A display featuring dresses on loan from drag queens Jodie Santana and Blanche Dubois is being installed as part of an exhibition that opens Friday, April 4, in Sharp Museum. (Photo by Todd Duermyer)
March 28, 2025
SIU’s Sharp Museum’s new exhibitions include celebrating LGBTQ+ community
CARBONDALE, Ill. — Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Sharp Museum will open three new exhibitions in April, including one that celebrates the region’s LGBTQ+ community.
“In a time of great erasure, it is important to preserve our histories,” said T Lance, the museum’s curator of exhibits. “I look forward to bringing visibility of our greater community’s experiences by telling their stories through these exhibitions. Sharp Museum is not only for those on campus. but we are also the greater Southern Illinois region’s museum.”
The exhibitions are:
- April 4-Oct. 31 — West Gallery: Multiple artists, “Queer Stories, Queer Spaces — Southern Illinois Histories and Queertographies.” Reception: 4:30-7 p.m. Friday, April 4.
- April 11-Sept. 25 — Saluki Gallery: Nicholas Blair, “Castro to Christopher, Gay Streets of America, 1979-1986.” Reception: 4:30-7 p.m. April 11. Blair will discuss his work at 3:30 p.m. in the museum auditorium.
- April 18-May 31 — Hall of Art: Monica Turner, “The Way Out is in Deeper.” Reception: 4-6 p.m. April 18.
As with all exhibitions, the artwork represents the viewpoints of its creators, not SIU. SIU complies with the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act and State Officials and Employees Ethics Act.
‘Queer Stories, Queer Spaces’
Lance said “Queer Stories, Queer Spaces” is a celebration of two years of researching, compiling and designing a collaborative exhibition. The reception will allow visitors to listen to the “rich oral histories, experience the collective memories and learn the facts and figures of our local queer community in the greater Carbondale area in the 1970s and 1980s,” they said.
The event is cosponsored by Sharp Museum and SIU Carbondale’s Paulette Curkin Pride Resource Center.
Lance added that visitors will be encouraged to leave their queer histories in the story booth that is a part of the exhibition, and that resources will also be available for people to learn how to become involved and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community.
‘Castro to Christopher’
Photographs by visual artist Nicholas Blair capture the period “after Stonewall and before the worst days of the AIDS epidemic” illustrating what life was like for gay Americans. The exhibition features nearly 60 photographs of his work.
Blair’s book, “Castro to Christopher, Gay Streets of America, 1979-1986,” features 126 photographs and notes that “if the specter of AIDS were not hanging over these photographs, it would be as if they were showing us a parallel universe where full equality under law for LGBTQ people could have come so much sooner. As they stand, these historic images are time capsules of a few places in America, where, for the very first time, and for a very short while, it was ok to be gay.”
Blair earned his MFA in photography in 1981 from the San Francisco Art Institute.
‘The Way Out is in Deeper’
Turner’s work “focuses on constructing environments that simulate memories of moments in time when it felt like the space the viewer was inhabiting was not made for them, or does not want them there, or both,” Lance said.
Lance said Turner’s pieces use “forced perspective and a combative relationship with gravity to disorient the viewer and utilize highly saturated colors to display a heightened sense of reality. Turner used cardboard, paper, paint, drawings and sometimes photorealistic landscape images to build the scenes for this work.”
Turner earned a bachelor’s degree in ceramics in 2017 from the Kansas City Art Institute and is working toward a Master of Fine Arts degree in ceramics from SIU Carbondale.
Museum hours
For more information, contact T Lance at 618-453-5388 or t.lance@siu.edu or visit museum.siu.edu. Sharp Museum hours are noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1-4 p.m. Saturday. The museum is closed Sunday and Monday and during all SIU breaks and holidays.