Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Valentine’s Day frames love as single images — a rose, a red lip, an interlaced hand. But in contemporary art, that frame widens. 

Love can be obsessive or tender, political or private. It shows up in gestures of care, in longing and loss, in intimacy, devotion, rupture, and repair. It asks what it means to be seen — and to see others clearly. 

In this Valentine’s Day version of Stories Behind the Art, explore works that engage with love in its many forms. Whether restless infatuation, desirous temptation, enduring connection, community pride, or chosen family, no love is like another, but rather, a whole gallery of experiences. 

Mary Weatherford, Her Insomnia, 1991

In Her Insomnia (1991), Mary Weatherford transforms the language of abstraction into something charged and intimate. Magnified thorny rose stems emerge through a saturated red field, evoking both romance and unease. Created during a shift in her practice—from traditional oil paint to a distinctly rich in color vinyl-based paint—the work carries a vividity that feels both physical and psychological. 

Weatherford’s engagement with art history, feminism, and the expressive potential of color comes together in Her Insomnia, leaning into the complication behind familiar symbols of love. Like love, roses bloom with care and thorns protect. The roses are suggested but stripped of softness; what remains is tension, the restless energy of a sleepless night—like one spent in love.  

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Mr. and Mrs.), from the series S.E. San Diego, 1982–83

In this photograph from her S.E. San Diego series, Carrie Mae Weems portrays a married couple at home, the longtime proprietor a community portrait studio and his wife, seated closely together in their living room. Made while she was a graduate student at UC San Diego, the series documents the people and social spaces of Southeast San Diego, a working-class neighborhood, pairing portraits with text that shares her exchanges with her subjects.  

On Valentine’s Day, when love is often reduced to spectacle, Mr. and Mrs. offers something steadier: partnership shaped by time, history, and shared space. Their closeness feels lived-in rather than staged, embedded within community and tradition. Weems reminds us that love is not only to romance but also to witness—an act of seeing and being seen within the broader story of a neighborhood and its histories. 

Marilyn Minter, Make Up Study #One, 1989 

Gloss and crimson allure, Make Up Study #One (1989) leans into the visual language of seduction, featuring women as both sexualized objects and agents of their own desire. In this early enamel-on-canvas work, Marilyn Minter draws on the high-shine tropes of fashion and advertising—deep, saturated red, slick surfaces, the promise of glamour. Across three panels, lipstick becomes both love token and evidence: kisses linger as marks, a mouth glistens and drips, and pigment pools in a lush wave of scarlet. 

The Valentine palette, and symbology, may suggest romance, but Minter keeps the sweetness in check. By separating product from body and isolating the act of adornment, she exposes beauty as performance—desire mediated through consumption. What reads at first glance like a gesture of love gradually edges toward something more unsettling, reminding us that glamour and longing are rarely as seamless as they appear. 

Joey Terrill, Jeff, Victor, Lewis and George, 1992–93

Valentine’s Day often centers on couples, but Joey Terrill’s Jeff, Victor, Lewis and George (1992–93) focuses on the sustaining and elective love of chosen family. Painted from a photograph taken at one of Terrill’s elaborate parties in early 1990s Los Angeles, a time when the AIDS epidemic ravaged the queer artistic circles of LA, the work captures a circle of friends and partners gathered in celebration and solidarity. 

The painting portrays members of Terrill’s community, including longtime partners Jeff and Lewis, and his close friend Victor alongside his partner Jorge. Their costumes — red velvet hearts, references to Frida Kahlo, theatrical flair — speak to performance and art history. Terrill’s work has long centered queer Chicano identity, portraying forms of Chicano maleness and affection in untraditional ways.  

This painting reminds us that love is not only romantic; it's friendship, partnership, and chosen family, devotion that sustains us, even in the hardest of times.

Sending you ❤️ in all its forms, today and every day,

MCASD