Simeon Solomon
A number of galleries and museums in United Kingdom are staging exhibitions to highlight the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 (a Parliamentary Act which decriminalize homosexual acts in private between two men who were at least 21 years of age). It only applied to individuals living in England and Wales … it took Scotland and Northern Wales until the early 1980s to adopt similar legislation.
According to Matilda Battersby’s article in The Independent, The National Portrait Gallery recently opened [I am me], an exhibition exploring London’s gay scene in the 1980s, hot on the heels of its Speak Its Name show; while the British Museum’s Desire Love Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories opens in May; in Manchester the People’s History Museum is documenting 200 years of activism in Never Going Underground: the Fight for LGBT+ Rights; while Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery will showcase how artists responded to decriminalization in Coming Out: Art and Culture 1967-2017, opening in July.
However, the biggest of the exhibits appears to be Tate Britain’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 which explores how artists expressed themselves in a time when established assumptions about gender and sexuality were being questioned and transformed. The exhibition includes works by Simeon Solomon, John Singer Sargent, Doran Carrington, Duncan Grant and David Hockney.
Source: Queer British Art at Tate Britain: Is it wrong to group together LGBT art?