Clifford Chance

Stonewall 50 is Arcus Americas' thirteenth annual Pride art exhibition in the Firm's New York office and the fourth in Washington, DC.

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a violent police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in the West Village in New York City, erupted into a series of spontaneous demonstrations by queer and trans people for their safety, survival, and right to exist. As the rebellion progressed over the course of three days, an international LGBT+ civil rights movement was born. In celebration and recognition of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall and World Pride, Stonewall 50 explores the far-reaching art and activism the uprising spawned: the artists and activists whose influence and contributions have been historically overlooked and the history of Pride, which began with the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970 and has expanded city by city into a worldwide phenomenon. The exhibition includes historical and contemporary artwork that traces these histories: photographs of early Gay Pride marches and pioneering activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera; works by contemporary and underrepresented historical artists who reflect on queer experience and visibility; and documentation of the increasingly intersectional focus of contemporary LGBT+ activism. 

Lolita Beckwith

Lolita Beckwith (Lolita Lens Photography) is a New York–based professional sports, concert, and street photographer. Her series of photographs and corresponding oral histories included in our exhibition were originally commissioned for Metanoia: Transformation Through AIDS Archives & Activism, an exhibition at the New York LGBTQ Community Center that explored community-based responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis. For the project, Beckwith photographed and interviewed HIV/AIDS activists, focusing on how the disease transformed and impacted their lives.

Nicholas Buffon

Nicholas Buffon is a painter and sculptor who lives and works in New York. His paintings of LGBTQ businesses, bars, and establishments in New York are part of an ongoing series that illustrates social spaces. In these paintings, Buffon fuses his own photographs with images from Google Street View, then renders the composite image in acrylic paint. Foreground and background coalesce, making every detail appear tightly in focus.

Liz Collins

Liz Collins is a New York–based artist who employs the materials, processes, and techniques of fiber and textile media. She incorporates vivid palettes and dynamic patterning to create work that varies in scale, from the object-based to the immersive and architectural, and straddles the divides between the functional, the decorative, and the expressive. Embracing optics, textures, color, and dimensionality, Collins re-creates her experience of the world as a place of stupendous wonder and cosmic energy.

Hoesy Corona

Hoesy Corona is a Baltimore, MD, and Tulsa, OK, based multidisciplinary, queer Mexican artist who considers what it means to be a latinx immigrant. Reoccurring themes of queerness, race, class, gender, nature, and celebration are present throughout his work. Corona's Climate-Ponchos are a series of wearable sculptures central to his ongoing performance and site-specific installation, Climate-Immigrants, a project that considers the impending plight of climate-induced migration worldwide and its effects on people of color.

Gordon Hall

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who examines the personal, relational, and political effects of the ways we relate to objects and architectural and social space. DETAILS is a series of photographic prints and a 48-page color zine that isolate moments from Hall's performance work focusing the viewer’s attention on the way bodies are performative, recognized, and gendered.

Jim Marks

Rainbow History Project's mission is to collect, preserve, and promote an active knowledge of the history, arts, and culture of metropolitan Washington, DC's diverse LGBTQ communities. The organization engages individuals of all backgrounds – particularly those from underrepresented groups. Since its founding, the project has recorded oral histories, recognized community pioneers, conducted research projects and public panels, and amassed a collection of documents, manuscripts and photographs for permanent storage at the Historical Society of Washington, DC.

Pamela Sneed

Pamela Sneed is a New York–based poet, writer, and performance and visual artist. In her collages, Sneed explores the relationship between word and image, figure and ground, color and shape to address her larger experience of the intersection of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Sneed's Mourning Series is a response to the ongoing culture of gun violence in America, the magnitude of which reminds the artist of the level of loss experienced during the AIDS crisis.