Queering the Burton

York museums Trust (YMT), specifically York Art Gallery (YAG) and York LGBT Forum have formed a partnership, the Queering Group, with an aim to broaden the stories being told within YAG’s collections, enabling greater inclusion and social justice/equality for the LGBTQ+ community.

As a precursor to the Bloomsbury exhibition scheduled for 2022 at YAG, a group famous for their unconventional relationships with one another, this initiative with York’s LGBTQ Forum group will focus on the reinterpretation of some of our own works in the permanent collection.

We aim to work within the heritage organisation to uncover, understand and interpret the lives of people linked to the site as collectors/artists/craftspeople, who challenged conventions of sexuality and gender diversity. In answer to this we have formed the Queering Group. The use of Queer in the groups title is a positive affirmation. As a definition Queer has a number of meanings, and in this instance, our aim is to de-weaponize the term Queer, a reclaimed slur that we use positively as an inclusive word for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

Upcoming Events:

Queer your Labels!
Saturday 17th November 2021 / 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm

How can we use our identities and experiences to reveal stories often made invisible? How can we navigate using current LGBTQI terms for historical figures and artists? And what does it even mean to represent your gender identity and expression in an artwork – or its label? Join curator and educator Claire Mead to look at objects in the collection from a queer angle. Find out more here.

Past Events:

Our Voices
Saturday 23^rd October 2021 / 10am-1pm

Becky Gee, Curator of Fine Art and Sas Greenwood, Creative Learning Producer, will be on hand to guide participants through a “look behind the scenes” in our store, take in a tour of the Burton Gallery, ending in a session focussing on label creation. Find out more here.

How to Queer a Museum with Matt Smith
Saturday 30 October / 1:30 pm – 4:00 pm

Drawing on two of his exhibitions– Queering the Museum at Birmingham Museum and Losing Venus at the Pitt Rivers Museum – this session will explore how Matt has interrogated and subverted museum displays to allow queerness and LGBTQI+ lives to come to light, and questions whether the museum space is a good space to be queer. Find out more here.