From the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, just prior to the sexual revolution, the psychoanalytic concept of Eros was elevated to defining status in the international art world. This ideal of Eros was made communal, collective, and utterly undifferentiated in terms of gender, sexuality, and race—the exact obverse of the forces that motivate a body-based art today. Making this Eros-inflected art the ur-ground of a new vision of society, the art of Eros served to politicize our newly forged body-in-common, thereby ironically engendering the very specific contemporary social categories like gender, race and sexuality that now obscure Eros' formative and foundational role.

Jonathan D. Katz co-curated Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first queer exhibition ever mounted at a major US museum, which opened at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2010, then traveled to the Brooklyn and Tacoma Museums, receiving numerous awards along the way. Katz directs the doctoral program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo and is president of the new Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. A pioneering figure in queer art scholarship, and the first tenured faculty member in queer studies in the US, Katz' next major exhibition, ArtAIDSAmerica opens at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art this coming May and then travels to three other museums across the US.