Week 3 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Mickalene Thomas makes work that refuses to shrink. Her paintings, collages, and installations are lush, saturated, and unapologetically bold. They glitter—sometimes literally—but the surface beauty is never the point on its own. Thomas uses excess with intention. She understands adornment as power. Her work centers Black women—often queer women—in poses that recall art history while firmly rejecting its exclusions. Rec

Week 2 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Catherine Opie makes work that doesn’t rush you. Her photographs ask for time, and they reward it. Like Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel…, Opie’s practice is about staying with things that are often smoothed over—identity, intimacy, discomfort, domesticity—and refusing to tidy them up for someone else’s ease. Opie emerged in the early 1990s, at a moment when queer communities were under intense pressure: politically, medic

Week 1 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Zanele Muholi describes their work as visual activism, but that framing almost undersells what’s happening. Muholi’s photographs don’t argue for visibility so much as they practice it. They document Black queer and trans lives with care, intention, and insistence—creating an archive where one did not reliably exist before. There is a steadiness to Muholi’s work that feels grounding. The portraits are direct. Subjects me