Live Big, Love Hard - Art from the 70s,80s, and 90s

Welcome. Let’s Dance. 

When you read that, how do you feel? What images come to mind?

Throughout history, dance has been a language as universal as it is unique to the culture creating it. The movement of the body through space, a physical expression that can command presence, release tension, and communicate power, tenderness, defiance, and exultation, depending on the steps (and the partner).

Queer communities have always found solace in dance, creating space wherever they could to move, sway, hold each other, and collectively raise the vibration around them. The work on this walls mirrors this ritual not literally, but as a reflection of the energy we generate inside ourselves and together.

The Bay Area has long ebbed and flowed with the energy of the times, while often eschewing it in defiance of a new beat. The nine artists in this exhibition were here during one of the most extraordinary and electric periods any American community has created for itself.

The 70s saw sexual liberation, political awakening, on a scale the country had never seen and the resulting backlash, as depicted in the expressive Castro street scenes and vibrant nudes painted by Ramon Vidali and the intimate polaroids from the Fairoaks Baths. The 80s brought AIDS and the institutional silence that deems some lives expendable, which stalked David Dashiell as he created his fur swathed Reverberation in 1986, and which Rex defied through raw sexual imagery. The 90s brought rage, survival, and the slow, uneven work of rebuilding, when Laurie Toby Edison set about intimately photographing nude bodies of people society often saw as invisible.

There is a version of queer history that gets told as tragedy. The losses tallied, the names read aloud, the grief carried forward like a debt that never gets paid down. That version is true. It is also incomplete.

Live Big, Love Hard is not a memorial, though it honors those we've lost. It is not a history lesson, though there is much to be learned. It is the choreography of a community that understood that finding joy, within ourselves and each other, is integral to survival. The sequins were armor. The dancing was escape, and ritual. The laughter was not denial but a collective refusal to let grief be the loudest thing in the room.

Many of the works in this show have not been seen by the public in decades. Some pieces passed many hands after their makers passed, nearly lost. That they still exist is something to celebrate. That they are gathered here at 575 Castro, in the neighborhood where much of this history was made, feels exactly right. As we put the work on the walls, we could imagine these artists dancing together, each bringing their own moves, partnering, colliding, and swirling. How lucky are we to be witness to such a gathering?

We are reminded that generations have built the floor we dance on now.

AND WE KEEP DANCING, BECAUSE THEY REFUSED TO STOP.