5 Collectors Championing LGBTQ+ Artists

Collecting is an inherently personal endeavor, often revealing one’s unique tastes. The relationship between queer artists and collectors can be an even more intimate bond. Today, with homophobia and transphobia still very much a part of our society, queer artists and their collectors bear shared resilience, anger, and celebrations at milestones achieved. This relationship can fuel a determination to summon power from art’s potential, to transform it into a shield against hate.

Here, Artsy has spoken with collectors who champion queer artists about the importance of supporting LGBTQ+ community today. For many, their private lives play into their collecting activities.

Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall

It began as soon as they were married: Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall encountered the David Hockney exhibition that changed their perception for art at the de Young Museum during their wedding week in San Francisco. Another life-changing experience for the couple was the Whitney’s groundbreaking 2018 David Wojnarowicz survey, “History Keeps Me Awake At Night.”

The two Davids’ different artistic voices—Hockney’s militantly hedonistic colors against Wojnarawicz’s poetic anger—were “instrumental in understanding the different aesthetic foundations” of the queer experience, the pair said. Soon, the couple (Rob is a surgeon, and Eric a politics professor) were knocking the door of the queer-championing gallery P.P.O.W (which also represents the Wojnarowicz estate) to help them on a deep dive into contemporary artists who follow the late artist’s legacy.

The first work to enter their collection by a queer-identifying artist was, however, a serendipitous encounter. “When we acquired a Chris Bogia from Mrs. Gallery, we were not aware of his sexual identity,” they told Artsy. Instead, the artist’s joyful abstractions with references to interior design, colorism, and bonsai trees fascinated the duo, who next brought a figurative Anthony Iacono painting to their home in Minot, North Dakota.

For the Thomas-Suwalls, locating their collection in a conservative state is an act of resilience and protest. “Having our walls covered with queer manifestations and hosting our friends from different life experiences around these works is a very important part of our collecting,” they said. Around 40 artworks from their private collection—which include a Paul Mpagi Sepuya photograph, a Salman Toor painting which traveled overseas from the artist’s New Delhi gallery Nature Morte, and their most recent acquisition, an abstract painting by Edie Fake from Broadway Gallery during Independent—will reach a wider public audience when Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota, opens an exhibition of their collection in the spring of 2024.

Caitlin Kalinowski

Caitlin Kalinowski’s initial exposure to collecting came from her lesbian community. While frequenting San Francisco’s iconic lesbian bar Lexington Club in the early 2000s, Kalinowski, currently head of Meta’s AR glasses hardware, was introduced to the paintings of the bartender Tanya Wischerath. Today, a painting by the artist, titled Sweetheart, Envy, Baby (2020), hangs above the collector’s bedroom.

Another milestone in Kalinowski’s collecting journey was meeting Jessica Silverman, whose eponymous San Francisco gallery represents Tammy Rae Carland. “I’ve been very interested in Carland both as an artist and also for having designed album covers of many queer punk rock musicians from the Pacific Northwest,” she told Artsy. In addition to photographs by another Jessica Silverman Gallery artist, Catherine Wagner, and a deeply cherished Gustav Klimt drawing of two women (“It simply brings me joy,” Kalinowski said), the collector also has a photograph by Chloe Sherman, which sits above her bed. “Sherman is a great documentarian of San Francisco’s nightlife since the 1990s,” said Kalinowski.

The current systematic attack to the LGBTQ+ community alarms the collector, who is also a board member of the organization Lesbians Who Tech, the largest women’s tech conference in California. “I am pretty worried about the climate right now,” she said. “Culture holistically is under a threat and we need a collective commitment to protect queer, particularly trans, people.”

As a person with broader social and financial access, Kalinowski sees it as her responsibility to connect LGBTQ+ artists with her network: “If I can introduce an artist I admire to a collector friend or a dealer I know, I see a deeper truth in my role as a collector.” Like many, David Wojnarowicz is among the artists she admires the most and hopes to add to her collection. She’s also interested in acquiring work by Catherine Opie and Tauba Auerbach (the latter of whom studied at Stanford University at the same time as Kalinowski). Meanwhile, when Kalinowski married her wife recently, the couple’s wedding gift for themselves was a stained glass and light box work from Judy Chicago’s new “Queen Victoria” series.

Bernard Lumpkin

The collection that the New York–based philanthropist and collector Bernard Lumpkin has amassed with his husband Carmine Boccuzzi was recently documented in the book Young, Black, and Gifted (also a traveling exhibition), which predominantly features queer artists from the couple’s collection.

“Artists who hold a queer lens to contemporary society naturally make up a vital part of our collection,” Lumpkin said. The couple’s involvement with their community also includes roles in MoMA’s Black Arts Council, where Lumpkin is the vice chair, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, as well as Yale School of Arts, where the couple has recently launched the Mickalene Thomas Scholarship. “Supporting diversity of the school where I met my husband when we were both students there in 1989 under the name of a queer artist like Mickalane is very important for us,” Lumpkin added. “I am the gas and Carmine is the brakes—I do the research and build most of the relationships and we make the acquisition decisions together.”

Out of many friendships in the art world, Lumpkin cherishes his connection to Wardell Milan. He owns, for example, a work from the artist’s Tennessee Williams–inspired “Desire and the Black Masseur” series, which the collector described as “altogether encompassing representations of gender, sexuality, race, and the body.” Another recent acquisition with similar themes is a recent photograph by Katherine Hubbard, which Lumpkin said “was an homage to David Hammons’s body prints, and a queer artist’s dialogue with an iconic Black artist meant a perfect fit for our collection.”

Another artist Lumpkin admires is Ronald Lockett, who had a recent show at Lower East Side’s March Gallery. “Lockett was a great yet underappreciated artist who explored the issues around AIDS,” Lumpkin explained. The prime estate above the couple’s bed currently belongs to a tapestry by Qualeasha Wood, a fast-rising artist who explores self, identity, and performance both through the digital realm and the tactility of her loom.

Dan Berger

A career in AIDS and HIV research and decades of clinical practice on the subject has shed a significant light onto Dan Berger’s collecting. “I’ve seen many individuals, including artists, restricted from proper human rights in my work, so art that speaks about the subject is very important in my collection,” he said. It was also through his job that the Chicago-based doctor has seen the overlap of the struggles shared by the Black community and those living with AIDS or HIV: “I’ve found the realities of both communities have run parallel in many ways.”

At home, Berger has hung works by many of the queer artists in his collection—Devan Shimoyama, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and Doron Langberg—all of whom he has a personal relationship with: “Their statements are always present and visible through what I hang on my walls.” Berger also considers his friendship with multimedia artist Carlo Motta “very enriching.”

Like many collectors here, David Wojnarowicz’s work is a guiding light in his art patronage. Fittingly, one of Wojnarowicz’s mixed-media map installations—which includes dog tags and an acetate-washed world map—is one of his prized possessions. Berger also has a chalk-, honey-, and glue-covered American flag work by another AIDS activist AA Bronson, White Flag Number Seven (2015). Elijah Burgher’s playfully abstract painting, BotD (Love Machine) (2015) about queer sexuality is positioned across from his bed. South African artist Igshaan Adams is the most recent name to join Berger’s collection with a tapestry that illustrates drone-shot images of ritualistic dances by the artist’s queer community in Cape Town.

Berger is most interested in expanding his presence in the queer community, most significantly with his own Iceberg Projects—an exhibition and event space at the garden behind the collector’s house—and serving on the board of trustees at Leslie Lohman Museum. “I am in a continuous dialogue with their staff to support a museum that works for queer artists like no other institution,” he said. “We are constantly pushing for visibility and inclusion but we also need to maintain this relevance for future generations.”

Noel Kirnon

Noel Kirnon also got his initial exposure to art through his community, an interest that soon turned into a passion. In the early 1990s, HIV and AIDS activism became entangled with his awareness of art’s potential for change. “I went to a group show named ‘Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing’ at Artists Space, which started my journey,” he remembered.

A year or two later, Kirnon made his first attempt at collecting with a Lorna Simpson photograph entitled C-Ration (1991). Soon came a Glenn Ligon work on paper purchased during an ACT UP benefit, followed by a work by David Wojnarowicz in the same material. Soon, this turned into an expansive collection, shared with his husband Michael Paley.