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Every June, institutions remember they have queer artists on file. For a lot of them, Pride Month doesn’t feel like a celebration. It feels like extraction.

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Animals sculpting the earth; tariffs hit Black hair stylists; queer Native actor Jonathan Joss; and so much more in this week’s Required Reading.

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“The arc of our lives is very, very long, and being queer is an amazing way to see the potential of what your life can really be about. I’m a real proselytizer — get with your queer self, you know?” —Kay Turner, artist, scholar, and bandleader

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Kim Sajet, who has led the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery for over a decade, has resigned as director weeks after President Donald Trump claimed he fired her for being a “highly partisan person” and a “strong supporter of DEI.”

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In this week’s A View From the Easel, artists lock in before their day jobs and find comfort in a library of art books.

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In response to Trump’s relentless attacks on transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming populations, artist and activist Nan Goldin and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art launched a two-week online print sale to raise funds for three organizations committed to supporting these communities.

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The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and The Broad in Los Angeles are hunkering down in response to the protests against mass raids by ICE and heightening military activity under the direction of President Trump.

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After 87 years, the Indian Craft Shop has closed following the retirement of its longtime director. The shutdown spotlights tensions around authenticity, inclusion, and how Native art is defined and displayed.

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One may be surprised to learn that Edvard Munch, best known for “The Scream” (1893), also produced hundreds of portraits. A generous number are on display at London’s National Portrait Gallery, and the range of skill and experimentation is evident from the start.

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After Harvard questioned her genealogy and refused to return exploitative photos of her enslaved great-great-great-grandfather Papa Renty, Tamara Lanier fought back and won. Watch her discuss the battle and her memoir with @hrag.bsky.social in the Book Talk we did with ICA LA.

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One of the many factors in moving the needle in favor of gay and trans visibility in NYC in 1969 was a designated gay arts scene pioneered by partners, collectors, and activists Charles Leslie and J. Frederic “Fritz” Lohman. It paved the path for what is now known as the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

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“Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson,” on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, presents the defiant vision of an artist who lived through some of America’s darkest times.

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Four downtown LA art spaces — the Japanese American National Museum, the Chinese American Museum, LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and Grand Performances — issued a joint statement calling the federal government’s response to the city’s anti-ICE protests a “manufactured crisis.”

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Two of Chicago’s most delightful solo shows right now concern human bodies: “Bribes de corps” at the Arts Club gleefully declares itself corporeal, and while “Petal Fold, Rabbit Ear, Inside Reverse” at Compound Yellow makes no such claims, its relationship to anatomy is just as important.

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Beyond posterity, what is the value of preserving and sharing regional queer histories?

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University campuses provide a protected space for intellectual, creative, and personal exploration. “Substitute Equal Amounts” presents the work of seven graduate students and emerging artists from the University of Chicago at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

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“Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art” is not just a book. It is a map, a record, and a movement. It reminds us that the work of liberation is collective and ongoing, and that visual art has always been a powerful force in that struggle.

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“Police State,” a 10-day durational performance by activist, artist, and Pussy Riot creator Nadya Tolokonnikova, transforms the cavernous warehouse of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles into a site of carceral confinement and government surveillance.

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Though Trump announced last month that he had fired Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, for her supposed proclivity toward DEI, the longtime museum leader has reportedly shown up for work anyway.

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Gary Hustwit’s 2024 documentary about Brian Eno uses an algorithm to remix hundreds of hours of footage, ensuring no two viewings will ever be the same.

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With her brighter-than-life color palette, deliciously unrealistic sense of proportion, and tendency to apply paint like frosting, it’s hard to believe that Florine Stettheimer depicted her everyday life in her paintings. But for Stettheimer, there wasn’t much of a difference between art and life.

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This week in New York, artists Renée Green and Jim Shaw uncover the ways that United States history is manipulated to veil systemic and government abuse. Meanwhile, a show at Brooklyn’s Amant looks at the failings and potential of education in the US.

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In early 1987, six New Yorkers wheat-pasted SILENCE = DEATH posters across Lower Manhattan, sparking a movement that would reshape AIDS activism forever.

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Combining text fragments from literature and other sources, Renée Green employs stylistic typologies to conjure alternative narratives, while using color as a categorization device and words as the building blocks for systems.

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After nearly two years of extensive restoration, the soaring Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, New York, has reopened to the public.

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While photorealism feels like a historical period of contemporary art, mostly limited to the 1960s and ’70s, Tim Hawkinson has transformed it into something very different. He conjures an awareness of time passing, and of his sitters’ interior lives.

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Flaming self-driving Waymo cars, “Death 2 ICE” spray-painted across the entrance of a boarded T-Mobile store, highway overpasses dotted with anti-ICE graffiti, swaths of police cars lined up. These are some scenes captured by photojournalists during the mass protests against immigration raids in LA.

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Two years ago, the historic San Francisco Art Institute was filing for bankruptcy and even considering selling its iconic Diego Rivera mural. Now, the campus will reopen as the California Academy of Studio Arts, a free, experimental studio program devoted to emerging artists.

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If the school system itself provides any example, repressive policies and structural oppression necessitate creative forms of resistance. “On Education,” unwittingly, seems to ask: What comes next?

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Some of Jim Shaw’s iconography might seem random at first, but the more you connect the dots, the more the insidious and, ultimately, catastrophic work of the US government, law enforcement, and military come to the fore.

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One could imagine a dystopia governed by a hologram of Trump that wouldn’t differ much from the present. Which is to say that actual art, which is made by real people in circumstances divorced from this burgeoning monoculture, is now all the more subversive and all the more crucial.

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The warm critical reception of “Wild Thing,” Sue Prideaux’s new Gauguin biography, illustrates two things: the complex nature of the artist’s legacy and the fact that, in 2025, redemption arcs sell.

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“I firmly believe, and I wrote about this in my book, that the elders didn’t trust the history books to tell our stories.” —Tamara Lanier, activist and author

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The word “tapestry” conjures Medieval constructions in dark, simple palettes, conveying religious rites and hunting motifs — but modern practitioners like Sam Dienst have demonstrated that the form is due for a (second) Renaissance.

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New Jersey’s new duplexes, Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal,” cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel, and more in this week’s Required Reading.

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San Francisco’s Letterform Archive houses a collection of over 60,000 graphic design items, from as early as 900 CE (labeled “Exodus Manuscript Fragment as Binding”) to as recent as 2019 (a monograph on designer Jennifer Morla published by Letterform Archive).

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“That’s what traditional Navajo weaving is: an interpretation of your environment. A lot of my earlier pieces were designed with that in mind. They’re not necessarily just stripes; they represent rainbows. They’re not just step patterns; they’re mesas or clouds.” —Roy Kady, Diné artist

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Elonald. Elump. Trelon. Trusk. Mump. Whatever combined moniker you gave Elon Musk and Donald Trump as they worked in tandem to diminish any vestige of a social safety net that remained in the United States, say goodbye to it, because it’s over.

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This new Banksy mural is less of a low-hanging fruit in sociopolitical commentary, and it certainly invokes a more vulnerable and personal touch than usual, but it’s still another installment in what feels like a series of work stifled by both surveillance and media fatigue.

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In this week’s A View From the Easel, artists find solace in morning rituals and relish both connection and solitude in their studios.

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Daniel Lelong, co-founder of Galerie Lelong in Paris and New York, died this Wednesday. Remembered for his “positive spirit, sociable demeanor, and enthusiasm for life,” the late dealer was also known for his commitment to the gallery’s success.

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Feathers fluttered and tassels swayed as a gust of wind swept over the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where hundreds of queer “pilgrims” and their allies gathered in monochrome Medieval outfits for a Pride celebration like no other.

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How satisfying to behold Saint Michael impaling a dragon in a Medieval manuscript. At Bibliothèque nationale de France, rare illuminated texts reveal why artists have obsessed over good vs evil for centuries.

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Rashid Johnson is not recontextualizing these forceful phrases — “Promise Land,” “Run,” and “Fly Away” — enough to evoke a particular, unique meaning, but rather relying on their historical potency to do the work for him.

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A tourist reportedly damaged two ancient warrior sculptures in the Terracotta Army after falling into a display at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Xi’an, China.

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Ten Asian diasporic artists explore how we create our self-images through technology, media, and cultural representation in “my hands are monsters who believe in magic” at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts.

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This summer, Los Angeles art institutions offer both sorely needed aesthetic escapes and deep dives into contemporary issues, including Barbara T. Smith’s early Xerox work and new work by Jeffrey Gibbson.

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Alice Austen’s black-and-white photographs depicted what she described as the “larky life” of middle-class Victorian women — dressed in drag, sleeping in the same bed, and appearing as though they were about to kiss.

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Weeks after the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that a woman can only be defined on the basis of biological sex, one artist has taken a stand against a transphobic billboard with the power of a really large Dachshund named Saveloy.

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