PULP Exhibition

When censorship lifted and gay liberation took hold in the 1960s, a robust publishing industry produced a steady stream of cheap paperbacks exploring the practice and burgeoning culture of homosexuality. Pulp books prompted gay men to navigate imaginatively their own impulses and curiosities, many for the first time. Gay male pulp fiction, as it is now known, was a key element in the evolution of diverse sexual self-expression in the United States. Using SNMA’s extensive archival collection, this exhibition highlights several late twentieth-century authors and contextualizes their books as cultural artifacts in the rise and fall of gay pulp. On exhibition until November 10, 2019.

Exhibition curated by Joe Madura
Exhibition design by Nathaniel Phillips

ABOUT CURATOR JOE MADURA

Joe Madura is a historian, curator, and teacher based in Washington, DC. He recently spent two years as a researcher toward the exhibition Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975, now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Following from his research on the Public Art Fund exhibition Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006, he will publish an essay in a forthcoming Yale University Press volume on the artist. His art historical projects have focused on HIV/AIDS and contemporary art and literature, Andy Warhol and NYC drag culture, and 1960s minimal sculpture. He has taught at George Washington University and Maryland Institute College of Art.