Emily Lombardo is spreading and commemorating love with her Queer Monuments.

Cover photo: Queer Monument: Winterson at Sunset, lithograph, by Emily Lombardo (2017). Via Paddle8.

This article is part of my 30 Living Queer Artists Worth Celebrating in 2019 series. June is Pride Month, commemorating the international gay rights movement that began June 28th, 1969, with the Stonewall riots of New York. 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the event. I’m celebrating all month long!

Boston-based Emily Lombardo is an artist actively exploring queer identity. Her work “weaves cultural and historical references to bring focus to marginalized narratives.” She is best known for her The Caprichos series, a contemporary updating of Francisco de Goya’s 1799 etchings.

My favorite series of Lomardo’s is Queer Monuments, which Lombardo has dedicated to queer writers like Jeanette Winterson and Leslie Feinberg. As described on the auction site Paddle8, “these heroes will continue to empower countless generations to keep on punishing boundaries until there is no room for margins.” The monuments sit in a desolate landscape, inscribed and graffitied, commemorating the queer community and celebrating love.

In Queer Monument: Winterson at Sunset, Lombardo quotes Jeanette Winterson from her 1993 novel Written on the Body: “‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.”

Lombardo writes, “This Winterson quote melts me… this piece considers the monumentality of love in an often hard and unpredictable world.” The giant rock monument feels particularly appropriate, as it emphasizes the neanderthal-like idea of words as found tools.

Love is not monopolized by any one group, yet it has been hard fought for the queer community. It is also deeply ironic, as writes Jane Moore, that there is a “paradoxical demand that love is experienced as a uniquely individual emotion” despite the fact that it is a universal desire.

In 2008, Winterson added to her thoughts about “I love you,” writing in her blog, “I love you. Who is so busy that they cannot write those three necessary words? I love you is always a quotation, and it is the least original thing that any of us can say, but just as it must be often said, it must be sincerely said, and as if for the first time, on a planet new-made from love.”

Winterson continues on, “Communication technology is all about My Shortcuts, and that makes sense in business and in the office. It doesn’t make sense in our personal lives. Love and happiness, worthwhile relationships and friendships, depend on time and effort, not the shortcut.”

Jeanette Winterson encourages us — and Emily Lombardo reminds us — to tell someone we love them, as long as we don’t copy and paste. Celebrate love daily and authentically.