About Face Book Launch

Jonathan D. Katz (he/him/his) was the curator of the 2019 exhibition About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art and is the Associate Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Pennsylvania. He is a founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the very first queer scholarship on a number of artists. His scholarship spans a period from the late 19th century to the present, with an emphasis on the U.S., but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality, and desire, producing some of the key theoretical work in queer studies in the visual arts. His books include Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, which was co-authored with Moira Roth, and the anthology Art AIDS America. Katz is widely known for his many essays that constitute the first queer studies scholarship on artists as diverse as Jasper Johns, Leon Polk Smith, Robert Indiana, John Cage, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Robert Rauschenberg. He has also written extensively on Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the notion of Eros, the culture wars, and protest art.

María Elena González, is a Cuban-born American sculptor who works with architecture, nature, and memory. Her projects often explore themes of home, nature and identity, especially the concept of home as something that moves with you, instead of something that you leave or return to. In her 2000 installation Mnemonic Architecture, she used materials that, in her words, “behave like memory.” In the 2017 Magic Carpet/Home rendition of the original 2003 project she painted the layout of a Los Angeles Public Housing apartment on a surface of soft, rubberized playground material on top of an undulating wooden base. Infused within the work are González’s connections between memory and place, but by encouraging visitors to walk on the piece, she gives weight to the viewer’s own connections to the project and emphasizes the importance of the physical experience pertinent to sculpture. González has exhibited at institutions such as the Bronx Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, Los Angeles Museum of Art, and El Museo del Barrio in New York, to name a few.

Leonard Suryajaya creates photographs that are at once absurd and mundane. In collaboration with his family and, more recently, students, he explores identity and belonging, placing his subjects into carefully constructed sets that are light-filled and clean but elaborately posed, and filled with dizzying patterns on the verge of clashing. Suryajaya is Chinese, grew up in Indonesia, attended Christian schools, and was educated in Buddhism. His multi-ethnic upbringing came with experiences of otherness and suppression of identity, which prompted his move to the United States when he was 18, where he later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He still lives in Chicago but travels back to Indonesia once a year to work there. For Suryajaya, photography is the construction of worlds. His photographs are acts of recreated closeness, ways to revise memories, to complicate identities, and to reinstall new layers of familial intimacy that favor celebrating identity rather than hiding it.