Getty Center Launches First-Ever Queer Art Exhibition with “$3 Bill” for Pride Month

17 June 2025

Photograph: Collection objects from Getty Research Institute

Los Angeles’ Getty Center has launched a trailblazing exhibition for Pride Month that marks a groundbreaking moment in its history: $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives. Opening June 10 and running through September 28, the show is the Getty’s first-ever exclusively queer-themed presentation, offering a richly layered, century-spanning celebration of LGBTQ+ art, voice, and history.

Curated by Pietro Rigolo, the exhibition takes its name from an unexpected artifact found deep in the Getty Research Institute archives: a fictive $3 bill printed in 1981, featuring portraits of civil rights icons Harvey Milk and Bessie Smith. The note, distributed during Pride as a grassroots symbol of defiant joy, captures the spirit of reclaiming “queer as a $3 bill” once a slur, now a badge of pride.

Organized into four chronological chapters from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day, the exhibition traverses eras of transformation: the emergence of queer self-awareness, Stonewall and protest, the AIDS crisis, and the rich diversity of contemporary queer experience. The gallery’s palette shifts accordingly in each section, guided by vibrant graphic design that mirrors the mood and drama of each time .

One of the exhibition’s most poignant works is Félix González-Torres’s 1991 candy pile, Untitled (For a Man in Uniform). Weighing approximately 220 pounds and colored in red, white, and blue lollipops, it is meant to be touched and consumed by visitors, its gradual depletion an echo of the lives lost to AIDS. González-Torres’s concept weaves themes of politics, memory, and intimacy into a single gesture.

Another arresting installation is The AIDS Chronicles, by the Institute of Cultural Inquiry. This wall-sized work features New York Times front-page photographs from 1993 to 2019, almost entirely obscured by layers of red paint except for the discreet AIDS headlines. The result is a haunting commentary on media erasure, reclaiming history by spotlighting the stories once suppressed

The exhibition also showcases seminal voices from the Getty’s permanent holdings: Robert Mapplethorpe’s bold portraiture, Harmony Hammond’s feminist Hair Bags crafted from shared hair in the 1970s and vivid images of Harlem drag balls captured by Johnson Publishing. Each piece asserts the vibrancy, complexity, resilience, and societal impact of queer culture across decades

Rigolo emphasizes that the show is not simply historic it’s emotional, embodied, and disruptive. It amplifies narratives too often relegated to marginal footnotes, while drawing lines of continuity to the present day. “It’s really a show that strives not only to present the accomplishments of our communities in the realm of art but also our presence and our significance in society overall,” he remarked

As Pride Month unfolds, $3 Bill stands out among the many queer-themed offerings across the country. It invites visitors to reckon with activism, loss, and transformation, while asserting that LGBTQ+ lives are and have always been integral to cultural history. And by staging the exhibition at the storied Getty Center, these stories receive a place of institutional reverence and permanence

Over the next three months, Angelenos and visiting art-lovers alike are invited to experience these vibrant, deeply human narratives. Whether taking a candy, confronting a painted-over headline, or encountering archived fragments of queer daily life from the 1900s, the exhibition offers a mirror and a testament to the power of insisting on visibility.