GLR May-June 2025

JRK: In your work in museums and academia, you challenge the prevailing tendency to erase queerness as part of an artist’s identity, particularly those from the 19th and 20th centuries. Your work makes this case persuasively, yet museums still resist. Why is that? JDK: I think it goes all the way back to the 1980s and the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment , when the combi nation of queerness and museums proved to be a third rail. In the museum world, innovation is in short supply, and yet they are very worried about what will be perceived as political. What they fail to see is that by not addressing questions of gender and sex uality, they are being equally political. And they are not wrong; ours will be perceived as a political exhibition. Our enemies use this in their fundraising. But this does not excuse the cowardice of institutions. And let’s be clear that in this country, private money controls most public museums. And that money skews right. I am a longtime stalwart in this field and can tell you it hasn’t changed very much in the thirty years that I have been doing this. JRK: In 2010, the director of the Smithsonian pulled a David Wojnarowicz video, A Fire in My Belly, from your exhibition Hide/Seek . What happened? JDK: This was a kind of classic bureaucratic stupidity. The di rector of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the cu ratorial team had worked out every kind of possibility of what would happen and had an ascending series of moves that we had calculated in advance. We had all these plans. Then the head of the Smithsonian panicked because they threatened to cut the budget by $60 million or something like that. He summarily ig nored our plans and snatched defeat for the institution out of the jaws of victory. JRK: For those who don’t know, the video shows a crucifix on the ground with ants crawling over it to the music of Diamanda Galás. JDK: The funny thing about that image, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to use it because it was so damn Catholic. It was the most religious work in the entire exhibition. JRK: You’ve been doing a lot of lecturing in France and Ger many. Why is that? JDK: Germany is a fertile ground for us. There are lots of con ferences on sexuality. I am working on several exhibitions that will be happening in a couple of years there. In France we contributed to an exhibition on the work of Gus tave Caillebotte, an early French Impressionist who was the sub ject of a one-person show at the Musée d’Orsay called Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men . Seventy percent of the work features male subjects, and many of the subjects are nude or partially so. My husband André Dombrowski and I wrote a chapter in the exhibition catalog about it that got picked up in French newspa pers as an example of the colonization of the French Academy by American identity politics. In response, the d’Orsay did some thing wonderful and hosted a symposium to bring out all the scholarship. Unfortunately, none of the people who attacked us came to the symposium. JRK: What other shows are you working on? JDK: There will be an exhibition also at Wrightwood in the

spring of 2026, Dispossession in the Americas, featuring con temporary Latin American work including a lot of work by queer and trans artists. JRK: I know you are planning a book on Jasper Johns... JDK: I have three books in advance of that. The books before are the catalogue for the current exhibition and then books on two queer artists: photographer Arthur Tress and land artist Jim McGee, not to mention the catalog for the Dispossession in the Americas exhibition. JRK: Getting back to Jasper Johns, he and all his contemporaries were never out. They were not necessarily closeted, but the press remained completely silent about their queerness. JDK: I always loved his work. I think he’s one of the greatest artists of our time. I am also looking to underscore the degree to which many of the most celebrated American paintings by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly not only have queerness at their center but also are coy missives sent back and forth to each other referencing each other’s painting, each other’s personalities. Essentially there is a gay love story at the very epi center of postwar American art. One of the things that makes this particularly charged is that the generation that proceeded these artists were the Abstract Ex pressionists, who were completely heterosexual. This next gen eration of Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Cage, Cunningham, and Warhol were queer. So, obviously sexuality had something to dowith it.

May–June 2025

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