What might it mean to train a queer lens on the study of medieval art history? How might the study of art in the Middle Ages shed light on present-day debates about gender binaries, human desires, and the place of the erotic in spiritual life? Those are the questions that informed a recent exhibition at the Cloisters, the northernmost branch of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Titled Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages, the exhibition brought together a diverse and surprising range of medieval art objects, many of them deeply affecting, some of them unsettling and challenging. In pulling together the exhibition, the curators drew inspiration from the insights of queer theory. The result was a wholesale reimagining of the visual culture of the Middle Ages, one that encouraged viewers to question their engrained assumptions about the forms that gender and desire took in the past. That aim brought it praise – but also, from a few quarters, controversy, coming as it did at a moment when the very idea of “queering” anything has drawn massive political pushback from the American far right.
In this episode we hear from the two art historians who organized the exhibition: Melanie Holcomb, curator at the Met Cloisters, and Nancy Thebaut, a historian of medieval art and architecture at the University of Oxford. They sat down for a conversation with Bob Mills, who teaches art history at University College London and grew fascinated by the new exhibition when he visited the Cloisters earlier this year. Together they discuss the making of the exhibition and the curatorial challenges that had to be navigated. In the process they reflect on the stakes of acts of queer curation in the current political landscape. How might the practice of queer curation illuminate not just the study of medieval art, but concepts of sex, gender, and desire themselves?
