Queer women painters challenge dominant patterns of depicting women’s bodies and representing their stories in not only the art historical canon specifically, but also more broadly in our world. Queer women painters not only tell stories that are historically underrepresented or invisible, but also use the way they paint to share their individual ways of seeing. This includes ways of seeing beyond dominant social paradigms for both women’s relationships to gender, sexuality, and one another.
Many of our followers may already be familiar with the paintings of our co-founder Danielle Mužina, who is proudly queer, such as the one on the cover below. This post celebrates 8 contemporary queer women painters that she would like to amplify for women’s history month.
Follow the links in each woman's section below to see their work!
“Each of these queer women painters offers us a unique alternative framework for accessing our shared reality. She provides windows into painterly worlds filtered through her personal lens and surfaces enlivened by her singular touch. Engaging with these frameworks illuminates the diverse breadth of queer women’s lived experiences navigating oppressive social norms and power structures. It also foregrounds our capacities to resist, create, and thrive outside of them - and, if you're paying attention, you just might hear us whisper that you can too.”
- Danielle Mužina, Co-Founder
1. JENNA GRIBBON
Jenna Gribbon’s lush figurative paintings of women play sensitively with proximity, brushwork, and color as she challenges and queers the gaze. As works invite viewers into psychological spaces that examine the relationship between seeing and being seen, we encounter characters whose responses to our presence range from longing to indifference. She is particularly well-known for her series of intimate depictions of her partner - these paintings delight in queer wonder, desire, vulnerability, and everydayness.
2. MICKALENE THOMAS
Mickalene Thomas’ vibrant paintings and collages celebrate the beauty and power of Black women, often incorporating rhinestones, enamel, and visually stunning patterns and colors. She is especially heralded for her critical reframings of canonical works from art history in which Black women take the place of the characters in the original compositions - unapologetically and gorgeously, too.
3. ALYSSA KLAUER
The phantasmagoric worlds and figurative presences in Alyssa Klauer’s paintings explore queer experiences of time, self, and relationships. Her dreamy and painterly montaged spaces make visual allegories for queer narratives such as the “second adolescence,” many go through after coming out. Alyssa’s paintings powerfully envision these complex, non-linear stories with fluidity, layered emotion, ethereality, and play.
4. TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA
One of the most striking strategies Toyin Ojih Odutola has implemented while creating galaxies of queer Black mythology is visioning worlds that invert Western structures of power. This includes her series about a fictional ancient civilization in Nigeria where a ruling class of queer women warriors called the Eshu are served by male laborers. Permeated with a queer and decolonial lens, the imagined historical narratives in Ojih Odutola’s work catalyze reinvestigation of the gendered, racialized power dynamics in our world.
5. SASHA GORDON
Sasha Gordon creates figurative paintings that reinhabit memories from her childhood with her empowered present-self. Her self-portraits reclaim space for herself as a queer Asian woman and are often stylized or nude as she both claps back at Anti-Asian racial tropes and makes room for the visibility of larger bodies. As Sasha’s emboldened characters wreak gleeful havoc and shift paradigms in their landscapes and communities, you want to root for them.
6. NASH GLYNN
Nash Glynn’s practice of sensuously painting herself into idyllic settings engages with traditions of authoring queer utopias - spaces where bodies can exist as their authentic selves with ease outside the restrictive structures in our world. The everydayness and serenity of her landscapes and the tenderness of her brushwork contributes to how felt and poignant her work is. Regarding her experiences as a trans woman painter, she states in W Magazine, “when you grow up without a reflection, sometimes you just need to make your own.”
7. ERIN M. RILEY
Not made with paint, but woven, Erin M. Riley’s imagery engages materially with dialogues about gendered art historical hierarchies that devalue textiles and other craft-based artforms that are often cast as “women’s work.” As her characters navigate sexuality, trauma, and mental health, they interact with contemporary ennui - these women are not only online, drinking gatorade, sending nudes, and changing tampons, but also taking their meds and anxiously watching the news cycle. The utter relatability of her work is somehow humorous and sobering at the same time.
8. AMBERA WELLMANN
The swathes of abstracted figures and marks in Ambera Wellmann’s paintings pulse with vitality and insist upon an expansive queer gaze. These fleshy forms frustrate heteronormative expectations for the decipherability or performance of binary gender categories as they touch and relate to one another. Wellmann’s painterly force feels simultaneously raw and earnest - as if the paint itself is wrestling for queer liberation, defiance, pleasure, and hope.
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