“She sells seashells by the seashore.”
The tongue twister is widely believed to have been inspired by Mary Anning (1799–1847), a legendary paleontologist from Lyme Regis, England. She’d sell fossils and seashells gathered from the cliffs along the English Channel supporting her family.
Another 19th century female trailblazer living on the seashore across the Atlantic from Anning, Alice Austen (1866–1952), photographed immigrant ships coming into New York at the turn of the century. Just as Anning’s coastal landscape shaped her radical scientific legacy, the Staten Island shoreline shaped Austen’s photographic practice.
Austen was an out lesbian. Anning’s sexuality is the subject of debate.
Across art, literature, and film, queer women have long been depicted at the water’s edge—intimately connected to coastlines, tides, and the sea. While promoting her 2022 novel “Our Wives Under the Sea,” Julia Armfield wryly captured this trope when she asked, “What is it with these lesbians and why are they all so wet?”
An exhibition exploring queer women’s enduring relationship with the seashore opens September 6, 2025, at the historic Alice Austen House in Staten Island. “She Sells Seashells” places artworks from 12 international queer women artists engaged with the sea alongside Austen’s photographs and objects from her extensive shell collection. The presentation builds on the lineage of queer women creatives invoking the seashore, presenting work reflecting on it as a site of queer desire, connection, grief, and possibility.
“This was a theme that I’d been wanting to work with for years and years, looking at that lesbian identity and the seaside and artistic creation and this feeling of the house itself being this radical queer retreat that Alice made into this incredibly safe space for her and her queer friends,” Victoria Munro, the first lesbian Executive Director at the Alice Austen House, told Forbes.com.
The Alice Austen House and its surrounding waterfront park are a nationally designated site of LGBTQ+ history. The museum centers the loving 55-year relationship between Alice Austen and her life partner Gertrude Tate, providing an important window into pre-Stonewall LGBTQ+ history and enriching our understanding of Austen’s important life and work.
“Alice was deeply connected to the waterfront,” Munro said. “The home itself was located on a 15-acre waterfront park, and the home was affectionately known by the family as Clear Comfort. It was also known as the ‘first house on the left’ because it is sitting right at the mouth of the New York Harbor. We look out onto the Verrazzano (Bridge).”
Austen created a waterfront sanctuary for her close circle of queer female friends while documenting the harbor’s activities prolifically, and embracing swimming and sailing as part of her Victorian era seaside life.
“For me, this all started when I took a trip to the Cornish coast,” exhibition curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley told Forbes.com. “I went to visit two artists, Ro Robertson and Sharp, who are both in this show. They took me and my wife and my children on a day trip to Lamorna Cove, which is a beautiful bay on the Cornish coast. We went swimming in the sea and they told me about the history of this particular part the British coast. I started to learn about the artists who had moved and been drawn to that area, the lesbian artists.”
Artists like Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) whose first major exhibition is on view at Tate Britain currently.
“Ithell wrote a text about that bit of the sea, and she called it the lesbian shore,” Rolls-Bentley said. “In the 19th century, at a time when women were not able to live their lives openly and freely, through their artistic communities, they found each other, and this is the space that they gravitated towards.”
“She Sells Seashells” draws connections between lesbian artists who reflect on their own relationships to the sea, from Austen’s American homeland to Anning’s British coast. All of the artists in the exhibition deal with the seashore as a means of exploring their lesbian identity.
“It feels like there is this line that connects lesbians, they’re connected across the sea, through geographies, and also through time. I find that very moving and powerful as a queer woman myself to know that exists,” Rolls-Bentley said.
Escaping to the Shore
Depictions of the seashore and harbors and boats are of course not limited to lesbian artists. The water serves as one of the most common subjects across Modern art. The sea is universal.
“The sea is something that I connect with very deeply,” Rolls-Bentley said. “There is nothing more humbling than the sea. The sea is so powerful, and it reminds us how insignificant we are and our problems are in the grand scheme of things.”
Still, for its universality, it can take on a special meaning for queer artists.
“There is something about the limitless potential and the freeing aspect of it,” Rolls-Bentley explained. “One of the artists in the exhibition, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, said something really poignant to me. The project of hers in the exhibition is a series of video works inspired by queer, female lighthouse keepers. She thinks that one of the things they were drawn to was that the horizon line doesn’t really ever end. It’s like you could just keep on going, going, going. It’s the perfect escape.”
Alice Austen’s house was an escape. Not only for her and Tate, but for their circle of queer, female friends.
“Those historical figures and the documentation of their lives are really hard to come by. It can be so meaningful and validating to hear historical stories of people living their queer lives, and to be reminded that we have always been there, and we’ve always found ways to overcome the challenges,” Rolls-Bentley said. “When I did visit (Austen House), I found it to be a very moving experience, to be in a home that was shared by two women who lived their lives together and the community that surrounded them. It wasn’t just Alice and Gertrude, she had all her friends who she did her bicycling and gardening clubs with. When you see the pictures of these Victorian era women in their bloomers with their bikes, they look like my friends in many ways, just in older clothes.”
Much like today, in Austen’s lifetime, acceptance of LGBTQ+ lifestyles shifted–backwards.
“In the late 19th century, women weren’t even considered to have a sexuality, and in a way, that gave them a bit more freedom to be together,” Munro explained. “Women were also encouraged to have these close romantic relationships with each other because it was thought a good practice for marriage. Alice had more freedom during that period than when she died in 1952 which was one of the most repressive periods in the U.S. for queer people.”
Austen and Tate made no secret of their relationship. They shared stationery with both their names on it. Oral history interviews from people who knew them understood they were a couple. They were engaged in the wider community and its clubs. They weren’t shunned.
That would come later through what Munro calls “homophobic good intentions” and subsequent historians and archivers attempts–successfully–to closet Austen. To conceal her sexuality in an effort not to have her photography marginalized. In many of Austen’s photographs of Tate, her lover is listed as “unknown woman.” Tate was never unknown.
This summer, the Alice Austen House Museum arranged for the repatriation of a near complete archive of Austen’s photographs, an archive that had resided in Staten Island’s Historic Richmond Town museum complex for more than 80 years. Bringing the photographs home will allow Austen House staff to return the appropriate queer context to the images.
“Alice deserves an important place in the canon of the history of photography, and that’s been denied her by the fact that, ‘A,’ her archive has been largely hidden and inaccessible to scholars, ‘B,’ of course, she’s a woman, and ‘C,’ she’s queer and has been closeted,” Munro said. “It’s one of the most important archives to give us a window into Victorian woman and queer woman.”
Her home and “She Sells Seashells” carries on that legacy.
“Having contemporary art and exhibitions like this brings that story to life, but it’s not just bringing it to life, it’s making it contemporary, because so many themes in Alice’s life and work are still incredibly relevant today, and we see how precarious, not just our histories, but our state of being and ability to live out are lives are,” Munro said.
“She Sells Seashells” can be seen through February 21, 2026.
Queer Art And History Around New York
As always, this fall makes for a great time to explore LGBTQ+ art and history around New York, including and beyond the Alice Austen House.
SoMad—a femme and queer-led multidisciplinary art space—presents “Life is Drag,” a solo exhibition of new work by Brooklyn-based artist, archivist, and cultural anthropologist Rachel Rampleman. On view from September 18 to December 18, 2025, this presentation marks a defining chapter in Rampleman’s six-year project using high-definition video to document over 370 performances of more than 200 drag artists.
Rampleman’s project serves as the largest digital archive of drag performance in the United States.
Launched in 2019, “Life is Drag” has evolved into a vast chronicle of American drag culture, spanning cities, generations, and genres. With LGBTQIA+ spaces and drag as an art form increasingly under attack, the presentation becomes more than documentation, it is a collective act of celebration and defiance, showcasing irrepressible performers challenging convention, rewriting the rules, and embodying the range of gender expression. In this spirit, the show transforms SoMad into a space where drag is honored as legacy and living ritual.
Drag also plays a central role in Anderson Zaca’s photography book published earlier this year, “Fire Island Invasion: Day of Independence” (Damiani Books, 2025). Zaca celebrates the legendary Fire Island Invasion of the Pines, an annual event taking place on July 4 on Fire Island, New York.
The inaugural Invasion occurred in 1976 when a drag queen from Cherry Grove was denied entry into a restaurant in the Fire Island Pines and a group of her friends, also dressed in drag, stormed the island in protest. Since then, The Invasion has been repeated every year, with hundreds of drag queens descending on The Pines to commemorate and celebrate this original act of protest. The book marks the 50th anniversary of this historic cultural phenomenon.
Opening October 10 at The New York Historical, “The Gay Harlem Renaissance” examines the Black LGBTQ+ artists, writers, and performers central to the Harlem Renaissance and everyday Black gay life in the early 20th century. Marking the centennial of “The New Negro”—the landmark 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke—the exhibition traces the queer creativity, friendship circles, and mentorships that flourished in Harlem’s salons, social clubs, and thriving nightlife and that helped power the Harlem Renaissance.
Many of Harlem’s most celebrated poets, novelists, and artists were gay or bisexual (some discreetly and others openly); and many of the preeminent blues singers performing in nightclubs and basement speakeasies were lesbian, bisexual, or transmasculine. Whether on Harlem’s biggest stages or in its nightclubs or hidden speakeasies, LGBTQ+ performers took center stage. Together they helped shape the cultural innovation that defined the era.
Amid this cultural convergence, queer and straight artists formed close-knit circles—living together, mentoring one another, and exchanging ideas that shaped the future of Black art and culture. Their creative tensions—whether over how openly to depict same-sex desire or the so-called “unrespectable” venues of Harlem’s nightlife—helped shape the bold, expansive spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.