Robert Reinhardt and JP Calabro are two Queer artists who have a forty year age difference between them, yet who share the same artistic language of abstraction. And though they engage with abstraction very differently, Reinhardt with mono-printing processes, and Calabro with painting, the same perennial questions confront the viewer of the their artworks as does all abstract art: What makes this abstract art relevant to our personal and communal lives? For our specific cultural community, What does it have to say about our Queer life in Philadelphia and America?

If an experience of being LGBTQIA+ is a fundamental distrust of reality as it is constructed and represented by society, then Queer abstract art represents that questioning distrust. It is the consequence of the relentless need to be authentic, to construct a language that is natural to oneself. It is a means to emancipate the imagination and free it from the confinement of a realistic depiction of the human figure, still life and landscape of the canonical beaux arts tradition. It is, like Queer life, rebellious, individualistic, unconventional and confrontational.

These artworks are powerfully Queer, representing both the fascination and liberation experienced through the process of discovering an authentic personal voice, as well as the courage to make a stand for a new perspective. There are those who reject abstract art outright as obfuscating art, making appreciation impossible. Instead, we would encourage you to approach these abstract artworks with an open, curious, meditative mind, observing them with slow looking, allowing them to reveal their unique individuality, as you might on being introduced to a new person, wondering if they are Queer, like you.

In a Queer art community that is dominated by figurative artworks, we are honored to have curated these abstract artworks as powerful alternative Queer voices, the unique artistic vision of Robert Reinhardt and JP Calabro, recipients of the Juror Award in the WWCC 16th Annual Juried Art Exhibition.

Guava Rhee and Janus Ourma
Curators