Lesbian Art Was Never Missing. Museums Just Weren’t Looking

For decades, lesbian artists have been making work about sexuality, identity, desire, bodies, history and the wonderfully complicated business of being alive.

The problem wasn’t a lack of lesbian art. It was who institutions decided was important enough to remember.

Three exhibitions in Los Angeles are now putting renewed attention on the work of Monica Majoli, Millie Wilson and Susan Silton, artists whose careers span decades of feminist, conceptual and queer art. Together, the shows also reopen a larger conversation about why lesbian artists have so often fallen through the cracks of mainstream art history.

Monica Majoli goes back to the lesbian archive

For Monica Majoli, that history is quite literally being placed inside an archive.

Her exhibition Countervision brings new drawings together with material Majoli researched and selected from the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood.

The project draws partly on the history of the Ovulars, feminist photography workshops held at a lesbian commune in rural Oregon between 1979 and 1983.

These women weren’t waiting for a museum to decide their lives were culturally significant.

They were documenting themselves.

Countervision runs until 21 November.

Susan Silton finally gets a major survey

At the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck is the artist’s first major survey.

More than 150 works span photography, video, audio, installations, graphics and text, presenting Silton as an important figure within West Coast conceptual, feminist and queer art.

The title comes from Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, connecting the exhibition to another major figure in feminist and lesbian cultural history.

And perhaps there’s something fitting about the title.

Recovering queer history often feels exactly like diving into a wreck: searching through what survived after institutions decided what was worth keeping.

Then there’s The Museum of Lesbian Dreams

Artist Millie Wilson has spent decades playing with precisely those institutional conventions.

Her ongoing project The Museum of Lesbian Dreams invents a fictional museum through paintings, photographs, sculpture and installation — using the language and authority of museums to question how sexuality is classified, displayed and historicised.

Its first retrospective exhibition opens at Cal State LA on 24 October and runs until 10 April 2027.

A fake lesbian museum becoming the subject of a very real institutional retrospective?

Babes, sometimes history does eventually develop a sense of humour.

Why were lesbian artists so easy to overlook?

Lesbian artists have often found themselves caught between categories.

Too queer for some histories of feminism.

Too female for male-dominated histories of queer art.

Too political to be treated as purely aesthetic.

And sometimes too specifically lesbian for institutions that preferred queerness once it could be made broad, marketable and comfortably universal.

The current exhibitions don’t magically solve decades of under-recognition.

But they do something important.

They show that the work was there. The artists were there. The archives were there. The history existed.

We just need to stop mistaking not being displayed for not existing.