Printmaking and LGBTQIA+ Communities

12 October 2023
6:00 – 8:00 pm
Paul Mellon Centre

This event is part of Printmaking for Change: Past and Present – the Paul Mellon Centre's new public events programme.

Join V&A curator of prints, Zorian Clayton, to explore LGBTQIA+ liberty and visibility through the varied history of printmaking. Via seventeenth-century radicals, eighteenth-century flamboyance and nineteenth-century scandal, to contemporary understandings around diverse gender and sexuality, prints and ephemera, Zorian will provide a unique snapshot into a rich and radical history. Through looking at portraits and zines celebrating pioneering activists, writers and artists, as well as highlighting significant Queer spaces in Britain through the centuries, this session will provide an overview of the considerable contribution to printmaking made by the LGBTQIA+ community and its many ancestors.

This programme is an introduction to the subject and is open to all.

Talks and workshops will take place at the Paul Mellon Centre, the British Museum, PageMasters and the Royal College of Physicians.

Talks at the Paul Mellon Centre will be streamed live via Zoom. Off-site workshops will be in person only.

Registration via Eventbrite is required and opens 8 September.

Listing image credit: Sidney Hunt, Bookplate Design (detail), c. 1923, woodcut, 4.5 x 2.5 in. Private Collection. Image courtesy of The Court Gallery.

About the speaker

Zorian Clayton is a curator of prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, specialising in posters, paper ephemera and Queer art history. He has been the co-chair of the LGBTQ Working Group of the V&A for the past nine years. Recent publications including contributions to The Poster: A Visual History (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism (Routledge 2020) and Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear (V&A, 2022) for which he was also curatorial advisor.

Since 2016, he has worked jointly as a programmer for the British Film Institute’s Flare Festival and as a board member of TransCreative, a Manchester-based arts company platforming transgender and non-binary writers, artists, directors and performers.