5 Late LGBTQ+ Artists Finally Getting Their Due

LGBTQ+ artists have long been excluded from popular narratives and public recognition both in art history and the art market. But in recent years, as the art world at large reevaluates its relationship to the past and revises the canon, several previously overlooked names have begun to receive overdue attention from institutions, galleries, auction houses, and collectors.

Here, we spotlight five LGBTQ+ artists who, while not fully appreciated during their lifetimes, are being recognized posthumously in the art world today.

Beauford Delaney

B. 1901, Knoxville, Tennessee. D. 1979, Paris.

The African American modernist painter Beauford Delaney was a notable figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s and ’40s and struck up friendships with the likes of James Baldwin as well as artists including Georgia O’Keeffe. During his lifetime, however, Delaney was often underrecognized compared to his peers. His vibrant oeuvre was seen as radical, yet it failed to gain recognition amid the white-dominated art world.

Openly gay, Delaney struggled for acceptance in a society that was largely homophobic. Experiencing poverty and mental illness, the artist passed away in 1979 in Paris.

Delaney’s work began to garner more substantial recognition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and his legacy has been reassessed through a number of posthumous exhibitions. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has been a major proponent of the artist’s work for the past three decades; the gallery’s third and most recent solo exhibition of Delaney’s work, “Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney,” was mounted in 2021 and traveled on to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

The Knoxville Museum of Art organized a major exhibition in 2020, “Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door,” which brought renewed attention to his contributions to American modernism. And in 2021, the Asheville Art Museum held the exhibition “Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom,” which traveled to the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in early 2023.

Recent years have also seen more of the artist’s work appear more frequently at auction and achieve estimate-beating prices. Four works by the artist have achieved six figures under the hammer since the beginning of 2022, and a new record was set last October for the 1966 painting James Baldwin, which sold for £1.026 million ($1.16 million) at Christie’s.

Hugh Steers

B. 1962, Washington, D.C. D. 1995, New York.

Hugh Steers was an American artist known for his poignant figurative paintings reflecting the physical and emotional impact of the AIDS epidemic. Despite his talent, Steers’s work was largely overlooked during his lifetime due to the prevailing abstract and conceptual art movements of the 1980s and ’90s, and the societal stigma associated with AIDS. A few galleries and institutions did take notice—Steers had half a dozen solo shows between 1989 and his death in 1995, including at New York gallery Richard Anderson and New York University’s Grey Art Gallery.

After his death of AIDS-related complications at just 32 years old in 1995, art historians and critics began to reevaluate the artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, and Steers’s work started gaining broader attention. A number of key exhibitions of his art, such as at Alexander Gray Associates (which represents the artist’s estate and has been showing his work for more than a decade), and the 2009 Visual AIDS exhibition “That Soft Glow of Brutality: The Art of Hugh Steers” Visual AIDS later published the first Steers monograph in 2015. In 2021, mega-gallery David Zwirner featured Steers in a solo show in Paris as part of its “More Life” series of exhibitions to commemorate 40 years since cases of HIV/AIDS were first identified.

By last year, it was clear that Steers’s work had made its way to the wish lists of collectors. Last July, Sotheby’s sold two works—Hudson Bay (1994) for $69,300, 73% above its mid-estimate; and Red Velvet Curtain (1992) for $20,160, more than double its mid-estimate—and several impressive sales have followed. A new record was set for the artist’s work when At the Amoire (1994) sold at Phillips New York in May 2023 for $133,350, 167% above its mid-estimate.

Leonor Fini

B. 1907, Buenos Aires. D. 1996, Paris.

Openly bisexual, Leonor Fini was a significant figure in the 20th-century Surrealist movement. Born in Argentina and raised in Italy, Fini spent most of her career in Paris, where she became known for her depictions of powerful women and erotic themes. Her first major exhibition took place when she was just 25, in 1932 at the Galerie Bonjean, where Christian Dior was the director. Her work became known to New York audiences in 1936, when she was included in the major Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” and she began showing with famed Surrealism dealer Julian Levy.

Despite Fini’s vibrant output and fierce artistic independence, she was largely overshadowed—particularly in terms of the market—by her male contemporaries such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte.

The full depth and impact of Fini’s work have been more thoroughly appreciated and recognized in more recent years, with a number of exhibitions and galleries—such as Kasmin and Weinstein Gallery—bolstering her standing in the art world. For example, there was a notable increase in attention to her work around the 2018 “Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930–1990” exhibition at the Museum of Sex in New York City. More recently, her works played a key role in the main exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams.”

A recently concluded solo show at Kasmin in New York this year has also highlighted the thirst for Fini’s work among collectors. At auction, her work has also seen a remarkable ascent in the past few years: A record price of $2.3 million was set in 2021 for Autoportrait au scorpion (1938). Other recent results under the hammer have confirmed strong demand: In April, Sotheby’s sold Scène de bal (La Tragédie de Roméo et Juliette) (1979) for €177,800 ($194,093), 154% above its mid-estimate.

Martin Wong

B. 1946, Portland, Oregon. D. 1999, San Francisco.

Chinese American artist Martin Wong is known for his vivid realist and symbolic works that reflect on urban life and multicultural identities. Wong’s works primarily focus on his surrounding environment, especially New York’s Lower East Side, and also explore themes of race, identity, and sexuality.

Wong’s first solo exhibition was held in 1984 at New York gallery Semaphore, where he also had exhibitions in 1985 and ’86. In the late ’80s and ’90s, he exhibited widely in group shows in New York and across the United States, and held a few more solo shows—including at Frank Bernaducci Gallery, EXIT ART, and the Pyramid Club, plus a Public Art Fund commission in Times Square. In 1993, he held his first solo show with New York gallery P.P.O.W, which went on to champion Wong’s work ever since, and now represents his estate.

It wasn’t until after the artist’s death of AIDS-related causes in 1999 that Wong’s work received wider attention. His 2015 retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic,” led to a reassessment of Wong’s contributions and increased his visibility in the art world. In late 2022, the first extensive touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, titled “Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief,” debuted at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, and traveled to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin earlier this year; it opens this month at the Camden Art Centre in London and then goes on to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

A new auction record was set for the artist’s work in 2022 when Quong Yuen Shing & Co (1992) sold for $1.3 million at Bonhams. Last month, Phillips auctioned a pair of works by the artist, Mandala and St. Joseph’s (both 1988), which both solidly beat their mid-estimates, selling for $63,500 and $190,500, respectively.

Peter Hujar

B.1934, Trenton, New Jersey. D.1987, New York.

Peter Hujar’s black-and-white photography subjects—from Susan Sontag to Fran Leibowitz—include some of the most famous New Yorkers of his generation, yet the man himself was little-known outside his peers during his lifetime.

After quitting a commercial photography job in 1967, Hujar created work that was often raw and unflinching, and he was not afraid to explore difficult subjects such as death, sexuality, and AIDS. A key figure in downtown Manhattan bohemia during the 1970s and ’80s, his photographs of friends, animals, lovers, and strangers are some of the most iconic images of that time in New York.

Hujar’s first solo exhibition was held at the Floating Foundation of Photography in New York City in 1974, and he only published one book, Portraits in Life and Death, in 1976. Since his passing in 1987 (due to AIDS-related pneumonia), several major retrospectives—such as “Peter Hujar: Speed of Life” in 2016 at the Morgan Library & Museum (which traveled to four U.S. cities), and “Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death” in 2019 at the Museum of Modern Art—have since cemented the artist’s reputation as one of the most important American photographers of the late 20th century.