Pop-Up Museum in NYC

LGBT life is at the center of a series of exhibits in New York as the city welcomes its first gay marriages

Yesterday the first of several hundred gay and lesbian couples tied the knot in New York City. It’s estimated that the state will earn as much as $155 million from same-sex weddings within the first year of being made legal.

The city also introduced a new Pop-Up Museum of Queer History that’s been transforming spaces throughout the city into temporary art and history installations that celebrate the LGBT experience.

Courtesy of L.J. Roberts

Curator Hugh Ryan helped to create the exhibits to showcase diverse stories within the community by working with MIX, New York City’s Experimental Queer Film Festival. It first got started as a one-night-only installation in queer communal home in Brooklyn as part of Quorom Forum, a series of events this past January. Almost 40 different artists created installations for hundreds of people that night.

Now, many local and internationally known artists have stepped up, including I’m From Driftwood with ties to Philly (the website tells the stories of LGBT people in their own words).

If you get to the city this summer, here a few other worthwhile exhibitions from the program:

Daniel Lang (Levitsky) is a performer who creates his shows from found items. For this latest exhibition, he pulls from the notebooks of Carl Van Vechten, a writer and photographer from the 1920s.

Using a Barbie Knitting Machine from 1974, L.J. Roberts makes queer crafts. She uses words and common images with a new twist – like knitted barbed wire and felt signage that is displayed in galleries, museums and public spaces around the country.

Anna Campbell‘s work focuses on abstractions and representations of heroic masculinity through mixed media. For the latest show, she uses 1,000 matchbooks styled after 1950s bar matchbooks – with passages from her grandmother’s memoir.

For a full list of exhibits and their locations, click here.

For images of the first same-sex marriages in New York, click here.