There is not, and never will be, complete alignment among queers, but there is room for dialogue in places of intersection that can help with learning and teaching — the core of Grinnell College’s mission — especially beyond queer-identifying communities. Ultimately, ‘queer’ is never comfortable with limitations in its definition.

Louis Fratino’s inspiration comes from ancient art via the modern.

He rejuvenates the Cubist revision of Classical and Academic ideals by Pablo Picasso.

Picasso prioritized the female body in his work, the complexity of which he compounded (and problematized) by his relationships with the women — his successive “muses” — who populate his art. Fratino gives us, also in the form of friends and lovers, the male body, the natural state of which was commonly depicted in ancient art, and remains a fundamental of life-drawing classes to this day. Male genitalia, however — euphemistically (en)titled “manhood” — is typically shrouded in today’s popular culture, as if in modesty, and left to the imagination.

The tent wall is a tapestry, is a blanket, is a carpet, is folded up under your bed, is draped over your couch, is hung on the wall; I’m fascinated by all the ways a textile transforms as an object while remaining itself through all of its iterations.It is always either in transition or laying in wait for its next one. It has different appearances and different performances based on context, on audience and place. It is most itself when it is allowed its many forms.

I really believe that we work from our experience...

...and that's kind of our default mode. I think that the responsibility, or burden, or however you want to ... or privilege, is to be true to that and reflect that in the most honest and direct way. And I think that the times where I feel like people are betraying their responsibility is when they don't work from their experience or they assume that their experience is universal. Or when they are evasive about who they are and what they are. I think that, to me, is an important point. When queer artists make bro abstract paintings it upsets me because it's like, why are you claiming neutrality when neutrality just means straightness or heteronormativity?  I think this kind of acknowledgment that we all have a position, and that position is colored by our experience, to me, is where the responsibility lies. More so then this affiliation or that affiliation.

For me, the work is about asserting Queerness.

The thing that I'm interested in is asserting Queerness as fundamental to the formation of photography, and looking at the things that the medium can attempt to hold on to; what it reveals as constructions of a set of desires that have been put together through technology, looking more closely at what we choose to look at, how we look at it, and how we find ourselves in relationship to it.

All the other stuff, I don't care about, because there's all these waves of exhibitions around identity. When I talk to friends or mentors who are older and have gone through the clusters of the late 80s, the early 90s, or the early 2000s. The backlash was late 90s or early 2000s. When I was in school, identity politics work was so out, and then came this moment that we're in where it's like everyone wants QTPOC artists. We just keep adding new acronyms or ... what do you call them? Is acronym the word? I don't know.

I don't depict black figures in pain.

I'm not interested in seeing more of those images circulate throughout the world. I think they bring a lot of trauma and they circulate enough through social media. In works like Untitled (For Tamir), it's a way for me to celebrate their life, and bring attention to the tragedy that was their death, without disrespecting their family and loved ones by pumping more of these images out and hurting other Black people by reiterating it. 

I think it's important to try to have these dialogues about this but not have the majority of images you see of Black people, or Black trans women, or any of these people, being dead or memorialized. I don't think that's something I'm interested in. So I'm thinking more about representing people's bodies; how I want to celebrate and put out more images that are positive of those people that we so often think of as just automatically dead in our minds.

I want to see more living happening.