Relatedly, multimedia artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) also uses the family album format. In one series, he juxtaposes his own family photographs with amateur gay male pornographic images. He intersperses these disparate images literally to insert the body of the gay male into family history.

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For the 1993 Whitney Museum Biennial exhibition, Ligon created "Notes on the Margin of the 'Black Book'" (1991-1993) in direct response to Robert Mapplethorpe's celebrated yet controversial photographs of the black male body.

Like Ellis, photographer Christian Walker (b. 1954), originally from Atlanta, also alters the surface of his photographic prints, made from old family images, using oil, charcoal, and pigments. Walker's work deals with miscegenation, race relations, and the family dynamic rather than his own sexuality.

African-American Lesbian Artists

Although black lesbian visual artists are a diverse group, it nevertheless remains difficult to find women artists who identify as both lesbian or bisexual and of African descent. Still, a number of African-American lesbian photographers and filmmakers have emerged in the last twenty years. While their work is less well known and well documented than that of their male counterparts, they also explore themes of community, family, and sexuality, often through representations of the self.

Like their male counterparts, lesbian artists have also had articulate writers and critics to advance the discussion surrounding their images. While black lesbian novelist and poet Jewelle Gomez wrote about images of her family and of black women in 1987 without addressing lesbian identity, in 1995 critic Jackie Goldsby located black lesbian desire in Vanessa Williams' Penthouse magazine pictorial, which featured her engaging in simulated sex with another woman. Goldsby's essay points out the persistent invisibility of the black lesbian body as virtually none of the sensationalistic press accounts of the publication of the images actually addressed the lesbian content of the photographs.

Using the documentary approach to break down that invisibility, San Franciscan Jean Weisinger (b. 1954) makes self-portraits as well as portraits of women and the lesbian community. In 1996 Aunt Lute Press published a calendar of her portraits of women authors, many of them women of color and/or lesbians.

The varied photojournalistic work of photographer and curator Valeria "Mikki" Ferrill (b. 1937) has focused on everything from black cowboys to "Dykes on Bikes" at the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco, giving faces to both racial and sexual communities that are little known in mainstream society.

Using representational imagery but in a much more interpretive vein is H. Lynn Keller (b. 1951), a San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker whose work addresses identity, politics, and spirituality.

Likewise, Carla Williams (b. 1965), a Santa Fe-based artist, uses self-portraits to investigate representations of the black female body throughout photographic history. She positions herself as both photographer and subject to break down the separation between the object and the viewer's gaze. In addition, Williams' website, www.carlagirl.net, functions as a source of information about black artists (especially women artists) and gay and lesbian artists to help facilitate access to resource materials.

Working in the tradition of British photographer Jo Spence who, along with lesbian photographer Rosy Martin, pioneered the practice of phototherapy, African/Caribbean/Canadian artist Karen Augustine (b. 19??) deals explicitly with sexual abuse and black women's mental health in her photo/text mixed media works. "Drawing from my own experience, I noticed various dynamics within the abuser/abused relationship," Augustine writes in a self-interview. "I couldn't deny the role my sexuality, class, gender and race played in this straight, white man's need to express his power over me." Augustine also writes about black women's sexuality and art.

African-American lesbian filmmakers Jocelyn Taylor (b. 19??), Yvonne Welbon (b. 1962), and Cheryl Dunye (b. 1966) have also garnered much attention in recent years for their work regarding black lesbian identity. Dunye's Watermelon Woman (1996), in which a black lesbian is determined to restore not only a name but a lesbian history to a forgotten film actress once billed only as "Watermelon Woman," mirrors the filmmaker's own attempt to give an eloquent cinematic voice to black lesbian lives.

Conclusion

The gay, lesbian, and bisexual artists of the African Diaspora largely work in representational media. Their work explores race and sexuality, although it is by no means limited to such subjects. Indeed, their increased visibility--their openness as gay or lesbian and of African descent--gives them freedom to explore every aspect of their complex lives and worlds.

Prior to Stonewall, most gay artists were closeted, but they were inventive in creating codes for those in the know; after 1945 some adventurous artists developed independent networks for the distribution of works of gay art.

After Stonewall, American gay male art underwent a radical transformation as artists came out and began to treat gay themes openly and directly.

American lesbian art in the earlier twentieth century was indelibly shaped by the expatriate experience and by the emergence of a more democratic art form, photography, as well as by the intense pressure following World War II to retreat into the closet.

Since Stonewall, lesbian artists in America, from installation artists to filmmakers and photographers to performance artists and painters, have become increasingly diverse and visible.

The Harlem Renaissance, an African-American literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, included several important gay and lesbian writers.

Since Stonewall lesbian photographers have created an enduring archive that documents lesbian lives, searches for a lesbian sensibility, and explores various issues of particular import to the lesbian community.

A popular African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, James Richmond Barthé used his art as a means of working out internal conflicts related to race and sexuality.

Versatile African-American artist Nayland Blake creates--in a variety of media--work that reflects his preoccupation with his racial and sexual identities.

The pressures of being black and gay in a racist and homophobic society may have ultimately robbed renowned American painter Beauford Delaney of his sanity.

One of the most important black photographers of the late twentieth century, Rotimi Fani-Kayode explores important themes of racial and sexual identity.

In her poetry, fiction, and essays, Jewelle Gomez seeks to merge her black, feminist, and lesbian identities into an indivisible whole.

Filmmaker, artist, and cultural critic Isaac Julien is the most prominent member of a new wave of black artists and filmmakers involved in examining black and gay representation.

American sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis lived most of her life in Rome, where she was a member of a lesbian circle of American expatriates and artists.

The work of African-American mixed-media artist Glenn Ligon often conflates issues of race and gender and their frequently parallel histories and struggles.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial images typically combine rigorously formal composition and design with extreme subject matter.

African-American filmmaker Marlon Riggs celebrated black culture and gay male sexuality, while exposing homophobia and racism.