This month, construction started to nearly double the space of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in SoHo, New York, the only museum in the world to focus on LGBTQ visual culture—and it is already contemplating its next big move. “This is conceived as a temporary expansion, just to allow us to gear up and the final one, we hope, will be permanent,” says Jonathan David Katz, the president of the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s board of trustees. “We’re aware of the fact that some museums have over-expanded and got into trouble that way.”
The institution, which was co-founded by Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman as an art foundation in 1987 and has been registered as a museum since 2011, has taken over the street-level commercial space next door in the iron-front building it occupies on Wooster Street, just a few doors down from the Deitch Projects. This brings its footprint from 3,300sq ft. to 5,600sq ft. It will remain open until 18 December for its current exhibition Cut Ups: Queer Collage Practices, after which it will close until the expanded space opens in early 2017.
The museum plans to remain in this space for less than a decade before looking to move to a larger facility as its permanent home. “Our ultimate goal is a substantial museum, and while we’re thrilled that we have doubled our space, it’s still not the kind of floor plan we need,” Katz explains. Two major criteria on the wish list are multiple floors for displays and offices, and on-site storage for its collection of around 30,000 works, which are currently kept in multiple locations.
Around 140 works from the museum’s collection—which Katz calls “a compendium of queer visual culture since the beginning of the 20th century”—will be featured in the inaugural show in the expanded space, including work by Bernice Abbott, Mickalene Thomas and George Bellow. The pieces were selected both for their quality and their representativeness, Katz says, how much a work has “come to stand for a moment, or a population, or a geography”. The museum has also planned a new lecture series in partnership with the Fashion Institute of Technology and will have an education department for the first time.
The museum is also focussed on actively expanding its collection, in both size and inclusivity. A founding goal of the museum was to preserve gay art at a time when the Aids crisis of the 1980s was killing off artists whose families sometimes destroyed or discarded their work. The collection is largely by male artists, but this past summer, the museum launched the Hunter O’Hanian Diversity Art Fund—named for the museum’s former director, who became the executive director of the College Art Association this year and now sits on the museum’s board—to acquire works by female and female-presenting transgender artists.
The $40,000 raised so far “is just the beginning”, says Katz. The museum is chiefly looking to buy art “from the 1960s to the present—but if something extraordinary presents itself from an earlier period, we’re going to be looking at it”, he adds. “We are—as always—looking to engage and to collect young artists even as we attempt to shine a light on historical artists who have not been given their due,” Katz says.