Three new exhibitions opening in California are placing lesbian artists at the center of institutional and archival attention after years of limited visibility. The shows, featuring Monica Majoli, Millie Wilson and Susan Silton, have been framed by organisers and supporters as an overdue correction to the historical erasure of queer women’s artistic practice.
Monica Majoli and the archives
Monica Majoli’s exhibition, titled Monica Majoli: Countervision, is built around new drawings that enter the holdings of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives and are presented by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). Majoli recalls spending afternoons at the now-closed Sisterhood Bookstore in Los Angeles as a 12-year-old “searching for my tribe,” and the show weaves that personal history into a wider archival recovery.
Central to the exhibition are materials related to the Ovulars, a group of feminists who ran photography workshops at a lesbian commune in rural Oregon between 1979 and 1983. The Ovulars used photography to document and shape images of lesbian life in real time; in Countervision, Majoli’s new work is displayed alongside those historical materials to highlight continuities in self-representation.
Some of Majoli’s drawings are presented in a five-drawer flat file that visitors may handle, while others are integrated into the Mazer’s holdings, a presentation strategy that deliberately blurs the line between gallery object and archival artifact. The arrangement underscores how archives and exhibitions can collaborate to make marginalized histories tangible and accessible.
Wider recovery in Los Angeles
Alongside Majoli’s show, exhibitions of work by Millie Wilson and Susan Silton in Los Angeles are part of the same moment of recuperation, bringing long-standing practices by queer women artists back into public programs. Curators and community advocates say these presentations contribute to a broader reappraisal of the contributions made by lesbian artists during periods when institutions largely overlooked them.
Supporters view the trio of exhibitions not merely as individual showcases but as part of an expanding effort to recover, preserve and display lesbian cultural history. By foregrounding archival material and allowing closer, sometimes tactile engagement, the shows aim to reshape how galleries and archives represent queer women’s creative work and to offer audiences new ways of encountering these practices.