The Museum of the City of New York could not have predicted how timely it would be to mount an exhibition exploring how creativity became both an outlet and a refuge for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender artists in New York.
Now, after the shootings in Orlando, Fla., the show, “Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York,” which opens this fall, seems prescient in that it “celebrates the creativity and the richness of the L.G.B.T. community,” said Whitney W. Donhauser, the museum’s director.
The show looks at queer networks that grew in the city around 10 artistic figures: the composer Leonard Bernstein; the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and George Platt Lynes; the visual artists Andy Warhol, Richard Bruce Nugent, Harmony Hammond and Greer Lankton; the playwright, poet and novelist Mercedes de Acosta; the impresario Lincoln Kirstein; and the dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones.