives are still too often represented through a simplified or distorted lens, artists are exploring identity as a multi-faceted concept. Nationality, gender, and race all play into the narratives that artists are working to reclaim for themselves.
Bodily Tension:
The body has always been a battleground for queer and trans people, where visibility can bring
violence, and scrutiny. For generations of artists, queer bodies hold tensions—many of the featured artists are thinking about the human condition.
Discussing her first nomination, Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, The Kitchen,
said, “Dominique White’s work presents a dense, breathless, and groundbreaking durational
pedagogy and poetic view on the histories of empire and colonialism. Dominique activates with
electricity and intentionality where these histories collide with Black movement both by choice and by force across transnational Black diasporic positions, guiding toward new horizons for Black futurity in the afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade.”
White uses decomposing textural sculptures with an anthropomorphic edge to reference the
weathered, sometimes drowned histories of diasporic Blackness and queerness. French-American artist Victoria Roth—nominated by artist Doron Langberg—paints fleshy forms that hover between internal organs and emotional states. Even when the body isn’t visible, it’s felt. It’s present through objects and materials: gestures, the acts of piecing things together.
Tenderness and Sensuality:
In recent years there has been a growing turn toward radical softness, exploring the intimacy and care in queer relationships. These artists are building visual languages rooted in touch, connection, and emotion.
Discussing one of his nominations, Jonathan D. Katz, Professor of practice, history of art and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, commented, “Born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, educated in Christian schools despite a Buddhist family background, now happily queer and rooted in Chicago, Leonard Suryajaya moves fluidly between disparate, and often mutually incomprehensible, worlds. He returns annually to Indonesia to work, enlisting his enormous extended family in the making of large, colorful, strikingly vibrant photographs that plumb his multiple investments in what are often deemed oppositions: traditional family and queerness; contemporary image culture and time-honored custom; social obeisance and active dissidence. Through these collisions, he finds a way to live comfortably in his contradictions.”
Price: $18,000.
Suryajaya’s hyper-saturated photographs celebrate queer domesticity with humor, chaos, joy, and care: silken fabrics and fragile flowers evoking tactility.
Hopeful Futures:
All of the artists featured, in one way or another, are thinking about the future. Futurity in queer art doesn’t mean utopia however—it’s more complicated, more grounded, and more expansive. British artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley uses digital tools to create interactive archives and video games that center on Black trans lives—not as fantasy, but as the foundation of what’s to come.
©2025 Artsy
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