This thesis examines the curatorial practice of William Olander (1950?1989), a prolific curator, writer, and scholar, over a short but full period of ten years before Olander?s death from AIDS in 1989. Olander?s work as a contemporary curator in the visual arts addressed the issues of his day as a form of criticism and even activism. Specifically, his work directly addressed and acted within a vital field of debate about the fraught aesthetics and politics of representation within the cultural discourses of postmodernism and the discourses of the politics of gender and sexual identification and of gay and queer identity after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. This thesis explores the exhibitions The Art of Memory/The Loss of History (1985), Homo Video: Where We Are Now (1986), and Let The Record Show (1987) as a series of responses to now established ideas and issues in the field of contemporary art history and theory. This thesis seeks to reinstate Olander as a fearless participant in the complex political reality of the eighties and as a voice that can inform curatorial practice today.