Christian Walker

Feb 27, 2025 - May 25, 2025
Christian Walker: The Profane and The Poignant

Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant surveys the work of artist, critic, and curator Christian Walker (1953–2003). Walker was a path-making photographer who made compelling and experimental work about queer sexuality, race, and their intersections from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. In the mid-1980s, his artistic practice shifted from documentary photography and portraiture to alternative photographic processes involving multiple exposures, archival appropriation, and the integration of paint and nontraditional materials.

Walker was primarily active in Boston and Atlanta, and his artworks, criticism, and exhibition-making addressed a myriad subjects, including queer public sex, interracial intimacy, HIV/AIDS, censorship, drug use, and Blackness and whiteness in public and private image cultures.

This exhibition is the first and most comprehensive account of Walker’s artistic and cultural production to date, yet it contains gaps and inconsistencies. Walker’s work is not confined to a single archive or collection, no photographic negatives have been found, and existing prints have sometimes been precariously housed, on the verge of being lost.

Though Walker received significant critical and curatorial attention during his lifetime, his work has largely gone unrecognized since his death. Foregrounding archival materials, this exhibition chronologically contextualizes Walker within his artistic and activist communities; in doing so, it situates his photographs, critical writings, and curatorial projects as vital contributions to the histories of art and photography. Reconstructed from oral history interviews with friends, lovers, and artistic collaborators, this curatorial narrative is inseparable from a biographical project, generating connections and tracing throughlines across Walker’s life and work.

This exhibition has been organized by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City and is presented at Atlanta Contemporary under the curatorial guidance of independent curators Jackson Davidow and Noam Parness.

Bios

Christian Walker

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Christian Walker moved to Boston in 1974, at which point he began making photographs. After obtaining a Fine Arts Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1984, he moved to Atlanta, where he published his photo book, The Theater Project at Nexus Press in 1985.

Christian Walker’s work was featured in numerous influential exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s, including Southern Expressions: A Sense of Self (1988), Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest (1989), The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), Christian Walker—Subject/Object: Photographs 1980–1990 (1992), Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1994), and Imagining Families: Images and Voices (1994), among others.

His work is in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia, The Center for Creative Photography, The ONE Archives, and The Hammonds House Museum. His writing appeared in Fag Rag, ART PAPERS, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, SF Camerawork, and the book Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (1994, ed. Deborah Willis). Walker, along with Cindy Patton, curated Against The Tide: The homoerotic Image in the Age of Censorship and AIDS at Nexus Contemporary Arts Center (now known as Atlanta Contemporary) in 1990.

More About Christian Walker