Tacoma is days away from opening the art world’s most-talked about exhibit from the past few years. Hide/Seek, the first major museum exhibit addressing homosexuality’s impact on American art, was originally displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and caused an uproar when it opened. The controversy arose over David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire In My Belly, an unfinished 8mm film that features an image of ants crawling on a crucifix (said to represent the lonely agony of dying of AIDS). Republican politicians were up in arms, taking it as an attack on Christianity and threatening to withdraw arts funding before the Smithsonian pulled the piece from the exhibit. And while the controversy certainly raised the profile of Hide/Seek (it was even discussed on The Colbert Report), it also overshadowed the overarching theme and the other tremendous works that comprise the exhibit.

More than anything, Hide/Seek is a re-examination of America’s art history through the context of homosexuality. The exhibit features works from masters such as Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Jasper Johns, and Annie Leibovitz. It’s laid out chronologically and stretches as far back as Thomas Eakins’s acclaimed 1898 oil painting a nearly nude boxer, Salutat, to work done during the AIDS epidemic, to more modern pieces such as Cass Bird’s gender-bending 2003 photograph I Look Just Like My Daddy.

“[In the past] there’s been a sexual cleansing of the art world,” TAM chief curator Rock Hushka said during yesterday’s press preview. “You don’t talk about it, you don’t mention it. And what’s remarkable is it’s on the wall. Everybody’s seen it. You just can’t talk about it. And that’s ridiculous."

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to address many of the blue chip midcentury artists in the terms of their sexuality. It’s the first time Jasper Johns has been talked about as a gay man; Robert Rauschenberg, Ezra Kelly, Agnes Martin. We’ve restored texture to an entire generation of artists who are, without a doubt, the most famous artists in contemporary American art—and who were all gay. We’ve never actually stated that, and that’s been criminal.”

Hide/Seek makes its only West Coast stop in Tacoma thanks to some fortuitous connections and a bit of hard work. TAM teamed up with the Brooklyn Museum (which displayed the exhibit last November) to reconstitute the collection for their museums. Luckily, TAM Director Stephanie Stebich worked at Brooklyn Museum several years ago with its director, Arnold Lehman. Additionally, Hushka and Katz have developed a relationship while working on the exhibition Arts, AIDS, America for the past six years (they hope to display it in 2014). By their powers combined, Hide/Seek is now a reality at TAM after just a year of collaboration; an exhibit of this scope usually takes three to five years to pull together. The collection is almost exactly what was on display in the National Portrait Gallery, with 90 of the 104 pieces featured in D.C. on display here.

It’s the framing of the collection that matters most. Thanks to our society’s progression, we can now look openly at the homosexual context of these pieces. In many cases the artists themselves were gay and put coded messages in their work—like Marsden Hartley’s modernist Painting No. 47, Berlin which, without context, seems like a collection of random colorful symbols, but is actually a tribute to his deceased lover Karl von Freybur. There are also works with strong homosexual undertones done by straight artists (like the aforementioned Salutat, where the all-male crowd gazes at the physical specimen of the boxer in a way normally reserved for a beautiful woman.)

“I fear that people continue see the show as an exhibition of gay art,” said Katz. “And there are many straight artists in the exhibition.”

“The very thesis of the exhibition is that gay and straight are always interwoven,” said Hushka. “That to pull queerness as a distinct thread out of American art is to unravel American art in general.”

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
March 17–June 10, Tacoma Art Museum