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For many gay and lesbian travelers, a city's arts scene ranks right up there with nightlife, scenic beauty, or dining when it comes to deciding where to plan a vacation. Devotees of certain artists, for instance, have been known to drop everything and fly to some faraway land to catch the latest Picasso or Caravaggio traveling exhibit. With that in mind, here's a sampling of some of the many stellar museums in the eastern United States (using the Mississippi River as the dividing line), any of them with strong thematic ties to the lesbian and gay community. Gay interest aside, these are all museums that any devotee of visual - especially contemporary - art would enjoy visiting.
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Although it's the setting for the American version of the ground-breaking TV series “Queer As Folk”, Pittsburgh seems an unlikely home for a museum that celebrates one of the world's most cutting-edge and gay-identified artists. But the stellar Andy Warhol Museum, which celebrates the life of the late pop-art icon who grew up in nearby Oakland, occupies Pittsburgh's dramatic Frick and Lindsay building, a 1911 steel supply warehouse. The 3,000 works here range from the expected “Campbell Soup Cans” to countless earlier sketches and drawings, as well as Warhol's time capsules, boxes in which he stuffed each day's receipts, notes, lists, and other minutiae. This engaging, and often very funny, museum contains abundant commentary on Warhol's life (and his homosexuality).
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Anchoring Grant Park you'll find one of the world's great repositories of creative endeavor, the Art Institute of Chicago, whose 300,000-piece collection spans more than 40 centuries and includes the most impressive display of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works outside of the Louvre, as well as such iconic works as Grant Wood's “American Gothic”, Edward Hopper's “Nighthawks”, and Rene Magritte's “Time Transfixed”. The highlights go on and on, but in this city of famous skyscrapers, you shouldn't miss the Graham Study Center, which contains some 130,000 architectural sketches and drawings. And the museum's mesmerizing photography collection includes a significant chunk of Alfred Stieglitz's lifeworks (donated after his death by his widow, Georgia O'Keeffe), plus a hauntingly evocative contemporary shot of Provincetown by Joel Meyerowitz.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland Adjacent to the leafy northern Baltimore campus of Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore Museum of Art contains a varied and impressive survey of works spanning several centuries and continents. A few thousand of the museum's holdings were donated by Baltimore natives Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone, two unmarried sisters who, with help from their friend (and sometime lover of Etta) Gertrude Stein, collected works by Henri Matisse (500 of them!), Picasso, Gauguin, and similar luminaries. Interestingly, this is not the only important institution in the neighborhood that owes much of its success to a pair of prominent single women; the esteemed medical school at Johns Hopkins was begun with funding from Mary Elizabeth Garrett. She, with her lover, Ms. M. Carey Thomas, raised the necessary half-million dollars to open the school. More than $300,000 came from Garrett herself, with the proviso that the school admit women on the same terms that it admitted men (an almost scandalous notion in those days). Garrett went on to fund and help found southeastern Pennsylvania's prestigious Bryn Mawr School for girls and Bryn Mawr College.
The Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York In a city containing some of the world's top museums, the Guggenheim has always been an exceptional venue for modern and contemporary, and often provocative, painting, photography, and other fine arts. It was founded in 1937 by Solomon R. Guggenheim with the specific aim of showcasing abstract paintings. Of particular gay interest are works by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the tremendous collection of Robert Mapplethorpe photography (a gallery presenting rotating exhibits at the museum bears his name). And should you happen to find yourself traveling abroad, of course don't miss the Guggenheim Bilbao near Barcelona, Spain, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, and the Deutche Guggenheim in Berlin.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. A short walk north of the Mall you'll find the outstanding National Museum of Women in the Arts, begun in the early '60s by renowned patrons of the arts Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and Wallace F. Holladay, who sought to rectify the distinct lack of art by women found in most museums. Their ambitious efforts grew into the present-day museum in 1987 and today includes works by such prominent female artists as Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, Elaine de Kooning, and Judy Chicago. Creative rotating exhibits are held throughout the year, and an extensive library and research center help further the museum's mission of recognizing the achievements of women artists of all periods and nationalities. While you're in Washington, consider also paying a visit to the estimable Phillips Collection, the first permanent museum of modern art in the United States; represented are Georges Braque, Pierre Bonnard, Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse, as well as gay artists David Hockney, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and David Hare.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania This imposing museum, whose front steps were made famous in the movie “Rocky”, is wonderful for several reasons: its contemporary collection, with many works by Picasso, Braque, and Matisse as well as a number of post-World War II artists; its outstanding Marcel Duchamp collection, which includes renditions of his “Nude Descending a Staircase” (the “nude,” people often overlook, is male); and a fine collection of local artist (and bisexual) Thomas Eakins' photos and paintings of young, virile men crewing and boating on the nearby Schuylkill River. If you get a chance, do as Eakins used to do: make the short trip across the Delaware River from Philadelphia to Camden, New Jersey, to the former home (now a museum) of the artists' close and kindred spirit, poet Walt Whitman.
The Little Black Book
Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 412-237-8300, www.warhol.org
Art Institute of Chicago, South Michigan Ave. at Adams St., Chicago, Illinois, 312-443-3600, www.artic.edu
Baltimore Museum of Art, North Charles and 31st Streets., Baltimore, Maryland, 410-396-7101, www.artbma.org
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, New York, New York, 212-423-3500; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, 575 Broadway, New York, 212-423-3500, www.guggenheim.org
National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue, North West, Washington, DC, 202-783-5000, www.nmwa.org
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 215-763-8100, www.philamuseum.org
Phillips Collection, 1600-1612 21st Street North West, Washington, DC, 202-387-2151, www.phillipscollection.org
