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The Guardian

‘Queer as a $3 bill': celebrating 100 years of LGBTQ+ art for Pride month

As curator Pietro Rigolo was combing through the Getty's archives in search of material for his new show, he came upon a strange sight – a $3 bill. 'I was in this section of the archive dealing with the Black Panther movement, the WPA, the gay rights movement and protest material related to HIV/Aids,' Rigolo told me during a video interview. 'In there, I found this little piece of ephemera that was this fictive $3 bill. This specific banknote bears the portraits of Harvey Milk and Bessie Smith.' According to Rigolo, the idea for the bill came from the phrase 'queer as a $3 bill', a once-pejorative remark that was claimed by the LGBTQ+ community as a rallying call and even term of endearment. Distributed during pride in 1981, the bill featured two gay icons: Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California who was murdered in cold blood in 1978, eventually resulting in a city-wide riot. Smith was another queer icon, one of the most celebrated and beloved entertainers of the jazz age and known as the 'empress of the blues'. The bill is a fitting namesake for Rigolo's new show at the Getty Center, which showcases over 100 years of queer art, packing a powerful irreverence and defiance. Case in point, $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives gets off to a engaging start with one of Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres's candy piles. Named Untitled (Para Un Hombre en Uniforme), the 1991 work weighs about 220 pounds and features red, white and blue lollipops. Visitors are encouraged to take a lollipop. According to Rigolo, the weights of González-Torres's candy piles often refer to specific human beings, and the piles' dwindling nature makes a poignant metaphor for the withering away of so many LGBTQ+ people who fell ill during the Aids crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Its themes draw in the debate over gays serving in the armed forces that was occurring in the 1990s, as well as its colors implicating the American, Cuban and Puerto Rican flags, all of great personal significance to González-Torres. 'The public is invited to take a candy, and it's up to the institution when to replenish the pile, so this pile gets smaller and smaller as the exhibition progresses,' Rigolo said. 'It's this beautiful metaphor for a body that is consumed and loses weight and gains weight again, this circle of illness, death and eventually rebirth. It also establishes this relationship with the visitors consuming the candy, so it's also this metaphor of the virus spreading.' Although Untitled (Para Un Hombre en Uniforme) is a loan from the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, most of the works in $3 Bill come from the archives of the Getty itself. The vast holdings of the Getty Research Institute include a library with nearly one million volumes, as well as major archives dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe and Harmony Hammond, and records of Entendido, a magazine that ran from 1980-83 as the first publication by and for a gay readership in Venezuela. The exhibition starts in 1900, not long after the word 'homosexual' was first coined and brought into wider use, signaling a new era in defining queer lives versus straight ones. It is broken up into four periods – 1900 through Stonewall, the protest era of the 1970s, and Aids epidemic of the 1980s and then the 90s to present. 'It's much more colorful, bright and in your face than other Getty shows,' said Rigolo. 'The color scheme really makes clear the different times, different moods, and different areas you find yourself in – it's thanks to the great graphic design of Alan Konishi and Chaya Arabia.' One standout piece from the post-90s era is The Aids Chronicles, in which mostly female members of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization, collected every single front page from the New York Times from the 26 years from 1993 through 2019. They then painted each page with a deep red acrylic paint that looks like blood, sparing only headlines and stories that deal with the Aids epidemic. The result is a monumental work about erasure of the epidemic from the mainstream media, and one that remains relevant as the Times continues to contemporarily erase and spread misinformation about transgender lives. 'This is the first time that we have a chance to show material from the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, and The Aids Chronicles are placed right in the middle of the galleries,' said Rigolo. 'They're a total showstopper and a really, really interesting project.' Holdings from Hammond include the artist's magnificent and bewitching Hair Bags, which she made in the early 1970s, dedicating one to each member of her feminist consciousness-raising art group. Hammond actually used hair from the women in the group in the bags and intended them to remain as a set. These strange, groundbreaking pieces emerged out of a period in which the queer icon was experimenting more and more with making art bags, as well as moving closer to being out as a lesbian. 'She was very important not only as an artist, but also as a scholar and curator, particularly of lesbian art,' Rigolo said. The show also draws on the Getty's archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes major African American magazines such as Jet and Ebony. Issues in $3 Bill showcase pictures of Harlem drag balls from the 1940s and 1950s, treated with surprising dignity for the time. 'It's interesting how these events were covered in these magazines. The language they used would definitely not be considered PC by today's standards, but at the same time the tone seemed to be pretty open within certain boundaries.' One of the big successes about $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives is that it's such a broadly encompassing show, offering the true diversity of the LBGTQ+ community. 'It's really a show that strives not only to present the accomplishments of our communities in the realm of art but also our presence and our significance in society overall,' said Rigolo. 'I'm really happy about how this show encompasses a very wide spectrum of sexualities and genders.' $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives is on show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles until 28 September