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This exhibition presents five artists — Doron Langberg, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Devan Shimoyama — whose works enable dialogue at the intersections of identity expression: race, gender, individuality and otherness, equality within differences, with a focus on the body as expressive terrain.
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The artists represent distinct voices across a spectrum of media, reflecting diversity in identity expression where it intersects with contemporary political, social and economic issues, always relevant but particularly charged at this moment.
At the heart of this project, indeed one of its essential forces, is this insistence on each artist as an individual first and foremost. Rather than gather a broad survey with one or two pieces by many artists, we present these artists in solo presentations side-by-side, creating a multidimensional dialogue, using the term ‘queer’ as a catalyst. In our belief, it is not a term restricted to the definition of a particular sexuality, but rather fractured and constantly shifting. To identify as queer means to be consistently and very consciously working from a place of anti-oppression and therefore to be listening, hearing, and making room for the voices of others around us and to be challenging the assumptions of the status quo. There is not, and likely never will be, a complete alignment with other ‘queers’, but there is room for discussion and a willingness to both educate and learn, especially beyond queer-identifying communities. There are also places of intersection and areas of overlap which can help with learning and teaching — the core of Grinnell College’s mission — and where one can take moments of pause. Ultimately, ‘queer’ is never comfortable with limitations in its definition.
Scroll down to experience both the works and the words of the artists in the exhibition.
You can return to the top of this page or explore individual artists at your leisure by clicking the buttons that appear between each section. The arrow in each button (▵ or ▿) indicates whether that artist's section is above or below your present location.
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Doron Langberg
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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? You know what I mean? I think this kind of acknowledgement 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."
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Featured works by Doron Langberg
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CATHERINE OPIE
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I'm not interested in a singular identity.
"I'm a human being with a lot of ideas in my mind... I'm looking at the world and trying to answer these various questions that come into my mind about how we function as human beings and society and I'm beginning to craft work and relationship to those internal questions. They certainly come from a question of a queer body in terms of my own identity, but that doesn't mean that that's the only identity that I operate from.... I am still a daughter from the Midwest, from a conservative Republican family, and you can't erase all of that. I think that the way I'm most interested in ideas about identity is the acknowledgment of, and creating visibility for, an identity that I am quite proud of. It's about being out, and how hard it was to come out, but also to make sure that that's not the only entry point in relationship with the things that I think about or care about in terms of mapping out communities and society."
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The Modernist, I feel is all of my ideas that have encompassed my work in the last 30 years.
Catherine Opie: You have architecture, you have income disparity, you have Pig Pen's body — I have been making images of Pig Pen's body since 1980, the late 1980s, and he's a dear, dear friend. I wanted to show a piece that was of the moment, of what people are thinking about now. And I wanted the queer body to exist in a space without saying "this is a queer body." I felt that The Modernist was the newest work that I had made that felt like it encompassed all of these ideas in relationship to other bodies of my work.
Daniel Strong: It's almost like a premonition. When you made this work, you had no idea that this was the world we were going to be living in.
Catherine Opie: Well, yeah. And the film Parasite came out and then won an Oscar. The Modernist was grappling with the exact same things that were laid out in that film. Except this is about artists, and it's also in conversation with Chris Marker's La Jetée, which was about fear of the future. This is about the longing of the past, but the recent past. And now we're even at a deeper longing of the past with this weird nostalgia. It's what the current body of work is trying to do, which I call Rhetorical Landscapes. You hope, as an artist, that you engage in a long conversation with your own ideas, as you traverse through multiple bodies of work.
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Featured works by Catherine Opie
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Christina Quarles
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Featured works by Christina Quarles
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Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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I will never forget that feeling of being young and looking out and identifying particular artists and finding a sense of recognition, but people can easily shut the book on that.
So you have to say, okay, that's where queerness is in my work, the apparatus and how it is used is the thing. Maybe we might be queer people using it or whatever but I want that to be there when the conversation has turned to something else and our pictures to still be in the room because you can't talk about photography without them."
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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."
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Featured works by Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Devan Shimoyama
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Not all artists who are in some kind of capital O "othered" community have to make everything through that lens to service or educate everybody else on something....
"People who are in communities that are subjugated or are highly politicized in a multitude of ways and under oppression can make work about a multitude of things.... We’re multifaceted, and it doesn't have to come out of a place of trauma. I think that is also really important to see."
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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 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.
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Featured works by Devan Shimoyama
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