Lincoln Park’s side-street art museum has welcomed two exhibitions to the fold, from a sweeping display of Martin Wong’s work to Dispossessions in the Americas.
Wong, a queer Asian-American artist, grew up around San Francisco’s Chinatown before moving to New York City in adulthood. His autobiographical works are spread throughout Wrightwood 659 with the Chinatown USA exhibition, curated by Yasufumi Nakamori and Ashley Janke. The exhibition explores spaces throughout Wong’s life, ranging from depictions of markets in Chinatown to depictions of his romantic partner, poet Miguel Piñero.
(Alec Karam)
“This is a side of Martin Long that really has not been shown before, that was clearly very important to him,” Janke shared.
Wong died from AIDS-related complications in 1999 at the age of 53. Janke said the exhibition’s display is as timely as ever, as the U.S. government slashes AIDS research funding and queer art faces widespread attacks.
“We’re in a unique position where we don’t need to rely on government funding and grants in order to execute our exhibitions,” Janke added.
“We have a unique ability to say things and be vocal, and to continue to highlight and forward queer voices. That’s something that’s important to us and that we will continue to do.”
That vision expands throughout the gallery with Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present, co-curated by Jonathan Katz and Eduardo Carrera. A presentation of more than 40 works by 36 Latin American artists from the 1960s to present-day, the expansive exhibition has circulated across nine countries before landing at Wrightwood 659. Alongside indigenity, themes of gender, sexuality, and queerness also play a major role in the exhibition.
“In many respects, queerness represents the sort of decentering of colonial hierarchies,” Katz argued.
(Alec Karam)
“What the exhibition wanted to do was to hear the voices of the indigenous populations who had a very different relationship to sexuality and gender, and to recognize that that relationship is the one that needs to come back to Latin America,” he added. “And, if allowed to flourish, that would produce freedom for the vast majority of the people in the continent.”
Katz pointed to a group of works in the exhibition that deal with AIDS in Colombia as centering this theme, one made of semen derived from HIV-positive and HIV-negative men.
A modern work from Panamanian artist Lulu Molinares, Camisa de Fuerza Para Yo (Contra), depicts a straitjacket made of various yarn patterns, symbolizing anti-trans violence by “transforming an object of confinement into a site of agency and resilience,” according to a press release.
With this exhibition, Katz hopes to “seduce an audience with beauty that gets them to then think about larger social and political issues. … I want to reach the people who disagree, and the way I reach the people who disagree is by appealing to a common humanity and getting them individually to sort of rethink their perspectives by essentially including the voices of those they’ve heard before. And that’s what this exhibition seeks to do.”