Big, bold colors immediately catch the eye upon walking into this vibrant exhibition celebrating LGBTQ+ history and artwork. Upbeat pop music uplifts visitors’ mood compared to the more muted tones throughout the rest of the Irving Museum at its Badge of Pride exhibition, being showcased from June 6 to September 28 with free admission.
For Adrian Cardwell, lead curator of the exhibition, the idea has been one in the making for three decades. Only recently have the pieces fallen into place for the exhibition to come to life.
“We started this project three years ago, and it started when the museum director Jen Landry and I met at the Irving Archive and Museum, who was also hosting an exhibition at the time,” Cardwell said. “Lots of strong themes and has a direct correlation to today.”
Just outside the main exhibit, Memorial Quilts stretch across the walls of the exhibit, commemorating the victims of the AIDS crisis. The quilts showcased countless personal stories across decades alongside sharing resources for those who are currently affected by AIDS, going back to a time where the LGBTQ+ community was suffering during the AIDS crisis.
The crisis emerged in the early ’80s and continued on until it was better controlled, but the LGBTQ+ community faced heightened discrimination due to homophobic misinformation that implied only homosexual individuals could contract the disease. In the ’80s alone, over 100,777 people died from AIDS, largely because of stigma surrounding it. Today, the Irving Museum reckons with that stigma.
“As a community and in this country, we have a lot of uncomfortable truths in our past,” Cardwell said. “We wanted to confront those.”
Walking into the exhibit, the viewer is greeted with a hot pink room with a disco ball, chandeliers and preppy music. The energy is remarkably different from the rest of the museum, visibly brightening the mood of the many who walked the room.
“What we wanted to do was create a work that would connect emotionally because given where we are as a country, I think we need to understand each other emotionally,” Cardwell said. “I did create this to be an emotional experience, so when you walk through this there is an overarching sense of joy.”
Considering the current tide of uncertainty in the gay community due to harsh anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, Badge of Pride, a group that works on a national collection of LGBTQ+ history, decided to think of those who came before, like Harvey Milk. Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, he had first come to San Francisco in 1972 where he would eventually settle into the historically queer Castro neighborhood. In 1973 Milk ran for the position of city supervisor, while he ultimately lost his first race Milk gained widespread support and recognition while leading the gay rights movement in San Francisco. Milk advocated for LGBTQ+ people to come out of the closet so that more people could see that they weren’t some dangerous entity in society. Milk was assassinated in 1978, one year after he was elected city supervisor in 1977. It was stories like those of Milk that Cardwell wanted to highlight to contemporary audiences.
“What we wanted to do was to activate this collection to answer a question that Harvey Milk asked,” Cardwell said. “How can people change their minds about us if they don’t know who we are?”
The exhibition not only considers queer history nationwide, but sports a unique, intimate focus: Dallas queer history. The Badge of Pride foundation has over 10,000 artifacts that Cardwell has personally collected over the past 30 years, which made it difficult to decide what to display in the exhibition. Ultimately, Cardwell said the selected artwork all highlights dedicated themes and is sourced locally, with Badge of Pride reserving space for similar organizations to contribute their own narratives.
“We reached out to local organizations like the Dallas Way, they’re an organization dedicated to preserving queer history in Dallas,” Cardwell said. “Then there’s an equivalent organization in Tarrant County called Yester Queer, so we consulted with both of those organizations to say, here are our themes, what do you have in your collections that highlight these themes?”
One of the most somber pieces was “Lost Faces: Transgender Day of Remembrance,” which recognized the 25th anniversary of the special day. The faces of those lost to violence and hate evokes a haunting, contemplative mood . Each piece brings out feelings of humanization, allowing one to find unity in knowing there are others who exist in the world with similar feelings and thoughts.
“What we wanted to do, first and foremost, is we wanted this exhibit to be a mirror for the queer community,” Cardwell said. “We wanted this because we believe fundamentally that every person deserves to see themselves reflected in history and in museum spaces.”
