Freddie Styles could never have imagined as a young boy that he would someday have his life’s work featured in a prestigious art gallery just a few miles away from the tin-roofed log cabin he was born into just east of Madison.
But there he was this past Saturday at the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art in nearby Buckhead, where Styles saw his paintings take up the most wall space in the museum’s new Queer Perspectives special exhibit. Just one of 13 artists featured in the all-LGBTQ+ project, at 80 years old, Styles is the eldest artist featured and one of just two Black contributors.
Styles says he knew from a very young age he was “different” – “a sissy,” as he put it – from the kids he attended school with at Madison’s segregated Burney Street School, which closed in 1952. At about the same time, he says his mother “made good on her threat to leave my father” and moved with him and his older sister to Atlanta.
Once there, Styles remembers being small, weak, asthmatic, and nearly constantly putting up with harassment from his Crogman School classmates, girls and boys alike. As a young teenager, he says he narrowly escaped a couple of potential rape situations. It was not an easy, nor pleasant existence.
However, Styles says he always had his art to comfort him. He remembers starting to draw at about six years old, a year before the move to Atlanta, after his mother drew a chicken for him to copy.
Within three years, he was dedicated to the craft, and in the 5th grade, a school counselor was the first to suggest he could have a professional future in art.
“That’s what planted the seed, and I never looked back,” Styles says, adding that he sold his first paintings as a 10th-grader. “An African American man had a store in the neighborhood, Mr. Maxey Clayton, and he bought three paintings for $10 each. I remember how proud I was. I was shaking with these crisp $10 bills, and my mother wanted to know where I had gotten the money. When I said, ‘Mr. Max bought three of my paintings,’ she initially didn’t believe me. But that started it, and I’ve been a professional artist ever since.”
Joining Styles as Queer Perspectives exhibitors are fellow Georgia artists Nat Blooming, Yousef Bushehri, David Clifton-Strawn, Perrine Gaudry, Krista M. Jones, LaSalle, Rial Rye, Royce Soble, Jeffrey Wilcox Paclipan, Ezra Witkowski, Cassie Wright, and Clint Zeagler.
One of four Queer Perspectives curators, Atlanta art gallery owner Yu-Kai Lin helped select the cadre of LGBTQ+ artists who made the show.
He mentioned, however, that he worked independently from his fellow curators.
“So, everybody had their own vision of what they wanted to see. We were independent of each other, which is not usually the case, but I guess that actually adds an extra layer of anonymity to the curation process,” Lin observes. “This is a show that represents a swath of our community from the LGBTQIA side, but you really don’t know what it looks like until you see it in person. So, to see the work in person is a whole other revelation, so to speak. It’s interesting.”
The Queer Perspectives artwork involves a wide variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, collage, and photography, among others.
Most have little to no overt LGBTQ+ reference or imagery, and even those that do are not explicit and would garner perhaps a PG rating at a movie theatre. Still, STMA founding director and Thomas’ daughter Lisa Thomas Conner says any school groups touring the museum the rest of this year will bypass the exhibit to concentrate instead on only her father’s wide array of artistic works.
However, Conner originated the idea for an LGBTQ+ show. She says her father’s well-known belief in “the brotherhood of man” provides the ideal backdrop for an alternative lifestyle show.
However, STMA Director Alyson Vuley admits she was initially a little apprehensive about featuring gay artists in a traditionally conservative region like Madison County. Still, she has been pleasantly surprised by the reaction Queer Perspectives received locally.
“I mean, it’s just incredible work. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got the artists here, bringing their people and making all these connections with our local community. With great turnout from here in our area, it’s just awesome,” Vuley says. “Even six months ago, I thought, ‘Well, I hope we get a good response to this,’ but then, as we got closer and closer, the response became phenomenal. We’ve had such great community support for such encouraging work.”
The Queer Perspectives exhibit will remain until Jan. 4 at STMA.
“I really think it’s important for people to see these different perspectives, to see people’s personal experiences,” Vuley says. “A lot of this work is deeply personal, and I think that people should challenge themselves to come in and check it out. I think they’ll be very, very pleasantly surprised.
"I’m so proud of this incredible group of artists. They have been amazing to work with,” she adds. “I feel so honored that they have shared their work with us here at the museum.”