ABSTRACT
The museum and its exhibition galleries are spaces where viewers are not only presented with images and art objects, but also instructed on how they ought to interpret them. Often, these institutional spaces are ill equipped to take up complex issues like queerness and nonnormative sexualities that are only gradually gaining recognition in mainstream culture.
While exhibitions are both spatially and temporally specific, their published catalogues transcend these limitations to provide an opportunity to consider how certain images have been studied differently over time.
Between 1951 and 2011, Gertrude Stein was the subject of four museum exhibitions that explored her contributions to twentieth-century visual culture. In this chapter, Hunt looks at how the catalogues for these exhibitions confront, ignore, or reassess issues relating to Stein’s gender and sexuality. Although the exhibitions were temporary, the exhibition catalogues allow for a comparative analysis of how major museums addressed – or chose not to address – different aspects of Stein’s queer subjectivity.
