Routes & Roots ✧ Issue 01

Pride Through the Ages – tracing the underground root-paths of queer art

By Sundayfringe

“Every artwork has two sets of roots: the soil it springs from and the secret fibres it sends into us.”

Welcome to Routes & Roots, our new Sundayfringe series that digs down into origin stories while following the living tendrils of creativity as they reach for light. Each edition pairs an artwork-in-focus with a wider archaeological sweep: where did this impulse begin, how did it branch, and what shoots are appearing now?

Today we travel queer time.

1 · Hidden Trunks in Ancient Soil

Martina Sun Sánchez Hernández reminds us that Greco-Roman artists sculpted affection long before anyone coined “LGBTQ+.” Vase painters and fresco masters simply showed what they saw: young athletes entwined, banquet revelry, Sapphic lyricism on a lyre. These works are like fossilised root-systems—quietly intact beneath later strata of censorship.

2 · Medieval & Renaissance Mycelia

When Christian doctrine pruned public desire, queer expression rerouted underground. Symbols replaced overt gestures: St Sebastian’s arrow-pierced torso, Pagan shepherds with oddly tender gazes, the ambiguous smile curling through Leonardo’s notebooks. The roots survived by shapeshifting, intertwining with religious and mythological foliage.

3 · Nineteenth–Twentieth-Century Taproots

Photography entered the scene and, with it, coded portraiture—hidden initials, private editions, salon whispers. Symbolists painted orchids wilting at ungodly hours; Modernists sketched desire in fractured Cubist angles. Even in secrecy, grafting experiments flourished: new cross-pollinations of gender, style, and rebellion.

4 · Contemporary Canopies

Post-Stonewall, the canopy burst into view. Keith Haring’s radiant babies, David Wojnarowicz’s burning houses, Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits glistening like seeds—each refuses invisibility. Digital art now maps queer lineages in augmented reality gardens; performance artists sow living archives in the street. Visibility is no longer a leaf but the whole photosynthetic engine.

Breadcrumbs in the Soil

What unites these epochs? A continual rooting and rerooting—artworks absorbing nutrients from community, then feeding future growth. Queer art is a rhizome: cut one shoot and three more appear elsewhere, still connected to the same underground pulse.

Routes & Roots ✦ Field Notes

Root-origin: Art thrives where labels lag. Root-within: Viewers nurture works by recognising themselves in the image. Root-forward: Today’s queer creators plant hybrid seeds—digital blossoms that archive, agitate, and heal.

⚡ Top 3 take-aways for artists ⚡

Grow like a rhizome, not a tree. Queer art history shows that when one route is cut off—by censorship, by fashion—a new shoot finds daylight elsewhere.

Design your practice so ideas can reroute rather than stall. Symbols are survival tech. From St Sebastian’s arrows to Keith Haring’s radiant babies, coded imagery lets a message travel even when plain speech is risky.

Think about the private “glyphs” your work could carry forward. Visibility is now an active medium. Contemporary queer creators treat exhibitions, murals and digital spaces as performances of presence. Curate how and where your work shows up with the same intent you give the work itself.

🎯 Hit list: three things to see this week

🚀 Quick Pick

WHAT & WHEN

WHY IT’S ROOT-WORTHY

National Gallery, London“Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between”Book talk · Fri 13 Jun, 11 am

Author Gemma Rolls-Bentley and journalist Amelia Abraham trace queer visual culture from antiquity to club flyers. One-hour dive that pairs perfectly with the Roots & Roots theme of hidden lineages. 

Queer | Art | Pride 2025, New York City

Ninth-annual programme of exhibitions, Black-trans cinema nights, and a Marsha P. Johnson tribute mural running all June. A live lesson in rhizome-style community building. 

Whitney Museum, NYC – Pride 2025Free creative workshops & community mural, all month

Combines local LGBTQ+ history walks with hands-on art-making—showing how visibility and activism fuse in a major institution. 

🌱 Liked this edition of Roots & Roots?

Subscribe to Sundayfringe for the next dispatch—fresh routes, deeper roots, and a new trio of must-see art moments delivered straight to your inbox.

🌱 Keep Following the Root-Path

Love this journey? Subscribe to Sundayfringe and get the next Routes & Roots dispatch—delivered fresh to your inbox, ready for your Sunday wander. Together we’ll keep mapping where creativity comes from and where it’s quietly headed next.