QUEER|ART|PRIDE is an annual summer festival celebrating the brilliant artistry and resilience of NYC’s queer and trans communities during Pride Month.

Queer|Art is pleased to announce the 2025 edition of Queer|Art|Pride, now in its 9th year. From neon-lit exhibitions and intimate portraiture, to Black trans cinema and a powerful literary tribute to Marsha P. Johnson, this year’s Pride events span a dynamic range of artistic voices and disciplines, all rooted in queer community and legacy building.

First, on June 12th, QA presents the opening reception for madder and madder and hotter and hotter, a group exhibition co-presented with Lite Brite Neon and New York Live Arts. Taking over the Ford Foundation Live Gallery, this luminous show spotlights neon as a queer medium of resistance and radiance. Featuring works by Jeffrey Gibson, Lola Flash, Demian DinéYazhi', Nelson Santos, Marie Watt, E.J. Hill, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Glenn Ligon, the show draws on feminist and trans legacies to speak to an urgent present. The show will also feature selections from the QA Artist Edition series, an annual neon commission now in its third year.

In partnership with IFC Center, our popular screening event T4TV returns on June 18th with a lineup of boundary pushing short films by Black trans filmmakers. Curated by interdisciplinary artist and 2021 Illuminations Grant Winner Lee Laa Ray Guillory, this program celebrates the genre-defying work of a new vanguard in Black trans cinema.

The following day on June 19th, QA teams up with The Poetry Project to co-host MARSHA!—an evening with artist and filmmaker Tourmaline to launch her new book, MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. This intimate Juneteenth gathering includes a reading, live performances, and a post-event talkback with Egypt LaBeija, offering a lively reflection of Marsha’s enduring legacy.

Finally, opening June 27th at Pen + Brush is I made it home, a solo exhibition by photographer, poet, and organizer Golden. Commissioned as the 2024 QA Community Portrait Project, the show features intimate portraits of QA community members in spaces of personal meaning, offering a powerful meditation on collective identity and chosen home.

Read more about our full slate of programming and its sensational roster of guest stars below!

madder and madder and hotter and hotter

A NEON EXHIBITION co-presented by new york live arts

Co-organized by Queer|Art and Lite Brite Neon, madder and madder and hotter and hotter brings together artworks that cite, transmit, remix, and illuminate queer, trans, and feminist lineages for an urgent now. The exhibition's title comes from Audre Lorde's daughter, who insisted on speech, knowing that censored or repressed language grows madder and hotter inside one's body; the language on walls, here, glows. Offering balms, songs, chants, and signs, the works in this show mix the concrete qualities of words and sculpture with the ineffability of light.

Artists in this exhibition include QA Mentors Jeffrey Gibson, Lola Flash, Demian DinéYazhi', and Nelson Santos, alongside Marie Watt, E.J. Hill, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Glenn Ligon. Anchoring the show are three QA Artist Editions, commissioned annually to celebrate the work of contemporary artists in QA's community while paying homage to the queer trailblazers who came before them—all co-created with Lite Brite Neon, the queer and trans-led neon fabrication studio responsible for collaboratively producing the works on view. Surrounded by ephemera from Lite Brite Neon's studio, the luminous pieces cite historical icons from Marsha P. Johnson to the collective ACT UP, as well as pop cultural references and ancestral wisdom. Together, they interpellate queer subjects in a bright, warm shout.

madder and madder and hotter and hotter opens Thursday, June 12th, with a public reception from 5:30–7 PM at the Ford Foundation Live Gallery, located in the Live Arts Lobby at 219 W 19th St. The show is on view through September 5th.

T4TV

a celebration of black trans film

MARSHA!

readings & performances honoring marsha p. johnson

I made it home

a solo exhibition by golden

Queer|Art and Pen + Brush are pleased to co-present, I made it home, a solo exhibition by photographer, poet, and organizer Golden. The exhibited portraits were commissioned as the 2024 Community Portrait Project, the seventh edition of an annual tradition celebrating artists in their growing and vibrant network. This new body of work comprises intimate portraits of fifteen artists and cultural workers within the QA community in spaces of deep personal resonance–apartments, studios, workplaces, parks, theaters, and exhibitions. Beyond the beauty of each subject, these portraits reflect the lives they’ve built and worlds they’ve nourished, revealing how identity is shaped by the environments we create and inhabit.

In their interdisciplinary practice, Golden’s highly attentive process centers collaboration, trust, and storytelling. Guided by a creative ethos of care and respect, they allow each sitter to determine how they are seen. In this sense, they subvert the traditional photographer-subject hierarchy, and instead privilege self-definition as an artistic right.

I made it home celebrates queer and trans collectivity while honoring the distinct narratives within it. The sprawling project spans several months, multiple states, and includes sitters from different creative disciplines. In some cases, successive generations are pictured, giving us a glimpse into a dynamic community in bloom. The result is a multifaceted series that resists homogeneity in favor of lived complexity. 

The exhibition design draws on visual cues from historical salons, public gathering spaces, and domestic interiors. By collapsing these diverse architectural references, the exhibition evokes a spirit of belonging that transcends physical spaces. In Golden’s world, home is defined not by brick and bone, but by connection, memory, and kin.

I made it home opens Friday, June 27th, with a public reception from 6–8 PM at Pen + Brush at 29 E 22nd St.

The 2024 Community Portrait Project was made possible by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

ABOUT THE 2025 QA PRIDE FLYER ARTIST

BENJY RUSSELL

Benjy Russell is a self-taught, multidisciplinary queer artist and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He was raised on the Chickasaw Reservation in Oklahoma. For the past 17 years, Russell has lived in rural Tennessee within an intentional queer community. As an artist, his practice incorporates photography, sculpture, set design, and ecological land art.

“My work is deeply informed by the intersection of philosophy, science, and art—an approach that allows me to view the world through a prism of possibility, questioning and unlearning harmful, outdated social structures. Science fiction has long served as a guiding framework, offering a vision of how we might shape the future by first imagining it. In creating fictionalized versions of the future, we take the first step toward manifesting it into reality.”

Much of his photography practice involves practical, or in-camera, effects—using materials like sculpture, lighting, wires, and mirrors to push the boundaries of what photography can achieve and to evoke a sense of magical realism. By creating physical moments of impossibility, he invites the viewer to consider alternative realities and expanded possibilities. His work seeks to capture the joy and wonder of existence, offering glimpses of both the present and a reimagined future.

You can purchase a print of Benjy’s artwork used for the QA Pride flyer, 50 ways to leave your body, here!

PRIDE ARCHIVE