Gallery Two, Chicago
Elijah Burgher invites Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz
Edie Fake invites Rosé
Dutes Miller invites Michael Pierson
Miller & Shellabarger invite Anthea Black
Stan Shellabarger invites Steve Reinke
For the The Gay Mafia is Real, gallery owner and straight bear Scott Speh has invited LGBTQ artists on Western Exhibitions’ roster to exhibit their own works alongside artists of their choosing. Art historian David Getsy will contribute an essay to the exhibition expanding on an interview in Chicago Magazine published around the time of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, in which he was asked if a Gay Mafia exists in the art world.
Coinciding with Chicago Pride, this game of curatorial tag puts into play the elective affinities and voluntary affiliations amongst artists whose gender and sexuality inform their work, explicitly or in less obvious ways. Although money and media often get credited as the glue of the art world, the contention of this show is that friendship and intellectual (and sometimes sexual) intercourse provides another framework for thinking about how art actually gets made. If the project room were twice as big, the show would map an even larger branching star of friends and lovers hot on the heels of a sexed up, gregarious, sometimes drunk and combative art. The Gay Mafia is not actually real. What does exist, however, are overlapping social worlds of artists, queer identified or not, having heated conversations with one another that eventuate in pictures, objects, actions and essays.