Join the Lehman College Art Gallery at an opening for the exhibition that will be on view at the Lehman College Art Gallery from Valentine's day through April 28.

Queer Love: Affection and Romance in Contemporary Art presents paintings and photographs that illuminate both individual and universal stories of vulnerability, tenderness, and desire in the LGBTQIA community.

The exhibition, which gathers the work of almost 50 artists, opens in two New York City galleries in February 2023−Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx from February 14 to April 23 and La MaMa Galleria in Downtown Manhattan, from February 18 to April 6. Each venue offers works that explore the power and significance of intimate queer familial, romantic, and sexual relationships.

From cheerful, romantic expressions of love to depictions of non-traditional nuclear families, the artwork of these LGBTQIA artists highlights the bond between them as art creators, and those with whom they have the closest ties. The LGBTQIA artists often move from celebrating their love to proclaiming a place for queer people within a larger society. Lushly beautiful, their art creates a series of nuanced and reflective, but largely positive narratives, and love’s transformative impact on both the human experience and the artistic process.

Lehman College proudly presents world-renowned poet and activist Nikki Giovanni. In advance of the College’s opening of James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner,” she will speak about Baldwin and beyond and share her newest poetry.

“What fools these mortals be!” 

Lehman's Theatre and Dance Program will stage a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, an iconic comedy of love both sought and unsought, where the mortal and supernatural collide, combine, and connect for amorous adventures.

This multimedia production features a cast of nine performers in over 20 different roles. The production focuses on the notion of dreams and transformation of characters as they move from the worlds of working class craftspeople, a Duke and Duchess's court that is rooted in Greek and Amazonian mythology, and the world of the “Fairies” whose very existence is both magical and fantastical.

The audience will get to see what usually takes place behind the scenes. The actors, who have been preparing for the past three months, take on multiple roles and have been working in the physical performance training style of Jacques Lecoq. Through movement and voice transformations, audiences will see the “translation” of one character to the next in real time. In the Elizabethan vein our actors not only transform characters, but gender roles and examine the very nature of what we call “male” and “female,” as we see that love truly is in the eye (and imagination) of the beholder.

This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream welcomes the audience into a theatrical dreamscape that embraces the magic of what live theatre does best: letting us enter a world that has its own rules and realities like dreams; like love itself.