Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters
Curated by Xavier F. Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Curator, and Aimee Ng, Curator
The Frick Collection, New York
September 30, 2021 – January 30, 2022
The installation at Frick Madison has prompted new ways of looking at the Frick’s paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts—works predominantly made in Europe from the thirteenth through nineteenth centuries. Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters is the latest addition in a broader program in the past decade that has celebrated a range of voices and perspectives through digital productions, installations, publications, and collaborations. At various times during the next year, four New York–based artists will engage with Old Master paintings in the permanent collection, each presenting a single new work on the second floor, where paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Holbein are displayed. These “pop-up” presentations, each running for a limited number of months, will initiate fresh conversations with the institution’s traditional figurative holdings, with particular emphasis on issues of gender and queer identity typically excluded from narratives of early modern European art.
The series begins on Thursday, September 30, 2021, presenting one painting each by Doron Langberg (b. Yokneam Moshava, Israel, 1985) and Salman Toor (b. Lahore, Pakistan, 1983) framed amidst those in the Frick’s Northern European galleries. Both works will be on view at Frick Madison into January 2022. Langberg will present a painting, Lover, in conversation with Hans Holbein the Younger’s iconic portrait of Sir Thomas More, whose usual counterpart at the Frick, Holbein’s Sir Thomas Cromwell, will be temporarily on view in the fall exhibition Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. At the same time, Toor’s painting Museum Boys will be shown alongside Mistress and Maid and Officer and Laughing Girl by Johannes Vermeer. It temporarily takes the place of Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which is on loan this fall to the special exhibition Johannes Vermeer: On Reflection at the Dresden Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Next winter and spring, the Frick will feature pairings by artists Jenna Gribbon (b. Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, 1978) and Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1985) responding to works by Holbein and Rembrandt, respectively. The rest of the third- and fourth-floor Frick Madison installations, showing highlights from the Frick’s holdings, will remain largely unchanged during this project, offering further context and depth to these confrontations between past and present on the second floor. This year-long project will be accompanied by ongoing programming, and a publication will present reflections on the experiences of the artists and curatorial team. Living Histories has been jointly organized by Xavier F. Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Curator, and Aimee Ng, Curator.
The Frick Collection’s new publication, Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, explores the pairing of four commissions by New York–based artists Jenna Gribbon, Doron Langberg, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Salman Toor with iconic works in the museum’s holdings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Holbein. The new works each address issues of gender and Queer identity and were presented at various points between September 2021 and September 2022 in conversation with their respective Old Master paintings at Frick Madison, the Frick’s temporary home at the Breuer building.
During the installation series, Gribbon’s What Am I Doing Here? I Should Ask You the Same (2022) was displayed with Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell; Langberg’s Lover (2021) was shown in dialogue with Holbein’s Sir Thomas More; Ojih Odutola’s The Listener (2021) was presented alongside Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait; and Toor’s Museum Boys (2021) joined Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl and Mistress and Maid.
Through essays and interviews with the artists, this new book explores the significance of this installation series and the responses it engendered. Contributors include:
Jessica Bell Brown (Curator and Department Head for Contemporary Art, Baltimore Museum of Art), Christopher Y. Lew (former curator, Whitney Museum of American Art), and Legacy Russell (Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen)
Jonathan Anderson (JW Anderson Collections Fund) and Russell Tovey (actor and Talk Art podcast host)
Jason Reynolds (author of Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks) and Hanya Yanagihara (T Magazine editor-in-chief and author of A Little Life)
Exhibition organizers Aimee Ng, Curator, and Xavier F. Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, both of the Frick, along with Stephen Truax, independent curator, each contributed essays on Queer figurative painting in the context of The Frick Collection.