30 Artists Defining Queer Art Now

Queer Art Now is Artsy’s Pride Month 2025 celebration spotlighting 30 LGBTQ+ artists meeting the moment and shaping the future of contemporary art. Nominated by leading figures across the art world—including curator and author Legacy Russell, photographer Catherine Opie, and art advisor Racquel Chevremont—these artists reflect the diversity and dynamism of queer creative expression today.

 

The featured cohort includes painters, photographers, performers, and sculptors showcasing the breadth of queer experience through their radical, boundary-pushing work. In tandem with this list, Artsy also invited curator and author Gemma Rolls-Bentley to reflect on some of the major themes she observes in queer art today.

 

Zoe Walsh

B. 1989, Washington, D.C. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Nominated by Artsy

 

Visibility is often a unifying thread for queer artists—a gesture of bold defiance against the policing and shaming of our bodies, sexuality, and communities. Zoe Walsh’s technicolor canvases, though, rely equally on presence and absence. Their subjects are hidden between shimmering layers of silk-screened landscapes, shadows, and architectural motifs, from which queer scenes emerge with ghostly qualities.

 

For years, Walsh has pulled visual references from queer photography archives at the One Institute, the longest-running LGBTQ+ organization in the U.S. Currently, they are creating new work for an ongoing series inspired by gay rights activist and filmmaker Pat Rocco’s covert photographs (often featuring nude figures) taken at parks and other cruising spaces across L.A. in the 1960s and 1970s. Blending mediums and processes, Walsh digitally cuts and layers these archival images with photographs they take with their partner and friends in their garden. Here, scenes from L.A.’s queer past and present collapse, creating a sense of cross-generational community that would otherwise exist only in imagination. —J.J.