A month-long exhibit of queer artists took over the city of Detroit for Pride Month in 2022 with what was considered the largest exhibit of LGBTQ+ art in perhaps the world. This June it’s heading back to Detroit with even more artists from across the country and beyond.
Mighty Real/Queer Detroit is the brainchild of Detroit curator Parick Burton. The biennial event’s first installment in 2022 featured work by roughly 150 queer Detroit artists across 17 galleries anchored by 1940s-era painter LeRoy Foster and his drag persona Martini Marti.
This year Burton says the show has expanded to feature nearly 170 artists spread across 13 galleries. While there’s a drop in the number of galleries this year, the focus is more on national and international artists including several from New York, Beijing, Mexico, and Paris.
This year’s theme “I’ll be your Mirror” examines the aesthetic mirroring between art and viewer, Burton tells us.
“Our goal is to highlight the role of art in achieving personal visibility and social connection,” he says.
Galleries hosting the show include Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery, Irwin House Gallery, Galerie Camille, Scarab Club, Detroit Artists Market, Detroit Contemporary, the Carr Center, the Hannan Center, and Wayne State’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, among others.
Programming throughout the month will coincide with the show including an evening of queer cinema curated by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Adam Baran at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Detroit Film Theatre. Burton says the complete lineup is still in the works but he’s working on getting a lecture by Linda Simpson, whose photos from her book Drag Explosion documenting New York City’s drag scene in the 1980s and 1990s are part of the show. He also is planning for a special performance of Pamela Sneed’s one-woman show A Tribute to Big Mama Thornton , which will run at New York’s Public Theatre in March.
In addition to paintings and performance art, the show will include a range of photography dating back to the 19th century.
“We have work that goes back to the 1890s — some of the first homoerotic photography,” Burton says. “There are some really young emerging artists coming out of New York and then, again, there’s a good bevy of Detroit artists. Of course, we have to keep it homegrown but the focus more so this show is bringing queer art to Detroit… We’re doing this every two years now as a biennial, and we want to make Detroit the go-to queer cultural event for Pride Month.”
Burton helped promote Detroit’s legendary after-hours techno spot The Music Institute in the late 1980s, connecting it to the city’s gay club scene. He says he envisions Mighty Real/Queer Detroit to grow into something like Movement Music Festival.
“We’re kinda using Movement as our model because it started off grassroots. It was free and mostly local DJs. There really wasn’t that much out-of-town talent in those first couple events,” he says. Now Movement is one of the longest-running techno festivals in the world with more than 30,000 attendees daily.
“We see Detroit as a go-to city for art and culture,” he says. “The way our art community here is so united is rare in many other communities. I lived in New York. I lived in Chicago [and] there’s more of a rivalry between galleries in those places so being able to do something involving galleries coming together with one goal is really special.”
He adds, “From what I’m hearing, we’re the buzz of New York in the queer art community. Everyone’s talking about coming to Detroit for this show. All the artists are coming in for opening weekend, so it’s gonna be who’s who in the queer art world.”
Mighty Real/Queer Detroit is supported by the City of Detroit’s Office of Arts, Culture, and Entrepreneurship and will run from Friday, May 31 to Sunday, June 30. More details will be announced in the coming months.
“It was historic, what we did,” Burton says of the first Mighty Real/Queer Detroit. “I’m a teacher in Detroit Public Schools and I always have been sort of a public servant. I see the work I’m doing with Mighty Real/Queer Detroit as part of that. I’m a cultural civil servant — a queer cultural civil servant.”
For more info, see mrqd.org or follow the exhibit on Instagram at mightyrealqueerdetroit.
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