Painter

Native American Artist

b. July 26, 1932
d. November 3, 2005

“I’m an Indian painting Indians, and if it worked out for me, then it's all well and good.”

Rudolph Carl (R.C.) Gorman was a gay Native American artist best known for his paintings and lithographs of full-bodied indigenous women. The New York Times called him “The Picasso of American Indian Art.”

A member of the Navajo (Diné) Nation, Gorman was born in Chinle, Arizona, to a family “rich in artistic talent and creative spirit, but not in material possessions.” His mother was a devout Catholic. His father was a Navajo Code Talker and an accomplished artist and illustrator. They separated when Gorman was 12.

Gorman grew up with his extended family in a hogan, a traditional earth-covered dwelling. His grandmother, who served as his guiding light, nurtured his budding talent. To his mother’s dismay, Gorman’s earliest drawing portrayed a naked woman. He credits a high school teacher with the encouragement to become an artist.

Gorman briefly attended Arizona State College (now Northern Arizona University) before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1951. While stationed in Guam, he drew the wives and girlfriends of his officers and fellow sailors for a small fee, using photos for reference.

After the Navy, Gorman resumed his education. In 1958 the Navajo Tribal Council awarded him a scholarship to study art in Mexico City. There, celebrated painters such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros significantly influenced his style and direction.

Upon his return, Gorman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to start his career. Initially, he earned more money as an artist’s model.

Gorman embraced San Francisco’s gay culture and moved to the Castro District with his male partner. After an acquaintance outed him to his family, Gorman wrote home: “I am a homosexual. It’s unfortunate only in that I myself did not tell you.”

In the 1960s Gorman opened the country’s first Native-American- owned art gallery in Taos, New Mexico. Celebrity collectors, including Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck, purchased his work.

Gorman’s success rested on his iconic representations of large, hardy, mostly Navajo women. “My women work and walk on the land …” he said. “ They are soft and strong like my grandmother.” Once, when asked about his subject matter, Gorman replied, “It’s me. I am every fat, nude woman I draw.” Traditional Navajo culture recognizes four genders and embraces the interplay of masculine and feminine.

Gorman received the Harvard University Humanitarian Award in Fine Art, the New Mexico Governor's Award of Excellence and multiple honorary doctorate degrees. When he died in Taos, the governor of New Mexico had flags flown at half-staff. The New York Times published Gorman’s obituary.

"LOVE" Sculptor

b. September 13, 1928
d. May 19, 2018

“I am an American painter of signs charting the course.”

A pioneering American artist, Robert Indiana was instrumental in the evolution of Assemblage and Pop Art. He is best known for his ubiquitous 1965 work “LOVE,” which features the word rendered in colorful stacked letters with the “O” tilted.

Born Robert Clark, he was raised in Indiana during the Great Depression. His adoptive father worked for the Phillips 66 energy company, and as a child, Indiana often looked up at company’s boldly lettered sky-high logo. It made an indelible impact on his creative sensibility.

Indiana spent time in the Air Force before studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1954 he moved to New York to begin his artistic career. “I was told … if I should persist in this ambition I’d be eating bean soup and living in a garret,” he recalled. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

Indiana’s fortunes turned when he met his lover, Ellsworth Kelly, a fellow artist living in the waterfront neighborhood of Coenties Slip, a lower Manhattan haven for contemporary painters and sculptors. Kelly helped Indiana find housing there and introduced him to other trailblazing gay artists: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin. Together, they laid the groundwork for the Pop and Minimalist Art of the 1960s. During this time, Indiana adopted his new surname as an homage to his roots and the distinctively American subject matter he chose to explore.

Inspired by the maritime trade at Coenties Slip, Indiana repurposed planks and used stencils of short, bold words to make enigmatic “sign” assemblages. The darker aspects of the American ethos became a central theme in his work, including “The American Dream #1,” an oil painting featuring words such as “tilt” and “take all.”

In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Indiana to create a Christmas card. The result marked a watershed in his career. Inspired by the inscription “God is Love” from the churches of his youth, his late father and the colors of the Phillips 66 sign, he produced “LOVE.” He reimagined the work in painting and sculpture, and in the 1970s it appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. “LOVE” has been translated into multiple languages. Today, more than 50 versions are displayed in public locations worldwide, including Philadelphia’s famous LOVE Park.

Indiana eventually complained that the widespread popularity and appropriation of his work caused the art world to shun him. He retreated to a remote island in Maine in 1978, where he continued his art until he died at age 89.

Renaissance Painter

b. 1445
d. May 17, 1510

“Figures are designed and painted with plastic subtlety and confident mastery; they are incarnate with vitality, each seeming to have taken form unforced, imaged on wall or panel or canvas with resolute immediacy.” – Ronald Lightbown, “Botticelli: Life and Work”

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli, was an esteemed painter during the early Italian Renaissance. His most famous works include “The Birth of Venus,” “The Primavera” and “The Adoration of the Magi.” 

The son of a tanner, Botticelli was born in Florence, Italy—the epicenter of the Renaissance—where he lived for most of his life. He trained under Fra Filippo Lippi, one of the city’s most prominent artists. As Lippi’s apprentice, Botticelli studied composition and painting techniques. He began painting frescoes in Florentine churches and spent most of his career employed by the politically powerful Medici family.

Botticelli painted prolifically during the 1480s. During this period, he completed “The Birth of Venus” (c. 1484-86). Groundbreaking for its nudity and the artist’s use of a canvas, as opposed to a traditional wood-panel substrate, it is one of the most celebrated and iconic paintings in history. Based on the writings of Homer, it depicts the naked goddess Venus arriving at the shore on a seashell. “The Birth of Venus” hangs in the famed Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Botticelli’s late 1470s painting, “The Primavera” (meaning “spring”) features a gathering of mythological figures in a grove. Considered one of the gallery’s most significant works, it also resides in the Uffizi.

By 1472 Botticelli had his own workshop. He mentored Filippino Lippi, the son of his teacher. As his success grew, Botticelli was summoned by the pope to help paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome

Botticelli never married. He was friends with Leonardo da Vinci, and the two collaborated. Many understood Botticelli to be homosexual. Although most of his subject matter concerned mythological characters, the Madonna and religious scenes, Botticelli also painted portraits in which art historians have noted homoeroticism. 

Botticelli is regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time. His paintings adorn the walls of the world’s most prestigious galleries and museums. In 2016 he was portrayed in the international television series “Medici: Masters of Florence.” 

Transgender Pioneer and Painter

b. December 28, 1882
d. September 13, 1931

“… The one hundred percent male and the one hundred percent female are theoretical.”

Lili Illse Elvenes, best known as Lili Elbe, was a transgender woman who received one of the first gender reassignment surgeries. Born in Denmark as Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener, Elbe worked as a successful artist before legally changing her name and living as a woman. 

When Elbe was young, she studied painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where she met a lesbian named Gerda Gottlieb. The two married in 1904, when Gottlieb was 18 and Elbe (still Wegener) was 22. The couple spent years traveling through Europe. Elbe was known for her landscape paintings; Gottlieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. They eventually settled in Paris, where Elbe began living openly as a woman and became a muse for Gottlieb. 

While in Paris, the couple was embraced by avant-garde social circles; the two women became the talk of the town. It shocked and fascinated the public when they found out that Elbe was a biological man. Newspaper articles were written about them all over Europe. 

In 1930 Elbe relocated to Germany, where she had her first surgery to transition into a woman. The process was still experimental, but she had a series of operations under the supervision of the famous sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. After transitioning, Elbe legally changed her name, and the Danish court invalidated the couple’s marriage. Elbe also left the art world. In an essay, she explained the transgender experience:

“Our assumption as a society is that … people come in two types, male nature and female nature. This has no scientific basis … I try to move from the language of the two sexes are similar or different to language that means we are all different.”

Elbe and Gottlieb eventually parted, and Elbe began a relationship with French art dealer Claude Lejeune. In 1931 in hopes of one day bearing children, she had her final operation—the most experimental one yet—to implant a uterus and construct a vagina. There were severe complications, and Elbe died a few months shy of her 49th birthday. 

The award-winning movie “The Danish Girl” provides a fictionalized account of Elbe’s life, based on an international best seller that has been translated into dozens of languages. The LGBT film festival MIX Copenhagen pays tribute to the transgender pioneer by presenting awards called the Lilies.

Women’s and LGBT Activist

b. August 15, 1926, Lynbrook, New York

“For 50 years, my passion has been equal rights for women, lesbians and gay men, and it continues.”

Ivy Bottini is a pioneering lesbian feminist. In 1966 she was inspired by Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique.” She met Friedan and together they established the first chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Bottini served on the national board of NOW for three years and was president of the New York chapter for two years.

Friedan was vocal in her concerns about out lesbians in NOW. Because lesbians were being asked to closet themselves, Bottini left. She moved to the West Coast where she became the women’s program director for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. Bottini met local activist Morris Kight and they formed the Coalition for Human Rights to oppose the Briggs Initiative. The initiative threatened termination of lesbian and gay teachers in California. In 1978 Briggs was defeated. It was the first defeat in the nation of a homophobic state referendum.

Bottini continued as a radical force for LGBT activism through the 1980s. She cofounded the Los Angeles Lesbian/Gay Police Advisory Board and formed AIDS Network LA, the first organization in the city created to combat AIDS. In 1986 she successfully worked to defeat Proposition 64, which designated homosexuals as a public menace who should be quarantined.

In 1993 Bottini founded the nonprofit organization Gay & Lesbian Elder Housing, Inc. The organization’s first low-income LGBT senior housing project, Triangle Square, is located in the heart of Hollywood.

Artist

b: April 10, 1936, San Francisco, California

d: August 18, 1998, Philo, California

“Drawing was the thing that kept me connected.”

A leading Asian-American artist, Bernice Bing spent her early childhood in a Chinese orphanage, in Caucasian foster homes and with her Chinese grandmother. She described her grandmother as having residual feelings of “anger and subservience” combined with an underlying strength. “For me there was the difficulty of being an Asian-American child going to a basically very middle-class white school and trying to assimilate both of these cultures,” Bing said.

Bing attended the California College of Arts & Crafts. After changing her study to painting, she encountered Japanese painting professor Saburo Hasegawa. A practitioner of Zen, Hasegawa’s structured lessons, Eastern philosophies, style, and introspection inspired Bing and influenced her life and her work.

In discussing her time with Hasegawa, Bing said, “I had no idea what it meant to be an Asian woman, and he got me started thinking about that.”   

A three-month trip to Asia helped influence Bing’s most iconic works, in which she incorporated Chinese calligraphy. Just as her connection to her grandmother influenced her identity, so too did her trip to China. Her journeys through the streets, cities and small villages left her feeling that she was apart. “I suddenly realized that I was in the majority, yet, also, though I had the same skin color, I was a stranger,” she said. “My posture, my dress was different, my accent was quite different—everyone knew I was a foreigner.” Bing’s masterpieces reflect her lifelong feelings of cultural duality and incorporate Eastern technique.

Robert Rauschenberg was an innovative and influential American artist whose work laid the foundation for the Pop Art movement. 

Born Milton Ernst Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg grew up in a blue-collar fundamentalist Christian family. After a tour of duty in the Navy, he attended the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris. He changed his name to Robert, which he believed was more befitting a painter.  

In 1948, Rauschenberg began studying at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1950, he married painter Susan Weil. The couple had a son and divorced in 1953. 

At Black Mountain, Rauschenberg studied under Joseph Albers, learning to appreciate objets trouvés—found objects—which later would become hallmarks of his work. He studied and collaborated with other emerging artists, including Cy Twombly, Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg had a romantic and professional relationship with Johns for eight years.  

Rauschenberg moved to New York, where in 1958, he had his first solo exhibition. The exhibit reflected the artist’s transition from abstract painting to what he termed “combines”—the finding and formation of combinations in three-dimensional collage. One of his most famous combines was “Monogram” (1959), which consisted of a stuffed goat, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe and paint. 

As the Pop Art era emerged in the 1960’s, Rauschenberg experimented with silkscreen printing and appropriating photographs from the news of the day. For the remainder of his career, Rauschenberg explored new methods of creating his art. Jasper Johns said, “No American artist invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg.”

In 1964, Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. 

In 1984, Rauschenberg established ROCI, the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange at the United Nations—a seven-year project in which Rauschenberg left a piece of art in, and influenced the cultures of, ten countries. 

Rauschenberg won a Grammy Award in 1984 for his design of the Talking Heads’ “Speaking in Tongues” album cover. Four years later, the Guggenheim Museum presented its largest exhibition ever with 400 works by Rauschenberg, showcasing his prolific talent and profound impact on 20th century art. 

Painter 

b. May 15, 1930

“To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.”

Jasper Johns is one of America’s most successful and influential contemporary artists. His paintings and prints, often incorporating objects and symbols from popular culture, inspired a new generation of artists and laid the groundwork for the Pop Art movement. 

Johns was born in Allendale, South Carolina. “In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and no art,” says Johns. The son of divorced parents, Johns grew up being passed among relatives. It was such an unhappy childhood, Johns says, he was “dying” to get away from it. 

In 1949, the aspiring artist moved to New York City. In New York, he explored the art scene and developed a circle of creative contemporaries, including composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham and painter Robert Rauschenberg, with whom he developed a romantic and professional relationship. 

In 1958, gallery owner Leo Castelli, who discovered Johns, was so impressed with the young artist that he offered him a solo show. At that exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art purchased three pieces, launching Johns as a major influence in contemporary art. 

“Flag” (1954-1955) is Johns’s best-known painting and considered by many his most important work. His use of classical iconography—flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers—became the hallmark of his early works. 

Johns is widely recognized for the distinctive surface treatments of his paintings. With the use of media such as encaustic (paint mixed with melted wax) and plaster relief, his innovative techniques and experimentation made Johns a breakthrough artist.

In 1998, Johns’s “White Flag” was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than $20 million. In 2006, his “False Start” sold for $80 million—the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living artist. 

Johns is among the leading artists of the 20th century, with works in major museums worldwide.

Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect

b. March 6, 1475

d. February 18, 1564

"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark."

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni is considered one of the greatest artists of all time. His art typified the High Renaissance style with use of naturalistic light, depiction of realistic figures and emphasis on the beauty of nature. One of the true "Renaissance men," his talent encompassed fine art, architecture and poetry. He was referred to as "Il Divino" ("The Divine One").

Michelangelo was born in the Tuscany region of Italy. At age 13, he started an apprenticeship in Florence with Domenic Ghirlandaio, from whom he learned fresco painting.

He moved to Rome and received a commission from the French ambassador to the Holy See, the central government of the Catholic Church. In 1497, he completed one of Christendom’s most significant artworks, the "Pietà." The lifelike marble sculpture depicts Mary cradling the body of Christ after the Crucifixion.

His colossal marble statue "David" is considered the masterpiece of High Renaissance sculpture. Completed in 1501, the sculpture is 17 feet tall and is exhibited in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Florence.

Michelangelo was a primary architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and the sole designer of its dome. From 1508 to 1512, he painted what would become his most famous work, the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. The frescoes include "The Creation of Adam," in which God’s finger stretches out to give Adam life. These murals are considered the most magnificent and spiritual art of the Roman Catholic Church.

A lover of male beauty, Michelangelo's lyrical poetry described his same sex-affection. He wrote: 

            The flesh now earth, and here my bones,

            Bereft of handsome eyes, and jaunty air,

            Still loyal are to him I joyed in bed,

            Whom I embraced, in whom my soul now lives.