Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters

A new and stimulating way of looking at Old Master paintings with a foreword by Hanya Yanagihara, contributions by Jonathan Anderson, Jessica Bell Brown, Christopher Lew, Jason Reynolds, Legacy Russell, and Russell Tovey, and works by Jenna Gribbon, Doron Langberg, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Salman Toor.

Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters is an exciting volume featuring the work of four New York-based artists, each presenting a single new work in conversation with celebrated paintings in The Frick Collection, with particular emphasis on issues of gender and queer identity typically excluded from narratives of early modern European art. The idea of commissioning four works to display at Frick Madison emerged when four masterpieces by Vermeer, Holbein, and Rembrandt were loaned to exhibitions. Works by Jenna Gribbon, Doron Langberg, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Salman Toor were commissioned to replace them, alongside other works by these artists.

This book is the result of the four New York artists' responses to the Frick's collection, and the conversations their work engendered. Written contributions are provided by Jonathan Anderson, Jessica Bell Brown, Christopher Lew, Jason Reynolds, Legacy Russell, and Russell Tovey.

Aimee Ng is a curator, The Frick Collection, New York.

Xavier F. Salomon is deputy director & Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection, New York.

Stephen Truax is an artist, writer and curator. Born 1985, Glenview, IL he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His solo exhibition How Will I Know, was organized by Anne Luther, 67 Ludlow, New York, NY in 2016.

Jonathan Anderson is a Northern Irish fashion designer and the founder of JW Anderson.

Jessica Bell Brown is a writer and art historian based in Harlem. She is curator and head of the contemporary art department, Baltimore Museum of Art.

Christopher Y. Lew is chief artistic director of the Horizon foundation, a new art foundation focused on supporting emerging and mid-career artists launched in Los Angeles 2022.

Jason Reynolds is an award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. His works include Ghost (2016) and two more books in what became his New York Times best-selling Track series, Patina (2017) and Sunny and As Brave As You, winner of the 2016 Kirkus Prize.

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the executive director & chief curator of the experimental new media, art, and performance institution The Kitchen.

Russell Tovey as an actor and producer, known for The Good Liar (2019).

Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. She is best known for her bestselling novel A Little Life (2015), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and for being the Editor in Chief of T Magazine.

Toyin Ojih Odutola was born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and moved to Alabama as a child. Her first solo museum exhibition in New York, To Wander Determined, was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017-18. In late 2020, London's Barbican Centre presented A Countervailing Theory, which later traveled to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg in Denmark and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Her work is in the collections of numerous museums, among them, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC. She lives in New York.

Jenna Gribbon (b. 1978) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her work is in the collections of the X Museum in Beijing, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and the Brant Foundation in New York, and has been included in exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville; the Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg; and the FLAG Art Foundation, New York. She lives in New York.

Doron Langberg (b. 1985) was born in Yokneam Moshava, Israel. His first solo exhibition in London, Give Me Love, was presented at Victoria Miro (2021). Langberg's work was also featured in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2022), in Any distance Between Us at RISD Museum in Providence (2021-22), and Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond at Berlin's Schwules Museum (2020-21). His work is in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in New York.

Salman Toor (b. 1983) was born in Lahore, Pakistan. Toor has had two solo museum exhibitions: No Ordinary Love at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2022) and How Will I Know at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-21). Recent exhibitions include Any Distance between Us at RISD Museum
in Providence (2021-22) and solo presentations The Pleasure Pavilion: A Series of Installations at Luhring Augustine, New York (2020-21), and I Know a Place at Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi, India (2019). His work is in public collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Tate Modern, London; RISD Museum, Providence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He lives in New York.