Part One: Our Focus and Audience

Audience

We designed this archive, first and foremost, for the queer community. Queer contributions to the arts are erased or marginalized in mainstream artistic archives and collections, and all too often this just fuels this idea that being queer is a recent phenomenon, instead of something that has been around throughout civilizations and time-periods. Our goal with this archive is to provide a place where queer people can go to see how they have contributed and been represented in visual art throughout various points in time; we want to step in and show that queer art history is highlighted rather than ignored. We know that by documenting the history of communties that have been traditionally treated as invisible, we can act as a "challenge to other archives’ monopoly over representing history" that results in forced silence of marginalized voices (Wakimoto et al., 2013, p. 297). 

Conscious of this need to be seen and to make the materials easily accessible for users who may not have any previous historical or artistic knowledge, but still have the basic human desire to see themselves represented, we chose our selections from various points in time, including multiple types of visual mediums, and all with the unifying theme of a queer story being experienced - as we believe in the power of story to resonate with viewers regardless of background knowledge a user may have.

During our designing process, we were also thinking of secondary users who may also be interested in the archive, such as art history scholars or enthusiasts, who can utilize the archive to see a variety of works and gain some perspective about how they overlap with queer studies. Being mindful of this helped us when deciding how to divide up into time periods, by referring to eras used in art history. Similarly, when selecting items we considered the perspective of potential users focused on feminist and gender studies - there is often a lot of overlap between feminist studies and queer studies, and so looking through the collection can inform them about how gender is represented at different points in art. Furthermore, as with all art, it can be a source of inspiration or historical allusions for current artists to draw from when creating their own work. Art is often in conversation with other art, so having access to see what’s been done before can inform what’s done moving forward.

Ultimately, a main takeaway we wanted all users to have is that there isn’t one type queer art and they aren’t only specific to one time period or culture, and that drove us to make sure our achive reflected that by not being limited to having one specific or traditional definition of visual art.

A Note on Terminology:

We chose to use the term queer for our archive as we felt it was the most inclusive while still keeping a scope for our archive. During the time periods we cover, we may, for example, show a man who was married to a woman but still had sexual relationships with other men, and this was considered normal for the time period. Assigning labels like gay or bisexual to a relationship felt like it didn't capture the full context of how sexuality was viewed at certain time periods, where as "queer" is a flexible and fluid enough term to encompass those relationships, even though we are still aware that it's not a term that would have been used at the time.