The Culture of Queer
A Tribute to J.B. Harter
by David S. Rubin

On July 23, 2005, the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans will premier an exhibition that we are organizing to honor the legacy of J. B. Harter, a museum curator and artist who was murdered in his home by an unidentified assailant on March 13, 2002. The exhibition, entitled
The Culture of Queer: A Tribute to J.B. Harter, will feature several of Harter’s paintings and drawings. Additionally, in that Harter’s art was collected and supported by the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation (which co-published The Drawings of J.B. Harter, 2003, in collaboration with the Burton Harter Charitable Trust), we have elected to include several works by other artists from the Foundation’s permanent collection. To bring a Louisiana spin to the project, we have also selected recent works by queer artists who currently live and work in the Big Easy or nearby areas. An illustrated catalog is being produced and, after the show closes on September 11, 2005, the exhibition will remain in storage until early 2006, when it will travel to New York to inaugurate the new exhibition galleries of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation when it moves to larger quarters at 26 Wooster Street at Grand Street. The entire project is made possible by generous support from the John Burton Harter Charitable Trust.

John Burton Harter, known to his friends as "Burt", was born October 7, 1940 in Jackson, Mississippi. After growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, he pursued studies in several academic fields, earning degrees in art history and studio art and taking graduate courses in archeology and South Asian culture. Ultimately, he decided to become a museum curator and, in that capacity, he worked at the Louisiana State Museum and The Historic New Orleans Collection for twenty years. After retiring in 1991, he devoted himself to his painting and drawing, as well as to world travels to favorite destinations such as New Guinea, Burma, and Tibet. It was also during the 1990s decade that he fully came out of the closet, and published the first book on his homoerotic artworks.

By his own account, Harter began exploring gay life in 1967, at the age of twenty-seven (which he considered "relatively late" in life). After having been married briefly and then divorced, Harter began a closeted gay existence during the height of the sexual revolution. As he put it in his writings, "My progress into that world was and continues to be a series of discoveries, some of them hard won, some painful." After celebrating the freedoms for sexual expression afforded by gay nightlife that included the bathhouse culture, he "witnessed the promise of a sexual liberation swept away by the emerging threat of AIDS," and, in the 1990s, he observed "the march towards acceptance blockaded by a newly mobilized religious conservatism.”

Dedicated to Harter’s memory and in keeping with his own quest to understand his gay identity through his art, the Culture of Queer exhibition will examine questions about contemporary queerness by exploring queer themes in the art of Harter and others. As reflected in his paintings and drawings, Harter was particularly interested in male beauty as reflected in faces and nude bodies and, as an art historian, his aesthetic leanings veered towards the classical, especially in terms of his treatment of the male physique. He also scrutinized his own face and body exhaustively—perhaps asking himself what it really meant to be a gay man—in his numerous self-portraits, many of which are full-body nudes. Other explorations within his oeuvre center on male bonding, with relationships ranging from fraternal to affectionate to sexual. A humorous aspect of Harter’s art will be found in playful studies of the penis, which include references to the decapitated organ of John Bobbitt, as well as a series of sexualized fruit.

To provide a broader context for using Harter’s art as a vehicle for better understanding where queer culture has been, and where it seems to be at present, works by other artists will be installed alongside those of Harter. For example, photographs from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation by classic physique photographers such as Bruce of Los Angeles and Douglas of Detroit will be presented beside Harter’s paintings and drawings of the classical male nude. Andy Warhol’s amusing drawings of his friend Victor Hugo’s erect penis will find its place next to Harter’s Ristra (1995), a painting that depicts a cluster of penises based on a string of New Mexican hot peppers.

In addition to the Warhol drawing, selections from the Leslie/Lohman Foundation will include works by other well known artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Pierson, Arthur Tress, and New Orleans’ own George Dureau, who, now in his early seventies, resides in the French Quarter and is somewhat of a local legend. Works by lesser-known figures from the Leslie/Lohman collection will also be represented. The younger Louisiana artists in the exhibition are Ralph Borque, Brad Dupuy, Jenny Kahn, Audra Kohout, Michael Meads, Keith Perelli, Roberto Rincon, Maxx Sizeler (formerly known to Leslie/Lohman visitors as Katherine Sizeler), Tom Strider, and Nique LeTransome.

J. B Harter believed in the notion of a "gay sensibility." He once wrote, in fact, that he didn’t "expect the average straight viewer to have much interest in bedroom work aimed at gay sensibilities." Nevertheless, with the success of television programs such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, there is evidence that he may have misjudged the straight population, in that the "sensibility" has recently found its place within mainstream popular culture. The Culture of Queer exhibition should prove to be an interesting litmus test that, hopefully, will dispel the apprehensions once held by Harter, and continue the advances made by Queer Eye (even in light of the country’s current wave of political conservatism) towards respect for and appreciation of the cultural contributions of queer artists to a pluralistic society.

The opening reception for The Culture of Queer: A Tribute to J. B. Harter will be held at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans on Friday evening, July 22, 2005. The exhibition will remain on view through September 11, which means that it will be open during the annual Southern Decadence event that brings an estimated 10,000 queer tourists to our city each Labor Day weekend (which this year is from August 31–September 5). If you are planning to attend, book your hotel early and be sure and visit the CAC.

David S. Rubin is Curator of Visual Arts at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.