Solace

April 04, 2025 - November 10, 2025

Cunningham Theatre Center - On Site Exhibition

With the increasing politicization and erasure of identity, many LGBTQ+ individuals seek refuge in community. We capture friends, partners, lovers, strangers, family, and ourselves to eternalize our persistent joy and expression despite the governmental onslaught. Stumbling across the pieces compiled here in the galleries’ archives has been a highlight of my time as an intern. Solace celebrates and showcases the resilience of queer communities through portraiture, revealing the complexities behind those who came before us and resisting the reduction of our struggle to statistics and abstraction. All of the subjects in Solace embody LGBTQ+ identities – an obvious fact for some, but a lifelong secret for others. These images are a testament to the enduring power of queer existence and survival, one I hope consoles the Davidson community I leave behind as a senior.

Solace draws inspiration from a 1974 portrait of a Black drag queen from New York City entitled Ladies and Gentlemen (Broadway). Andy Warhol took over 500 of these Polaroids at the request of Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino, each spotlighting one of 14 models that Warhol recruited from the popular Gilded Grape club. 125 Polaroids were selected to be enlarged onto silkscreens for the final Ladies and Gentlemen collection. Its debut in 1975 did not name the models, but the Andy Warhol Foundation has since determined 13 of their identities: Marsha P. Johnson, Alphanso Panell, Iris, Wilhelmina Ross, Easha McCleary, Helen Morales, Ivette, Kim, Lurdes, Michele Long, Monique, Vicki Peters, and Broadway. Warhol paid them $50 for each photoshoot—in contrast, the Ladies and Gentlemen collection became his most lucrative commission. Facing our current administration, a turn to Broadway’s surviving original portrait decenters doom-filled narratives to insist transgender people always have, and always will, persist.

This exhibition honors the impact of artistic and literary icons who shaped LGBTQ+ culture, even when their identities were not always acknowledged. Figures like dancer José Limón and author William Somerset Maugham are celebrated in their disciplines but scrubbed of queerness in their legacies. Seemingly disparate portraits like Lawrence Schiller’s photo of Marilyn Monroe nod to the presence of queerness even in the most hetero-typed sex symbols as she lived with her acting coach and partner Natasha Lyness for two years. Other featured moguls like Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, and Berenice Abbott, a photographer known for shooting lesbian and bisexual women, spent their careers advocating for LGBTQ+ rights. By situating these solo portraits alongside unapologetic expressions of queer love, such as Diane Arbus’s Two Friends at Home, NYC, which captures butch-femme intimacy, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s White Gauze, this exhibition challenges the idea that queer history is fragmented. Instead, it demonstrates the continuous, unbroken existence of LGBTQ+ lives and how art has served as a comfort, a form of defiance, and a means of storytelling.

– Curated by Audrey Cobb ‘25 in loving memory of Loah