13 Artists Reflect on the Stonewall Riots
T Magazine, The New York Times Style Magazine, June 27, 2019
By Zoë Lescaze
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, T Magazine invited a multigenerational group of artists to reflect on the demonstrations and their legacy. “Today, there’s a lot of infighting about who threw the first brick,” observes Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, an artist who was at the bar that summer night, in his response below. (Lanigan-Schmidt’s work is currently on view in “Art After Stonewall, 1969–1989,” a joint exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art — one of several shows throughout the country devoted to the protests and their aftermath. Others can be found at the Brooklyn Museum and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.) But the riots, he reminds us, were only possible because of the solidarity of the many different groups who joined forces 50 years ago. “Stonewall was very diverse, and it was unified in its diversity.”