Shadow Park: Queer Counterpublics in the Art of Salman Toor
Salman Toor’s vivid paintings and drawings depict fleeting moments of sensuality, pleasure, and danger amid verdant parks, cemeteries, and gardens. Toor notes, “Landscapes can be places of art-historical interest, escape, love, sexual abandon, or threat.”
Join art historian Jackson Davidow and anthropologist Brian A. Horton as they discuss public spaces and intimacy in queer culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Moderated by Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, this virtual conversation will use Toor’s landscapes to explore queer counterpublics—spaces created in opposition to a dominant culture, the shifting boundaries between public and private, and the relationship between play and policing in queer nightlife.
WATCH NOW
Shadow Park: Queer Counterpublics in the Art of Salman Toor, 2023. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Jackson Davidow is an art historian, photography curator, and cultural critic whose writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler, The Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Review, frieze, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Davidow is completing a book about global AIDS cultural activism and is the co-curator of Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant with Noam Parness. A second exhibition, As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston, will accompany Walker's survey during its presentation at Tufts University Art Galleries.
Brian A. Horton is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Department of African and African American Studies, and the South Asian Studies Program. His research projects broadly focus on sexual, gender, and racial minority subjects and the social worlds they build at the interstices of recognition and discrimination. Horton is completing a book on touch, queer ephemera, and LGBTQ+ public spaces in Bombay, India.
Sayantan Mukhopadhyay is the Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a PhD in Art History in 2022, where his dissertation was titled "Making Worlds, Making Way: Queer Belongings in Indian Contemporary Art (1980-2000)." He holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Art History from Williams College, from which he graduated cum laude with honors.
This program was held in conjunction with Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, November 16, 2023–February 11, 2024.