Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices

A reframing of the history of 1960s New York avant-garde art centered on the queer, genre-bending criticism of Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston.

In the early 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston began to imagine art criticism as something unruly and expansive, rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence that had overtaken the field. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York’s avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. First working independently...