Hey fellow bloggers! We are Justine Samaha and Charlie Staley and we will be focusing gender/sexuality and art. We both have had a lot of experience coming into this field so it should be fun to expand on it a little bit and become more open minded with what we find. Charlie will be posting about gender and sexuality in photography. It fascinating because not one person may have the exact same views as another. For example when Charlie was in Spain visiting The Rein of Sofia in Madrid he saw this photograph by an unknown artist. He can't find a copy of this photo. This was an abstract photo, at first glance it looked like a view of Paris in the winter, one could see a ruff view of Le madam of Paris also known as the Eiffel Tower, Then he saw a strait couple, a lesbian couple and gay couple kissing. Then he realized that this was a collage of photographs to make 1 giant photo. This collage was huge, probably about 10 by 15. When he stood back at this photo it was a giant LGBT logo and Love was in the foreground. he found this image to be very motivational and empowering, even me being a strait male he was glad that this artist did this. Charlie plan to post images and a brief synopsis for each photo, stay updated and you will see my views on the images and I would appreciate feedback.


My posts will be talking about gender and sexuality and incorporating these two terms into the art of painting. From my learning, art has been a huge playing card in the visualization of gender and sexuality for centuries. From the depiction of what sex and gender is to the striking paintings of how people view these two terms, art has taken sexuality and gender into its own form of expression. Sexuality and gender was introduced into the art society around the 1920’s shortly after film production began. Of course, sexuality and gender was displayed in art pieces by many artists before this time from the Victorian era. Sexuality and gender took a bigger step into the obvious world when photography and film was introduced though.  It was put into a more realistically visual outlook for people that didn’t really pay attention to it before while in paints and sculptures and this drew some concerns. Sexuality and Gender in such an obvious way became heavily protested against. It went to the point where art dealing with gender and sex of any kind became prohibited against some viewers. However, as the years went on, people began to feel more comfortable with the idea of dealing with such an abrasive point of view on sexuality and gender. Many even looked the idea of expressing these two terms through such a way as a learning experience through the eyes of others.

As art developed, it became more and more part of our lives, encouraging people to acknowledge it more daily as well. Once art in this matter began to first cshow itself to the world, ertain art forms were confined in ways that they limited visual ideas. Paintings of such things were usually of men only, films of sexual acts or gender were restricted to men’s eyes and photographs of sexuality were scarce. But these restrictions lessened and lessened as well. People began to bolding paint women in such promiscuous forms, women could see the films that expressed sexuality and gender roles so explicitly and photographs became the stand stills of breath taking moments that poured of sexuality in our lives. Then the question of gender really began to take play in art. What was gender? What did people see when they thought of the term? How does it feel? Art boldly took a turn to begin showing what gender meant to people. Taking on ideas of people being straight, gay, lesbian, transgender, bi, etc was another big step in the art society. This is what draws me to the topic of art; the boldness of people's ideas being blatantly placed onto a canvas. I've always thought that art was interesting, being an artist myself. But I have never really taken the time to look at art through the perspective of sexuality and gender. In my posts, I will be discussing art pieces that I find respresent these terms well that I think people will think interesting over the time of my research.

It will be fun working with each other because again, Charlie and I have some personal experience with art and it will be interesting to see how by the end of the term our opinions of the matter might change. Any feedback is welcome of course and we look forward to exploring. Happy blogging!

-Justine Samaha and Charlie Staley