Jonathan David Katz

Jonathan David Katz (born 1958) is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer. He is currently Associate Professor of Practice in Art History and Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Biography Katz is a founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the very first queer scholarship on a number of artists beginning in the early 1990s. His scholarship spans a period from the late 20th-century to the present, with an emphasis on the US, but with serious attention to Europe, Latin America and Asia as well. He has written extensively about gender, sexuality and desire, producing some of the key theoretical work in queer studies in the visual arts. Katz has curated more queer art exhibitions than anyone else in the world.

He is also the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University. He is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States.

Katz was co-curator with David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel of the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. This was the first major museum exploration of the impact of same-sex desire in the creation of modern American portraiture. David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly was removed from the exhibition on November 30, 2010, causing controversy. Katz was not consulted before the work's removal.

His recent Chicago About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art, at 500 works the largest queer exhibition yet mounted, was one of the rare art shows that featured a majority of artists who were neither male nor white, and was favorably reviewed on the front-page art section of The New York Times.

Works "Re-viewing the Field: Queer Studies in Art History", Art History, 1999 "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse", GLQ, Duke University Press, April, 1999. Reprinted in Here Comes Everybody: The Music Poetry and Art of John Cage, ed. David Bernstein, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999 "Performative Silence and the Politics of Passivity," in Making a Scene, ed. Henry Rogers, Birmingham University Press, 1999 "Dismembership: Jasper Johns and the Body Politic", Performing the Body/Performing the Text, eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, New York: Routledge Press, 1999 Difference/Indifference: Musings on Duchamp and Cage, coauthored with Moira Roth, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1998 "Lovers and Divers: Picturing a Partnership in Rauschenberg and Johns", Frauen/Kunst/Wissenschaft, Berlin, June 1998 "Rauschenberg and the Guggenheim", Out Magazine, April 1998 "Rauschenberg's Honeymoon", Art & Text, no. 16 (May–July), 1998