What Is Queer Art Now?

Queer art has always been associated with doing things differently. In 1916, for example, painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell relocated to the Charleston House on the south coast of England, drawing an eclectic group of artists, writers, and intellectuals to their unconventional lifestyle. Art, in this house, was entwined with love. Here, queerness was celebrated and lovers and friends became a chosen family: nontraditional and free from the norms of straight, early 20th-century society.

 

It was 100 years ago, but this communally minded lifestyle feels radical even today and continues to inspire me along with many other queer people in the art world. In my two decades of curating and writing about queer art, I’ve witnessed how LGBTQ+ artists have continued pushing to radically overturn convention, both in and outside their work. Today, as queer artists across the globe face urgent challenges, this is more true than ever before.

 

As Pride Month begins, it’s the perfect time to celebrate some of the most exciting queer artists working today, including 30 spectacularly inspiring queer artists pushing contemporary art forward. These artists were nominated by a group of leading figures in queer art, from artists Catherine Opie and Doron Langberg, to collector Racquel Chevremont, to curators and writers Legacy Russell, Che Gossett, and Lauren J. Joseph. The artists on this list are mostly emerging and mid-career artists whose work encapsulates something significant about the way queer artists are seeing the world right now. It’s a snapshot of the current moment, and a sign of where queer art is headed.

 

However, it’s important to remember that queer art is not a monolith. Something I hear a lot when I curate exhibitions or write about queer art is that people expect to see representational, figurative, sexually explicit visions of queer art. And yes, portraying queer lives is a part of the picture. But queer art today is about more than direct representation. So many queer and trans artists are making art that’s about their experiences in less explicit ways. Artists throughout history have made work that was definitely queer but wasn’t representational, or necessarily explicit. Abstraction, for example, can be a powerful language with which to make a point, from Turner Prize–winning artist Jesse Darling’s off-kilter sculptural installations, to Roni Horn’s coded minimalism.

 

Today, I’m pleased to say, audiences are better at reading artists’ work through a queer lens. And artists are able to feel more comfortable having conversations about the queer themes in their work. Look at Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s current show at Hauser & Wirth: It’s both very abstract and very queer, all of which she acknowledges when talking about her work.

 

For Artsy’s Pride Month celebration, Queer Art Now, I’m excited to explore some of the themes that these artists are engaging with, giving you a snapshot of how LGBTQ+ artists are working today. These artists are not just a marginalized subsection: They are pushing the whole of contemporary art forward, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

 

The archive of LGBTQ+ history has always been central to queer artmaking—both its absence and its potential. Today’s queer artists are confronting the failure of traditional archives to reflect our histories, and instead are forging their own visual records.

 

Artists like Paul Anagnostopoulos are intertwining personal and classical touch points to reveal queer references that influence our culture but have been systematically ignored. Meanwhile, Zoe Walsh reclaims the visual codes of gay porn—a site of both fantasy and violence—by translating its language into paint, making space for queer desire on the canvas. Paul P.’s work, delicate and haunting, does something similar: offering us an archive of queer sensuality that the institutional record has refused to hold.

 

But the archive isn’t only a backward glance. It’s also a tool for imagining. In her paintings, Lulu Bennett builds the fictional persona of Samantha Pepys (a cheeky twist on the name of the famous London diarist). This character stands in for all the people who were never recorded, never documented, and yet shaped the world in which we live.

 

 

At a time when queer lives are still too often represented through a simplified or distorted lens, artists are exploring identity as a multifaceted concept. Nationality, gender, and race all play into the narratives that artists are working to reclaim for themselves.

 

This is about telling personal stories of heritage that exist on their own terms. For example, Anthony Peyton Young uses collage and paint to explore the intersections of queerness, Blackness, and rural Southern identity. His work is emotionally raw, beautifully layered, and impossible to flatten. Amina Cruz offers another kind of narrative definition: tender portraits of queer and trans Latinx communities in the U.S. and Mexico that move beyond representation toward kinship. Kiyan Williams constructs precarious land art monuments that question powerful narratives, reminding us that choosing an identity for oneself can include refusal to accept the status quo. And La Chola Poblete passionately visualizes the fluidity in her identity through symbols of Andean folklore, Catholic colonialism, and pop culture.

 

There’s also a subtle code to the way these narratives are explored. Eva Dixon embeds contemporary lesbian culture into physical objects—badges, carabiners, overalls—anchoring identity to the everyday and material.

 

What ties these practices together is a deep-rooted understanding that narrative is power. For queer artists today, that power lies in telling stories that don’t fit the mold—stories that are messy, shifting, deeply embodied, and unmistakably theirs.

 

 

The body has always been a battleground for queer and trans people, where visibility can bring violence and scrutiny. For this generation of artists, queer bodies hold tensions. They’re thinking about the human condition and multiple facets of queerness, as well as marginalized identity more broadly.

 

Some artists work with figuration directly, using it to explore lived experience in all its complexity. Shadi Al-Atallah’s large-scale paintings, often rooted in personal memories of growing up in Saudi Arabia, twist the figure into new shapes that are tender, grotesque, and powerful. Chiffon Thomas creates hybrid forms using stitched leather for a visceral effect, combining biblical references from his childhood with the physical realities of transition.

 

Other practices evoke the body through abstraction or metaphor. Victoria Roth paints fleshy forms that hover between internal organs and emotional states. Dominique White uses decomposing textural sculptures with an anthropomorphic edge to reference the weathered, sometimes drowned histories of diasporic Blackness and queerness.

 

Even when the body isn’t visible, it’s felt. It’s present through objects, materials, gestures, the act of piecing things together. These works carry the physical imprint of queer life—not idealized, not sanitized, but textured and real.

 

 

In recent years, we’ve seen a growing turn toward radical softness, exploring the intimacy and care in queer relationships. Artists have taken on the task of owning the everyday moments of softness and vulnerability in a world that often frames queer and trans bodies through trauma or spectacle.

 

These artists are building visual languages rooted in touch, connection, and emotion, and it’s not sensationalized. Miles Greenberg’s sculptural figures, bouncing off his performance practice, embrace one another in polished marble. Here, a material often associated with power is softened into vulnerability. Leonard Suryajaya’s hyper-saturated photographs celebrate queer domesticity with humor, chaos, joy, and care: Silken fabrics and fragile flowers evoke tactility. And Willa Wasserman’s loose yet deftly defined paintings luxuriate in moments of queer stillness that are as radical as any protest.

 

 

All of these artists, in one way or another, are thinking about the future. It’s about the way they’re taking up space in their work. But futurity in queer art doesn’t mean utopia. It’s more complicated, more grounded, and more expansive than that. Artists like Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley are using digital tools to create interactive archives and video games that center Black trans lives—not as fantasy, but as the foundation of what’s next. Ebun Sodipo presents layered histories through performance and installation; by highlighting untold stories from the past, she makes it impossible to overlook today’s stories. Both artists assert that their art is for Black trans people of the future. Their work isn’t just about imagining the future: It’s about demanding it.

 

Others work within more intimate or everyday registers. Young Joon Kwak’s multidisciplinary practice imagines new ways for marginalized bodies to move through the world. Victoria Roth’s paintings take an abstract, organic approach to envisioning what queer desire could look like. These works are not just about existing in the future—they’re about thriving there.

 

Artists like Vita Kari, who use social media platforms like TikTok as their primary medium, are reshaping how art is encountered, who it’s for, and where it lives. They are unapologetically present in the now while cracking open what’s possible in the next breath.

 

These artists are not asking to be included in someone else’s vision of the future. They’re making their own. And in doing so, they remind us that queer futurity is already unfolding.