Featured in Salman Toor’s Cosmopolitan Queer Life
The artist s first institutional solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art explores lives of Brown, queer subjects through a scrim of nostalgia
I don’t remember precisely when I first saw Salman Toor’s paintings but I do distinctly remember how I felt in that moment: a particular flash of recognition, a momentary illumination that results from seeing and being seen. In his scenes of the lives of queer people of colour, Toor extends this evanescent flash onto the quotidian activities of his androgynous Brown subjects, who gather for parties in cramped apartments and spend evenings at crowded bars or alone in bed. Along with Doron Langberg and Anthony Cudahy, Toor joins a cohort of queer figurative artists negotiating the history of painting and the contemporary developments that condition their subjectivity. Though Toor eschews the formal innovation of such painters as Jonathan Lyndon-Chase, rendering h
Salman Toor: There’s a boy I know January 9, 2021 12:52 pm
Salman Toor,
The Star, 2019
By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently on view in the Whitney Museum’s first-floor lobby gallery (free of charge to the public). And rightly so. Toor’s pictures touch the heart, and his audacious drawing and sensitive paint handling satisfy our aesthetic longings.
Salman Toor, Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug, 2019
Curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Abrika Trasi, “How Will I Know” – the title comes from the eponymous Whitney Houston song – is Toor’s first solo museum show, and likely not his last. With fifteen fairly small oil on panel paintings
you have to have good policy. you can have empathy for that group of people, but the policies you make for that group of people don t actually make them better. let me take that one step further, and listen to marco rubio talking about poverty, in which he suggests, i do have empathy for poverty, but when i hear the policy proposals, they don t sound to me like good proposals. let s listen. for me, this issue is deeply personal. i m a generation removed from poverty and despair. with where i would be today if there had never been an american? what kind of lives tor futures would my children have if this was not a land of opportunity. what if my father had been stuck, working as a bar boy his whole life instead of making it to head bartender? what kind of life would i have right now? in all likelihood, i, too, would be on the outside looking in. so, this is a description of, i have empathy.
so they saved as much as they could and they boarded a airplane to miami and came to america in search of a better life. now like most recent arrivals, life in america wasn t easy. my father had someone phonetically write the words i am looking for work . those were the first words he learned to speak in english. he took day jobs and my dad worked as a bar boy on the beach. he saved money and tried to open up some businesses and when they didn t work they tried los angeles and vegas and he found himself back on miami beach behind a bar. the truth is they were discouraged and home him for cuba too. in the early days of castro s