Everyday Joys in Twenty-First Century Queer American Painting

Book excerpt: Taken together, the chapters in this book outline a theory and a practice of painting ecstatic ordinarinesses in contemporary, diverse American queer life. To do so, it offers the first sustained study of five individually renowned twenty-first-century queer painters—Gio Black Peter, Doron Langberg, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Salman Toor, and João Gabriel—who have achieved substantial recognition from international museums, galleries, and critics working with short-form reviews but not yet from academics producing large-scale studies. This study argues for a broad understanding of what constitutes the queer American art of our time and for a broad sense of who can help to fashion American culture and history, including art by African American, Southeast Asian, Muslim and Jewish American, South American, and gender nonconforming queer artists. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, gender studies, and queer studies.