Founded in 1951 as a department of the City of Birmingham, the Birmingham Museum of Art has grown to become one of the Deep South’s largest art museums, housing more than 27,000 works of art from across history and around the globe. In a richly illustrated talk, Dr. Graham C. Boettcher, The R. Hugh Daniel Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, will unpack the museum’s complex and sometimes surprising history of collecting the work of LGBTQ artists, sharing examples by Marie Laurencin, Paul Cadmus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Mickalene Thomas, Skylar Fein, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, among many others. Boettcher also discusses the work of Birmingham-based artists who explore LGBTQ subjects in their work, including Carolyn Sherer, Paul Cordes Wilm and Sonja Rieger.