A retrospective full of grit tackles being gay in America

Bottom line: An often emotionally-affecting exhibition from an important, longtime Atlanta artist.

Larry Jens Anderson has been a fixture on the Atlanta art scene for decades. A tall, steely man with a Midwesterner’s reserve, he probably defies expectations of what an artist looks like.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia has given over their reconfigured gallery space to a retrospective called “Larry Jens Anderson: The Atlanta Years (1979-2015).” The work spans the decades when Anderson was making provocative, heartfelt, impassioned and angry work about the AIDs crisis and the heavy burden of family and religious judgment while growing up in the small Kansas town, grappling with being different.

Anderson has been one of the rare Atlanta artists to consistently and passionately treat the kind of social and political issues that can get short shrift locally. There’s so much caution about engaging with issues of gender, politics, race or class from area artists. It it profoundly refreshing to see so much work devoted to heady social issues; even if that work was made decades ago.

An often incredibly emotionally-affecting exhibition, “The Atlanta Years” examines not just the difficult road of facing disapproval and judgment, but more universal themes of family, love and death. Various works document Anderson’s loss of friends and his twin brother to AIDs and the gnawing restlessness of never finding total acceptance from family members.

One of the most affecting pieces in the show is a large 1991 installation, “Where Do Queers Come From?” It incorporates family photos, video, Anderson’s worn, blue baby blanket and notebooks in which visitors past and present can record their feelings about being siblings or parents of gay relatives. The notebooks are an emotional wallop, exploding with devastating personal stories of denial, acceptance, rejection, misunderstanding, ostracism and deep love. If you spend time with one work in this far-ranging show, make it this one. Give yourself over to all it says about the fragility and heartache of the human condition.

The work on display ranges from the wry and kitschy to the grand and operatic. Anderson has centered years and countless artworks on the “Dick” character from the classic retro “Dick and Jane” primers. He upends those paeans to normalcy again and again. Dick serves as Anderson’s proxy: a clean-cut all-American kid, who also happens to be gay. In a series of tongue-in-cheek works Anderson juxtaposes that friendly, happy-go-lucky kid with the words of condemnation that define a gay man’s coming of age: “fruit,” “fairy,” “queer.” Anderson’s approach is often light and fun: Chiquita banana stickers to stand in for fruit or toile wallpaper fairies. But there’s a back beat of disgust and fury that is very personal.

Not all of the work is successful: how could it be over such a long and diverse career? Anderson can be strident and he can be grandiose. But as a whole, you come to appreciate the totality of what this show is: a life experienced and surveyed; and the grit and bravery of Anderson recounting his deepest struggles with loss and love.