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LGBT+ History Month 2022

February marks the month long celebration of LGBT+ History Month 2022 and this year’s theme is Politics In Art: The Arc is Long. Five artists were chosen (one each to represent the L,G,B,T and ‘+’ of the community) who used their talents for political ends, or expressed their orientation through their work.

This year’s faces of 2022 are: Keith Haring, Doris Brabham Hatt, Fiore de Henriquez, Mark Aguhar and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Discover more about their art and lives in our LGBT+ Reading List and their biographies below.

Our LGBT+ Reading list [RLO]

Hallam Library has a range of resources to support UK LGBT+ History Month. You can find examples of the artist’s work on the Hallam Library LGBT+ curated reading list alongside a range of LGBT+ books, journal articles, DVDs, picture books and comics within the Library to help you explore narratives, social history, academic texts and fiction aimed at all age ranges.

Explore our LGBT+ Reading List here.

LGBT Magazine Archive

If you want to delve back in time with vintage publications ranging from 1954 - 2015… take a look at the ProQuest LGBT Magazine Archive! The collection is an archival run of twenty six of the most influential, longest-running magazine publications covering LGBT interests. The collection includes the pre-eminent US and UK titles – The Advocate and Gay Times, respectively and chronicles more than six decades of the history and culture of the LGBT community.

About the artists

Keith Haring (4 May 1958 – 16 February 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. Haring's popularity grew from his spontaneous drawings in the city’s subways - chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylised images on blank black advertising spaces. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989 and his later work often conveyed political and societal themes; anti-crack, anti-apartheid, safe sex, homosexuality and AIDS through his own iconography.

Website > https://www.haring.com/

Jean-Michel Basquiat (22 December 1960 – 12 August 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Website > https://www.basquiat.com/

Doris Brabham Hatt (24 September 1890 – 27 August 1969) was a painter and printmaker, was a pioneer of Modernism in Britain. In 1915, while at Goldsmiths College, London, Hatt designed a First World War recruiting poster, featuring St George and the Dragon. It was successful in a competition organised by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, becoming 'poster no. 108' with a first print run of 50,000 and a second run later that year. Hatt first exhibited her paintings with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1918. Her work was initially influenced by the way the French modernist movement was being interpreted in Britain but as she began to travel, she was able to see works by Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque at first hand, the influence of Modernism deepened. Hatt exhibited her work for five decades, featuring in over 40 exhibitions in Clevedon, Clifton, Bath, Oxford, London and Paris. Doris was a woman ahead of her time – a feminist and socialist whose remarkable life and work have remained surprisingly little known.

Website > https://swheritage.org.uk/museum-of-somerset/doris-hatt/

Fiore de Henriquez (1921-2004) was an Italian-British sculptor. Following her exhibition debut in Florence in 1947 De Henriquez moved to Britain and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1950. In 1951, she produced work to commemorate the Festival of Britain, for which she earned the then enormous fee of £4,000. De Henriquez created portrait sculptures of a wide range of individuals, including Igor Stravinsky, Margot Fonteyn, Peter Ustinov, John F. Kennedy, Vivien Leigh, the Queen Mother, Oprah Winfrey and Laurence Olivier. Towards the end of the 1970s, she began to travel in East Asia, and carried out commissions for clients in Japan and Hong Kong. She was a prolific artist, and known to have created some 4000 portraits between 1948 and her death in 2004. De Henriquez's gender identity informed much of her work, with its recurring motifs of paired heads, conjoined figures, and ambiguous mythological creatures.

Website > https://artuk.org/discover/artists/de-henriquez-fiore-19212004

Mark Aguhar (16 May 1987 – 12 March 2012) was an American activist, writer and multimedia fine artist known for her multidisciplinary work about gender, beauty and existing as a racial minority, while being body positive and transgender femme-identified. Aguhar was made famous by her Tumblr blog that questioned the mainstream representation of the "glossy glorification of the gay white male body".

Website > https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5bwm8/mark-aguhar-art-id-rather-be-beautiful-than-male

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UK LGBT+ History Month February 2022: Politics In Art: The Arc is Long