Meet Éamon McGivern, Artist-in-Residence

Welcome Éamon!

Éamon McGivern is a painter from San Francisco who over the last seven years has painted portraits of Bay Area Queers, punks and poets. More recently, he has been delving into the archives of twentieth century LGBTQ+ history, picking up strands from holes in the historical narratives in an attempt to darn the tears between the past and present wrought by political oppression, transphobia and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. McGivern’s work feeds into the sorrow borne from the absence of the Queer and Trans people who would have been the teachers, mentors, parents and grandparents of his generation and the effect their deaths have on contemporary life.

McGivern holds a BFA with honors in Painting from the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, New York) and an MA in Fine Arts from the Chelsea College (London, United Kingdom). He is a two-time recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artists Grant and a former artist-in-residence at both the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, Nebraska) and Residency 11:11 (London, United Kingdom).

On his current residency, he said:

Born in 1920, Tom of Finland came of age in a time when the sexual/social identity category of the Homosexual male was still in formation both ideologically and legally. His popular erotic drawings of masculine men fucking each other were not only responding to the desires of the time, but actively shaping the sexual imagination of what it meant to be a Gay man in the 20th century.

In this timeframe I see a mirror of my own experience as a Queer Transgender man born in 1990. Lou Sullivan, the first openly Gay Trans man to medically transition did not do so until the late 1980s, just a few years before I was born. 

My life maps onto a historical period where the sexual identity I inhabit is not yet settled or integrated into the larger erotic framework of our society. While at TOM House, I will draw inspiration from the archives to support a body of work exploring the power erotic art has to shape social identities through fantasy and desire.

Published: 13th May 2025

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