Now that social distancing has put paid to all of the usual Pride celebrations, the queer community have to find new ways to show up for each other.
From photographers to illustrators, and cartoonists to portrait painters, the LGBTQ+ artists of the world show the joy, beauty, protest and love of queerness.
There is really no end to the amount of exquisite and meaningful artwork to be found on Instagram, and once you start looking it's hard to stop. But whether you're on the lookout for new masterpieces for your own walls or simply something to elevate your feed, this should help.
Here are a few queer artists you should follow now:
Gabriella Grimes
New York based artist Gabriella Grimes (or ggggrimes) focuses on challenging perceptions of gender, sexuality and race. Their work is inspired by activism and queer forebears to show the joy and validity of queer existence.
Miranda Forrester
London-born painter Miranda Forrester’s work centres around the portrayal of queer womxn and sexuality, celebrating the queer, Black female gaze. Her work appreciates womxn’s bodies, while combating fetishisation and investigating how her own identity impacts how she depicts others.
Liberty Antonia Sadler
An artist and filmmaker, Liberty Antonia Sadler is a body-positive, sex-positive femme, who investigates female stereotypes and gender performance through her work. The results are bold in shape, colour and joyfulness.
Mohammed Fayaz
As well as organising Papi Juice, an art collective for queer and trans people of colour, Mohammed Fayaz documents and celebrates his own community in New York, across digital and mixed media.
Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi was supposed to hold their first UK retrospective at Tate Modern before the lockdown happened. The non-binary South African photographer has been documenting the lives of Black LGBTQ+ people since the early 2000s.
David Uzochukwu
David Uzochukwu’s portraits are otherworldly and striking, often incorporating elements of nature. His photographs are all about the body, and he cites inspiration by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the spirit of which you can see in his work.
Ashton Attzs
Ashton Attzs won the 2018 Evening Standard Art Prize for their artwork Don’t Stay In Ya Lane. Since then, they have collaborated with the Brit Awards, Tottenham Hotspur FC and more, as well as designing a billboard in support of NHS heroes. Their work is all about uplifting queer and trans people.
Shanée Benjamin
Shanée Benjamin is a designer and illustrator, whose project Herstory features positive imagery of Black women with a 70s colour palette. Her illustrations of famous figures – from Beyonce and Janelle Monae to Eartha Kitt and Josephine Baker – are gorgeous.
Emily McGovern
Cartoonist Emily McGovern found internet fame with her web series My Life As A Background Slytherin, which charted the adventures of a hapless and overlooked Hogwarts student. Her first published graphic novel, Bloodlust and Bonnets, is a queer love letter to Regency romances.
Charmaine Poh
Chinese-Singaporean artist Charmaine Poh’s photographic series How They Love documents Singaporean couples and asks what desire looks like in a queer relationship. The pictures may be staged in a studio, but the couples’ love and tenderness shines through.
Lia Clay Miller
The first trans photographer to shoot for the cover of Out magazine with her portrait of Janet Mock, Lia Clay Miller is no stranger to photographing the big queer names: Fran Lebowitz, Billy Porter, Jeremy O Harris and MJ Rodriguez have all posed before her camera, and she frames them all with elegance and grace.
