​Tara Burk

Tara Burk is a Philadelphia-based art historian. Her work has appeared in WSQ, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Space and Culture. She has lectured widely at institutions and conferences including the Brooklyn Museum, The IFA-Frick Symposium on the History of Art, The College Art Association Annual Meeting and The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. She received her doctorate in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2015. Her dissertation, “Let the Record Show: Mapping Queer Art and Activism in New York City, 1986-1995,” was awarded the 2015 Paul Monette-Roger Horwitz Dissertation Prize by The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. This project examines the American activist art collectives Silence=Death Project, Gran Fury, and fierce pussy. It traces the development of cultural AIDS activism in the urban public sphere and the reconfiguration of both artistic and political engagement during the American culture wars of the late twentieth century. Tara is currently a lecturer at Rutgers University, where she teaches a course on pornography and gender. In July 2015 she curated a Visual AIDS web gallery, “Summer Streets,” which considers the urban street as both a site and a feeling of crucial significance to sexual outlaws. Her latest project examines the iconography of hands in queer art, which is supported in part by the Leather Archives and Museum and the Leeway Foundation.