Jonathan D. Katz
Personal Information
Description
Jonathan David Katz is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer. He is currently Associate Professor of Practice in Art History and Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Katz is a founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the very first queer scholarship on a number of artists beginning in the early 1990s. His scholarship spans a period from the late 19th-century to the present, with an emphasis on the US, but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality and desire, producing some of the key theoretical work in queer studies in the visual arts. Katz has curated more queer art exhibitions than anyone else in the world.
Books
Masculinities
When it was first published over a decade ago, R.W. Connell's ground-breaking text on the nature and construction of masculine identity rapidly became a classic. In Masculinities Connell argues that there is not one masculinity, but many different masculinities, each associated with different positions of power. In a world gender order that continues to privilege men over women, but also raises difficult issues for men and boys, her account is more relevant than ever before. In this new edition, Connell discusses the development of masculinity studies in the ten years since the book's initial publication. She explores global gender relations, new theories, and practical uses of masculinity research. She also addresses the politics of masculinities, and the implications of masculinity research for understanding current world issues. Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided world, dominated by neo-conservative politics, Connell's account highlights a series of compelling questions about the future of human society. Masculinities has been translated into many languages and in 2004 it was voted one of the ten most influential books in Australian sociology. This second edition will be essential reading for students taking courses in gender studies, and a valuable reference for readers across the humanities and social sciences. the fundamental study on masculinity as a formative factor of modern social inequality, and also one of the most important books in the social sciences in recent years' Professor Ilse Lenz, Ruhr University, Bochum
The First Homosexuals
A groundbreaking, global survey of queer art, featuring more than 300 artworks made following the introduction of the term ‘homosexual’ in 1869 An unprecedented and historic new book, The First Homosexuals traces the evolution of the homosexual identity through an archive of more than 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and film stills from around the world – many presented in a queer, global, and colonial context for the first time. Accompanying the works are twenty-two original, insightful essays by leading experts in art and queer history, each focusing on one geographical region – from Japan to Australia to the Indigenous populations of South America. Ranging from well-known masterpieces to works by unknown artists and pieces rarely considered in the context of sexuality, The First Homosexuals offers a stunning and illuminating look at the first self-consciously queer art. The book accompanies a groundbreaking exhibition of the same name presented at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago.
Intimacies
"A novel from the author of A Separation, a taut and electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She's drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. Her friend Jana witnesses a seemingly random act of violence, a crime the interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with as she befriends the victim's sister. And she's pulled into explosive political fires: her work interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes becomes precarious as their relationship is unbound by shifting language and meaning. This woman is the voice in the ear of many, but what command does that give her, and how vulnerable does that leave her? Her coolly impassioned views on power, love, and violence, are tested, both in her personal intimacies and in her role at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her; it is her drive towards truth, and love, that throws into stark relief what she wants from her life"--
John Waters
Known as a highly entertaining and controversial filmmaker, John Waters is also an artist and photographer. "John Waters: Change of Life" is a collection of his still photographic works made over the past decade. Includes essays by guest authors and an interview with Waters.
Art AIDS America / Art AIDS America Chicago Boxed Set
This slipcased boxed set contains the two volumes: Art AIDS America, published in 2015 to coincide with the original exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum, and the new book Art AIDS America Chicago. Art AIDS America included work by Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, among many others. Taken together, these two volumes are a stunning overview of the artistic response over the last thirty years to the AIDS epidemic in America, with voices from every community impacted by the crisis.
Andy Warhol
Love Letters
Art AIDS America
Art AIDS America' is the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of 30 years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool conceptual foundations of postmodernism and toward a new, more insistently political and autobiographical voice. 'Art AIDS America' surveys more than 100 works of American art from the early 1980s to the present, reintroducing and exploring the whole spectrum of artistic responses to HIV/AIDS, from in-your-face activism to quiet elegy.
Hide/Seek
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, companion volume to an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, traces the defining presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, and portraits from leading American artists. Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism. Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own. Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.
