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The work of Libby Otto and Jonathan Katz forced audiences to consider the history of art education and the modern queer movement through the stories of the Bauhaus design school and the Stonewall rebellion.

“Meanwhile, designing costumes for film allowed me the opportunity to reimagine personal style and self-presentation as a tool for storytelling and the expression of a character’s arc and self-identity,” she says. “I began to seek and record the narratives of African diasporic peoples told through traditional cloth and dress practice.”

“For me, this experience was a reassurance of my future career options,” says Chen, a member of the Stitch Buffalo team, who hopes to launch a social enterprise in her native China after completing her doctorate. “Usually, a PhD student goes into higher education, but I want to seek something else. The whole experience reassured me that I could do it and do it well—with the help of other people.”

Consisting of nearly 500 works, the exhibition About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art, curated by GGS faculty Jonathan D. Katz, opened in Chicago this summer at a new, major museum called Wrightwood 659, designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Tadeo Ando. The largest queer art exhibition ever mounted, it sprawls across all 4 floors of the large building. The artists are trans, female, male, and intersex, as well as African or of African Descent, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx, and/or some combination of all of these.