The seventh iteration of Swann Galleries’ LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture & History auction on Thursday, August 21, features an exciting selection of 20th and 21st-century fine art, photography, and ephemera from the community’s most prominent artists, authors, taste makers, and activists. “I’m thrilled to be in my second year at the helm of this sale,” said Corey Serrant, the Associate Director of Swann’s LGBTQ+ department. “This year’s offering will include a selection of works from the estate of notable LGBTQ+ rights advocate Dr. Charles Silverstein, with the proceeds of these works benefitting the NYC LGBT Community Center.”
The sale is led by a 1987 Hugh Steers oil-on-canvas portrait of Carl George, a friend and collector who worked freelance alongside Steers for the New York-based florist and party planner Michael Fenner. Executed in George’s kitchen between April and May of 1987, before Steers’s diagnosis with HIV, the artist utilized a lighter palette to portray his sitter. George was the first collector to acquire Steers’s work and collected a suite of oil works on paper over time.
The Swann Galleries auction also includes fine art and photography by Beauford Delaney, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Laura Aguilar, Iké Udé, and Jimmy DeSana as well as illustration art from the leather community, including works by Tom of Finland, The Hun, Domino, and Rex. Important manuscripts, archives, and books contain a large archive of lesbian pulp fiction books, a large selection of physique pictorials, and a first edition of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956).
A section of works has been generously donated by the Estate of Dr. Charles Silverstein. Proceeds from the sale of these items will benefit the NYC LGBT Community Center. Dr. Silverstein (1935–2023) was an American writer, therapist, and LGBTQ+ rights advocate who was best known for his 1973 graduate student presentation to the American Psychiatric Association, which led to the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness from the organization’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. He also penned the text The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. Highlights from the estate’s offering include works by Deni Ponty, Michael Leonard, and Bruce Kamerling.
View the LGBTQ+ Art, Material Culture & History auction catalogue.
For more information, visit swanngalleries.com.