Queer Australian Art and KINK acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of the lands and waters of this continent. KINK conducts its work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation in Naarm Melbourne, the Turrbal and Jagera peoples in Meanjin Brisbane and the Gadigal lands of the Eora Nation, Sydney. We pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Search
Filter
(X)
Birthplace (City)
Birthplace (State)
Based in (City)
Based in (State)
Gender
Birthplace (City)
Birthplace (State)
Based in (City)
Based in (State)
Year
Decade
Artwork type
Collection
Exhibition type
Year
Venue
State
Year
Category
(publication)

Grief and the Gay Community

1994

Citation

Ted Gott, “Grief and the gay community”, Artlink, 14:4, (1994): 16–21. 

Resources

External link

Includes these artists

Ross T. Smith

Ross T. Smith (b. 1961) is a Ngāpuhi/Māori photographer who has lived between both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Smith studied fine art photography in Melbourne at the Australian College of Photography Art and Communication between 1987 and 1990. In particular, Smith is known for his photographic series such as *Hokianga* (1997–98), held in the permanent collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and *Hemi Tuwharerangi Paraha* (1999) in which these two bodies of work position the image of young Māori men and women within the remote New Zealand landscape. In these complex series of portraits, Smith depicts the figure in varying states of strength and fragility, eschewing evocative documentary portraiture to consider the restrictions of identity and representation in a marginalised group. Smith is known within Australia for his large-scale photographic composition *L’amour et la mort sont la même chose* (1990–92), held within the National Gallery of Victoria collection and exhibited within *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection* (2022), *TRANSMISSIONS: Archiving HIV/AIDS, Melbourne 1979–2014*, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne (2014), and *Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS* (1994), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Smith's work is held in various Australian, New Zealand, and international collections.

Juan Davila

Born in Santiago, Chile in 1946, Juan Davila moved to Melbourne in 1974 and has worked between the two countries ever since. Over the course of five decades, Davila has produced a uniquely provocative, powerful, and influential body of work. Since the early 1970s, Davila has used the medium of painting to engage in debates around aesthetics, politics, and sexuality, drawing on rich and varied histories from Latin America, Australia, Europe, and North America. Davila has brought to high art the visual landscape of popular culture. As a visual archive, Davila’s works are not simply reflections of a society awash with images, but a carefully articulated questioning of the hierarchies applied to cultural material, and by extension, cultures. Davila opens up the hidden tensions that lurk beneath any official history or national mythology. Davila was included in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, in 2007. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria held retrospective surveys of Davila’s work in 2006–2007. In 2015, Davila participated in The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art with a presentation of monumental paintings. A major survey of Davila’s work of the last two decades was shown at Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile in 2016. In 2018, Davila participated in the EVA International Biennial, Ireland and held a solo exhibition at MUSAC, Leon, Spain. Davila’s work is included in every major museum collection in Australia, as well as significant international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Tate, London. Juan Davila rejects the application of labels to his practice including “Queer”.

David McDiarmid

David McDiarmid (1952–1995) was a leading gay activist and artist who worked in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. As an early gay liberation activist, he wrote for and illustrated the *Sydney Gay Liberation* newsletter and *Gay Liberation Papers*. His first gallery exhibition in Sydney in 1976 focused on gay male identity and sexual liberation themes. McDiarmid’s creative output encompasses art, design, craft, fashion and music. It also sits at the intersection of activism, art, and community art, with gay rights and identity politics being the primary focus in his contemporary art and graphic design. He moved to New York in 1979 where he lived and worked until 1987. Reflecting on his own work in 1992 he said: “I wanted to express myself and I wanted to respond to what was going on and I wanted to reach a gay male audience. I wanted to express very complex emotions and I didn’t know how to do it . . . I was in a bit of a dilemma. I thought, well, how can I get across these complex messages. I didn’t think it was simply a matter of saying gay is good.” McDiarmid designed posters for Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride and Leather parties, safe sex and World AIDS Day campaigns and he was artistic director of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. He was diagnosed HIV positive in New York 1986 and from his return to Australia in 1987 his work was concerned with HIV/AIDS experience and politics. His famed *Safe Sex* and *Safe Injecting* posters of 1992 designed for the AIDS Council of NSW were an international sensation after they were shown at the 1993 international AIDS conference in Berlin. The *Rainbow Aphorisms*, a series of digital works created between 1993 until shortly before McDiarmid's death of AIDS-related conditions in 1995, is a key example of his political savvy and wit, combining gay and queer activism with tongue-in-cheek statements, pointed truths, and messages of hope. His work has been widely collected by institutions and in 2017–18 his *Rainbow Aphorisms* featured throughout the London Underground transport network as part of the ongoing *Art on the Underground* program, a presentation initiated by London's Studio Voltaire and the David McDiarmid estate. In 2014, McDiarmid was the subject of the major survey exhibition *David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me* at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work continues to be shown internationally.

William Yang

William Yang (b. 1943) is a Sydney-based photographer and pioneer of LGBTQI+ Australian photographic practice. Born in Mareeba, just outside of the northern Queensland city of Cairns, Yang became recognised for his emotive documentation of Sydney's queer scene after moving to the capital of New South Wales in the late 1960s. Yang's photographs record in intimate and moving detail the emergence and impact of HIV/AIDS on his friends and broader community within the city in the 1980s. Yang's work also engages with his identity in relation to his Chinese-Australian ancestry, and familial relationships and histories. The artist is known particularly for his technique of inscribing photographic prints with commentary and reflections that broaden the frame of the image, integrating photography and memoir to create a hybrid life-image writing. Yang's work has featured in significant group exhibitions both interstate and internationally, including *World Without End*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2000); *Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS*, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1994); *Life Lines*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2009); *On the Edge: Australian Photographers of the 1970s*, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (1998); *Sydney Photographed*, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1994); and *From Bondi to Uluru*, Higashikawa Arts Centre, Hokkaido (1993). The artist's practice has been surveyed in a number of prominent retrospectives and solo presentations including *Diaries*, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (1998); *William Yang: Australian Chinese*, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2001); and *William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (2021). His works are held in major state galleries, as well as the National Gallery of Australia and National Portrait Gallery.

Includes these curators