Hide/Seek

*2011 ALA Stonewall Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award
*An Outstanding Academic Title of 2011 — Choice Magazine

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture is the companion book to the first major museum exhibition in American history to focus on lesbian and gay art and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beginning with Thomas Eakins and Walt Whitman and proceeding to the reconsolidation of the gay and lesbian community after the worst years of the AIDS crisis, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture. It reveals the wellsprings of artistic creativity and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists-- both gay and straight--as well as of portraiture itself. Through its conceptualization of American art, Hide/Seek will also permit a new take on the contours of modern American society as seen through the lens of the evolving and continuing history of the gay and lesbian community.

Hide/Seek traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture from Eakins to the present. The book is an unabashedly seductive selection of some of the defining American images and artists. It includes works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird--recent works that argue for their inclusion in the canon. In between, Hide/Seek will include major work by the most important artists of twentieth-century America: Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Andrew Wyeth, Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, and many others. The media used by the artists discussed runs the gamut from oil paintings to video productions of performance art. In addition to its historical breadth, the book is also characterized by its wide parameters of inclusion, and will feature portraits of well-known LGBT visual artists, writers, musicians, and architects, including figures as distinctive as Gertrude Stein, Ma Rainey, and Phillip John.