BOFFO Fall Benefit Exhibition 2025

Lavender Bloom brings together artists whose work engages with florals as a site of Queer transformation, embodiment, and radical possibility.

Flowers can function as symbols of identity, desire, and defiance. Flowers can be vessels of coded language, subversion, and politics. In the lexicon of Queerness, flowers hold particular significance—coded markers of resistance, their scent a whisper of histories both hidden and reclaimed. Lavender Bloom brings together artists whose work engages with florals as a site of Queer transformation, embodiment, and radical possibility.

Botanical language has long been entangled with Queer histories, operating as both metaphor and means of survival. Petals become sites of protest, gardens evolve into spaces of care, and blossoms—both cultivated and wild—emerge as emblems of resilience. This exhibition situates floral imagery within a lineage of Queer aesthetics, examining its capacity to reflect the vast interpretation of Queerness as fluid, strange, deviant, unclassifiable, different, eccentric, excessive, extravagant, flamboyant, curious, weird, exceptional, peculiar, odd, outlandish, and nonconforming.

Through painting, sculpture, photography, and more, Lavender Bloom explores the shifting relationship between Queerness and nature. Works interrogate the boundaries between the organic and the constructed, the ornamental and the political. Some artists will engage with historical codes of floral symbolism—channeling the violets of Romaine Brooks, the poetic symbolism of love and longing represented by floral motifs in Martin Wong’s paintings, and the themes of loss and remembrance in the photographic images of roses by Félix González-Torres—while others will subvert traditional representations of nature through abstraction, materiality, and performance like the radiant, almost spiritual energy of Beauford Delany’s late works, blooms of Cy Twombly, the charged botanicals of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Lavender Bloom draws on the deep historical ties between lavender and Queer identity. The phrase evokes both the history of the Lavender Scare, when Queer individuals were persecuted in the mid-20th century, and the later reclamation of lavender as a sign of empowerment within LGBTQ+ activism. Just as lavender flourishes in unexpected places, this exhibition celebrates the ways Queer artists have used floral imagery to assert presence, cultivate beauty, and reimagine belonging.

Designed by Math Bass

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Alannah Farrell Alessandro Teoldi Bony Ramirez CFGNY Chris Martin Clifford Prince King Dominique Knowles EJ Hill Ficus Interfaith Jimmy Wright Joe Brainard			John Giorno John Sandroni Justin Liam O’Brien K8 Hardy Math Bass Moses Leonardo Nicole Eisenman Oren Pinhassi Pamela Sneed Peter Schlesinger			Rachel Youn Ross Bleckner Sahar Khoury Scott Treleaven Tabboo! TM Davy Tom of Finland Travis Boyer Ulrike Müller WangShui

Opening: 23rd October, 6–8p

Panel Discussion: 25th October, 4–6p

Tom in Bloom
Artists reflecting on Queer figuration in their work with Tom of Finland as a source of inspiration.
With artists Bony Ramirez and Alannah Farrell in conversation with Michael Bullock.

Public Hours: 24th-25th October, 10a–6p

Within Lavender Bloom, Tom of Finland’s Flower print unfurls as both tribute and transformation—a bridge between past and present, and a testament to the endurance of Queer imagination.

Placed among contemporary Queer artists exploring floral imagery as a language of care and resistance, Flower becomes part of a broader conversation on how Queerness continues to evolve through tenderness, community, and collaboration. The partnership between Tom of Finland Foundation and BOFFO turns legacy into dialogue, showing that the radical beauty of Tom’s work still pulses through new generations of artists.