A Place at the Table
Collaborations
Gertrude Stein introduces gay author Samuel Steward to Pablo Picasso. Steward’s extensive collection of material from Stein and Toklas came to The Bancroft Library in 1972. The letter, written in French, reads: “Dear Pablo: This note is to introduce Mr. Sammy Steward. He is charming. Be kind to him. Gertrude.”
QUEER COUPLINGS
LGBT artists have long had a healthy disrespect for boundaries and borders. Queer visual artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jess have used simile and collage in order to represent ideas that would have been deemed unacceptable if represented realistically. Along with crossing formalistic boundaries in their own work, LGBT artists have been particularly adept at collaborative efforts. In many lesbian projects from the 1970s, for instance, the line between individual artists and the community in which those artists lived is nearly indistinguishable.
Queery-y: How might evidence of literary and artistic collaborations be used to reconstruct lost or hidden LGBT communities?
