Opening October 23, 6 – 8 PM

Public Hours October 24 & 25, 10 AM – 6 PM

Flowers can function as symbols of identity, desire, and defiance. Flowers can be vessels of coded language, subversion, and politics. In the lexicon of queerness, flowers hold particular significance—coded markers of resistance, their scent a whisper of histories both hidden and reclaimed. Lavender Bloom brings together artists whose work engages with florals as a site of queer transformation, embodiment, and radical possibility.

Botanical language has long been entangled with queer histories, operating as both metaphor and means of survival. Petals become sites of protest, gardens evolve into spaces of care, and blossoms—both cultivated and wild—emerge as emblems of resilience. This exhibition situates floral imagery within a lineage of queer aesthetics, examining its capacity to reflect the vast interpretation of queerness as fluid, strange, deviant, unclassifiable, different, eccentric, excessive, extravagant, flamboyant, curious, weird, exceptional, peculiar, odd, outlandish, and nonconforming.

Through painting, sculpture, photography, and more, Lavender Bloom explores the shifting relationship between queerness and nature. Works interrogate the boundaries between the organic and the constructed, the ornamental and the political. Some artists will engage with historical codes of floral symbolism—channeling the violets of Romaine Brooks, the poetic symbolism of love and longing represented by floral motifs in Martin Wong’s paintings, and the themes of loss and remembrance in the photographic images of roses by Félix González-Torres—while others will subvert traditional representations of nature through abstraction, materiality, and performance like the radiant, almost spiritual energy of Beauford Delany’s late works, blooms of Cy Twombly, the charged botanicals of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Lavender Bloom draws on the deep historical ties between lavender and queer identity. The phrase evokes both the history of the Lavender Scare, when queer individuals were persecuted in the mid-20th century, and the later reclamation of lavender as a sign of empowerment within LGBTQ+ activism. Just as lavender flourishes in unexpected places, this exhibition celebrates the ways queer artists have used floral imagery to assert presence, cultivate beauty, and reimagine belonging.

BOFFO cultivates space for LGBTQ+ artists to thrive. Proceeds from this exhibition directly support the artists themselves and BOFFO’s programming, ensuring that future generations of queer creators continue to bloom.

As Audre Lorde wrote, “Without community, there is no liberation.” Lavender Bloom envisions a world where queerness, like nature, is unbound—rooted in history yet constantly growing, evolving, and flourishing in unexpected ways.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Alannah Farrell Alessandro Teoldi Bony Ramirez CFGNY Chris Martin Clifford Prince King Dominique Knowles EJ Hill Ficus Interfaith Jimmy Wright Joe Brainard			John Giorno John Sandroni Justin Liam O’Brien K8 Hardy Math Bass Moses Leonardo Nicole Eisenman Oren Pinhassi Pamela Sneed Peter Schlesinger			Rachel Youn Ross Bleckner Sahar Khoury Scott Treleaven Tabboo! TM Davy Tom of Finland Travis Boyer Ulrike Müller WangShui

Graphic design Composite. Flower design Math Bass.