Matthew Leifheit | Queer Archives – Artist Talk

We are pleased to have Matthew Leifheit at the Griffin Museum for an in person presentation to discuss his ongoing project, Queer Archives.

Join us on Thursday March 27th at 6.30pm in our Main Gallery for this special conversation as part of our ongoing exhibition, Nuclear Family

Since 2021 Matthew Leifheit has traveled the country visiting and photographing in queer archives. Leifheit describes: “During the 1970s and 80s, independent archives were established by LGBTQ Americans to collect materials that major institutions would not. These materials—pictures, letters, T shirts, protest signs, ephemera, and the like—document queer culture and identity in the 20th century, in relation to the rise of the US gay rights movement. More importantly, they contain the evidence of many peoples’ lives who would otherwise be lost to history, for reasons ranging from homophobia to racial prejudice, sexism and AIDS.”

Leifheit’s Queer Archive asks us to consider what is worth keeping, how histories are made and told, who gets to hold them, and who is able to seek out and find them.
These photographs dramatize the limits of immortality as we attempt to access it through media.

Text by Rachel Stern, Curator, MassArt Museum exhibition, 2024

About Matthew Leifheit

Matthew Leifheit is an American photographer, magazine editor, and professor based in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art, Leifheit is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, the journal of emerging photography he has published since 2010. Leifheit’s photographs have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Aperture, TIME, and Artforum, and have been exhibited internationally. His work has been supported by residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo and The Watermill Center, receiving grants from the New York State Cultural Council and the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale, where he was awarded the Richard Benson Prize in 2017. He is currently full-time faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.