Hudson opened his Chicago gallery on April Fool's Day, 1984, with a Richard Prince show, then featured Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, and Jeff Koons during the next year and a half. Debora Duez Donato, director of the State of Illinois Art Gallery in Chicago, observed that "Hudson had the best-the toughest-eye in town." I like diversity." Much of Hudson's reputation derives, on fact, from his knack for spotting the moment's best and brightest artists of any ilk. "Of course, I want to see gay representations, but that's not all I want to see. That only 20 percent of artists he shows make gay art seems natural to him. It's the content that's being discriminated against." In the case of Tom of Finland, Hudson wished his drawings did not trigger art world homophobia: "If you want to discuss Tom's work in terms of simulation or codification you can. Feature is not one of these: gay group shows and Tom of Finland's suave and soulful drawings are atypical Feature fare.
Ghettoization has been their modus operandi, whether they've focused exclusively on homoerotic art or on more "high art" gay production.
Gay galleries come and go in New York, most notably gone is the ambitious Robert Samuels Gallery. Tenderly drawn images of homosex lovemaking are something else entirely. Plenty of dealers feel comfortable showing conceptually oriented artworks such as Kevin Larmon's canvases with overpainted gay porno backgrounds. Those who make gay and lesbian art are few and their exhibition opportunities are slimmer than Oprah Winfrey. The number of lesbian and gay artists who populate it is, of course, legion.
Just a few months ago, he moved his four-and-a-half-year-old gallery from Chicago to its present location on Soho's Broome Street.ĭespite its much ballyhooed liberalism and generous financial response to AIDS, the art world may be only slightly less homophobic than most professional communities. Hudson, the pioneering integrationist behind Feature, is beginning to garner a national reputation. If the juxtaposition of their "high art" and Tom of Finland's pop cultural "artifacts" is rare, the regular exhibition of gay art in a mixed, mainstream context is unprecedented in the art world. In Feature's rear gallery, a group show called HoHoHoMo offered decidedly more "mainstream" gay artworks by five artists who usually show in East Village or Soho-style venues: Arnold Fern, Richard Hawkins, Kevin Larmon, Johnny Pixchure, and Kevin Wolff. The gathering of the thirty- or fortysomethingish clan was a poignant reminder of how distant the heyday of that Saint-ed past now seems: As one friend observed wistfully, "You'd think there'd be some sexual tension." Or perhaps art was imitating a life no longer possible but once inspired by art like this. Their dress seemed an elaborate homage to Tom of Finland's homoerotic drawings hanging on the walls but known mainly through reproduction in porno magazines. Feature's main gallery was packed with men in leather biker jackets, boots and the coded signifiers of desire-keys, chains, and cuffs dangling from the appropriate loops. Hudson In New York: Feature Gallery's Gay Gaze
"Hudson in New York," the arrival of Chicagoís lavender-tinged gallery in New York, 1988 Keith Haring, "A Tribute," 1990 "Queer TV Diary," a week glued to the TV set during Gay Pride Month, 1993 and "May I Speak Phrancly," an homage to the Lesbian-Jewish, performance-artist folk singer extraordinaire, 1994.