Museums routinely collect and display work by artists known to have been gay, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, but rarely treat the artists’ homosexuality as a line of inquiry into their work. Reasons can range from curators’ timidity to the fact older artists emerged at a time when homosexuality was driven underground by harsh laws and social taboos.

Perspectives 175: Marc Swanson: The Second Story at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston takes its title from the name of a gay bar of a bygone era. Photo: Rick Gardner

So perhaps it’s a snapshot of the times that the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has two solo exhibitions of work by artists — Donald Moffett and Marc Swanson — whose identities as openly gay men have been inseparable from their careers, and who — unlike Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring, among others — survived the darkest days of the AIDS pandemic.

Donald Moffett: Lot 102907 (X), 2007 Acrylic, polyvinyl acetate with rayon, and steel zipper on linen, wood stretcher Collection Adam Clammer, San FranciscoThat’s not to say Moffett's and Swanson’s superbly crafted, formally compelling art should interest only gay men or that the artists’ homosexuality is the most interesting thing about the work. Their gay and other political references notwithstanding, Moffett’s paintings, in particular, are consumed with extending the post-World War II tradition of “attacking” the medium — metaphorically and sometimes physically — dissecting its components and attempting to liberate it from the two-dimensional plane. (They succeed, to dazzling effect.)

Yet you can’t understand these artists’ work — although you can respond to it — without knowing gay men of a certain generation made it. Though Moffett is a baby boomer and Swanson a Gen-Xer, both artists fall on the same side of a more pertinent generational divide for gay men: those who remember when AIDS was an automatic death sentence and those who don’t.

“Swanson’s new works came out of his experiences of considering the worldview of the generations that have grown up since AIDS placed a final marker on the era of early gay lib, severing the ties to that culture’s rich history,” director Bill Arning writes. “He realized that someone born in 1990 might repeat certain icons familiar to those born in 1960 without any actual sense of context.”

Marc Swanson: Untitled (Boxer Box), 2010 Wood, chain, digital c-print, polyurethane. Courtesy the artist

Swanson’s reliquarylike assemblage Untitled (Harold Box) contains a photo of Harold, the barb-tongued guest of honor at a birthday party in The Boys in the Band (1970), the first major American film to revolve around a cast of gay characters, veiled behind draping fabric and dangling chains. Harold appears at once enshrined and buried to the point of near-oblivion.

Part of the piece’s meaning is that Harold, an iconic figure to gay men of a certain age, is unfamiliar to the Glee generation, which has unwittingly adopted some of the film’s cultural signifiers as its own.

Though Moffett was an in-your-face AIDS activist early in his career, his paintings of the past decade also “mean differently” depending on viewers’ life experience. That’s particularly true for the 2003 series that gives his survey its title, The Extravagant Vein.

Donald Moffett: Gold/Landscape #2, 2003. Video projection, enamel oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

It’s a suite of textured gold canvases that would read as abstractions if not for the way Moffett “lit” them — with video projections of the Ramble, a lushly planted area of New York’s Central Park.

What gives these shimmering landscapes their haunting mood? Much of it has to do with how the scenes, seemingly shot at twilight, reflect off the gold canvas, with occasional flurries of blue paint reading as gashes. They register that way even more emphatically in light of the fact the Ramble has been both a gay cruising site and the scene of violent attacks on gay men for more than 100 years.

Most viewers won’t bring this knowledge to the series, of course, any more than most visitors to Swanson’s show will know who Harold was. Both artists assume, even count on, as much. Nor would such insider’s knowledge matter if the artworks weren’t compelling enough on their own to make viewers pause, look more closely and ask questions.

Even as signs of a generational changing of the guard emerge, “art” is still the operative word in “gay art.”

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Through Sunday
Perspectives 175: Marc Swanson: The Second Story
Through Jan. 8
Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein
Where: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose; 713-284-8250