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Queer/Dialogue
September 7 – December 12, 2021
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Fratino ▿ King ▿ Laing ▿ Langberg ▿Opie ▿Quarles ▿Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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This exhibition presents eight artists — Louis Fratino, Jordan King, Jeremy Laing, 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, equity within differences, with a focus on the body as expressive terrain.
The artists represent distinct voices across a spectrum of media, reflecting diversity in identity expressions where they intersect with contemporary political, social, and economic issues, always relevant but particularly charged at this moment.
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Scroll down to experience both the works and the words of the artists in the exhibition.
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Fratino ▿ King ▿ Laing ▿ Langberg ▿Opie ▿Quarles ▿Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Devan Shimoyama
Potted, 2018At the heart of this project is the celebration of each artist as an individual. 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.
Queer 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.
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Doron Langberg
Sleeping 2, 2020There 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.
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Installation Views
Queer/Dialogue
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Louis Fratino
he/him/his -
Louis Fratino
Long Morning (detail), 2019Louis 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.
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Louis Fratino
Jamie, 2019Queer-identifying artists are exploding "modern" customs;
interrogating the misogynist conventions in which the female body is rendered available and commodifiable but the male’s is reserved, as if sacrosanct. Rejecting the oppressive circumscription of human sexuality and sexual practices more generally, Louis Fratino celebrates the unbound male body and consensual sex itself as natural states of human affairs, the repression of which, and stigma attached to which, are far greater causes of social, mental, and spiritual disorder.
Sensibilities abound regarding nudity, sexuality, and propriety.
The truth is, we are all made this way. Everything else is imposed.
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Listen to a Queer Reading by Kit Perry '22 of "Andrea in his hammock" by Louis Fratino
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Listen to a Description of Works in the Exhibition by Louis Fratino
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Featured works by Louis Fratino
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Home ▵ Fratino △ King ▿ Laing ▿ Langberg ▿Opie ▿Quarles ▿Sepuya ▿Shimoyama ▿
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Jordan King
she/her/hers -
Jordan King
NYC 3, 2020I am simultaneously an artist, archivist, and historian. My practice is rooted in archival research and intergenerational connectivity among trans femme performers and queer elders.
I stand joyously at the confluence of drag culture and trans identity, historically a liminal, transitional space, but one which holds incredible beauty and promise for a trans celebratory future.
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PERFORMANCE
I look at the history and traditions of trans female-identifying performers going back to the 1950s and 60s. In this world (which was then a very niche world) of trans performance there were commonalities, decade after decade, in trans females' individual realizations. This became my driving force to think of myself as an artist. I realized that I am part of a legacy of many trans women who had come before me, performers and artists who were unrepresented and not celebrated as they could or should have been.
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It started out as something that I was doing for myself, just to help me gain a bit of power.
And when I think back to it, there was immense power. It was a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life, gaining strength and feeling totally powerful in peeling off those layers. I thought, "Wow, I can actually be in my body and hug my body and show off my body.... Yeah, this feels like how I want to share who I am." There was — and is — self exploration, self understanding and self actualization in the act. When I think back to that initial period of performance for myself ... I never set out to try to recreate exactly how things were done at that different point in time or in that prior decade, it is about moving the history forward and taking inspiration from that and taking some of the ideas from that, but then also delivering it to a new audience, which then allows it to evolve and to continue to grow.
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PERFORMANCE
I've been looking at some of the history and tradition of trans female identifying performers in the 20th century, going as far back as in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the original driving force to really think of myself as an artist, to recognize that I was part of a legacy, of many other trans women that had come before me who were performers and artists and who were unrepresented and not as celebrated as they could have been or should have been.
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TRANSITION
The photos below were taken over two years in the course of my medical transition. Using this term presumes the reader understands the ways in which trans people in the 20th century transition, or begin expressing, living, and perhaps modifying physical characteristics to inhabit a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth.
In viewing these photos as a series, the viewer may scrutinize my appearance for these changes. Some are evident, some are not. Part of stage performance is an awareness of this scrutiny. I lived my medical transition publicly, in front of audiences, and as a result I acknowledge and anticipate the scrutiny. I also seek to challenge presumptions that trans identity is based solely on physical presentation and visible gender-defining characteristics.
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Listen to an Interview with Jordan King
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JEREMY LAING
he/she/they -
Laings’s practice pulls from many overlapping areas but at its center is always an intentional questioning and a very palpable dissonance or friction. His work creates and holds space for the idea of Queer bodies without specifically identifying who they are. There is an invitation extended to the viewer to engage but also enough nuance and subtlety that only those who seek shall find. The ideas around Queerness that these physical works and created spaces explore always seem to be just ahead of us. To come to rest on any one specific reading or arrangement seems unlikely.
This refusal to reveal everything may sound at first like a refusal to commit, but it is this very refusal to commit that actually gives each of these works their power and renders them Queer. There is an intentional refusal to limit what they are and therefore to limit what they can become.
Laing moves easily between media, made easier by his greater interest in the concept than the object, or perhaps in the tension and friction between the two. There are often holes in Laing’s work. Literal holes, waiting to be filled; holes recently mended or embellished and existing only to act as a pass through; holes as exit or entry to another side or another idea. His work creates and holds space for other ways of thinking and other ways of being, even those of the viewer. His works are connected to his community-building and people-focused projects, different but linked in their exploration of spaces and the questioning of who and what gets to hold value within them. There is a conscious interrogation of intent behind all he produces and an intentional examination of both wanting to be seen and holding onto the power that comes from being invisible and/or not answering every question.
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Jeremy Laing
“Baby’s First Mood Bod” – my poetry dealer, 2019The 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.
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Jeremy Laing
Artwork-Life Balance (Ongoing Relation, Wear and Repair, 2010-21), 2021 (detail)We treat objects, in a sense, the same way we treat subjects. Some are deemed important, and some are not. Some do all the work and get no credit. Some rest mainly on the fact that they are historically of a certain shape and scale and position on a wall and therefore have inherited a supremacy. These things require interrogation and an opposition, and I am interested in doing that in a way that is representational in some way, but also not, in the sense that while my objects are also about subjects and people and bodies, I'm not... I'm not presenting that with any specificity…because of the exclusion inherent in any representation.
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Listen to a Queer Reading by Zamashenge Buthelezi '22 of "Artwork-Life Balance" by Jeremy Laing
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Listen to a Queer Reading by Bailey VandeKamp '22 of "Captive Vessel" by Jeremy Laing
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Listen to a QUEER READING by Phillip Tyne '24 of "Leavings" by Jeremy Laing
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Listen to a Description of Works in the Exhibition by Jeremy Laing
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Featured works by Jeremy Laing
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Jeremy Laing
Swatched Pot/Potted Swatch #13, 2019
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Jeremy Laing
Swatched Pot/Potted Swatch #5, 2019
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Jeremy Laing
Swatched Pot/Potted Swatch #11, 2019
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Jeremy Laing
Swatched Pot/Potted Swatch #2, 2019
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There is a cost to visibility which is sort of falling into line. I mean, back in the early 2000s, nobody was taking photos of people bobbing for butt plugs on stage at a party. If they were, maybe people would not have felt quite as free. Part of every gesture being a record, as in our contemporary moment, is the coterminous anxiety about how you are looking in that record at all times. There is no space that is off record ... which is also partly why, for instance, the parties I do ... well not now and not in the last year because of COVID, but the parties I'm doing most recently, and will do soon … are parties without a social media presence, just very word of mouth, no cameras on the dance floor. This is about wanting to prioritize a space that is still somewhat invisible .... And this is a kind of non inclusiveness, but in a way that I hope fosters a more dynamic shared experience in the moment. It's also why I don't want to port over this gesture into an institutional art context which rewards certain types of performances of visibility, instrumentalizes them in certain ways, extracts from them.
Art doesn't get to have everything. It doesn't get to colonize and extract from everything and everyone.
Sometimes the art is only for the people making it together, in the moment.
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Home ▵ Fratino △ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▿ Opie ▿ Quarles ▿ Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Doron Langberg
he/him/his -
Doron Langberg
Devan, 2019I 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.
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Listen to an Interview with Doron Langberg
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Listen to a Description of Works in the Exhibition by Doron Langberg
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Featured works by Doron Langberg
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CATHERINE OPIE
she/her/hers -
Catherine Opie
Model Fire #1 (The Modernist), 2016I'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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Listen to an Interview with Catherine Opie
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Watch a documentary film by Sini Anderson
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Watch an excerpt from The Modernist by Catherine Opie
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LISTEN TO A QUEER READING by Annalise Rummelhart '24 of "Bo" by Catherine Opie
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Listen to a Queer Reading by Dean Oppenheim '23 of "Model Fire #1" by Catherine Opie
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Listen to a Description of Catherine Opie's Works in the Exhibition
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Featured works by Catherine Opie
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Catherine Opie
Bo, 1994
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Catherine Opie
Sleep (The Modernist), 2016
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Catherine Opie
Mirror #3 (The Modernist), 2016
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Catherine Opie
Artist #2 (The Modernist), 2016
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Home ▵ Fratino △ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▿ Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Christina Quarles
she/her/hers -
... what freed up my practice was taking away the idea of trying to make work about something, because as soon as you try to make work about race, or about Queerness, it isn't that. It's just didactic and it's explaining something, but doesn't embody that thing. And as soon as I allowed myself to make work that's when it suddenly could encompass these issues that were important to me rather than just being illustrations of an idea that was important to me.
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Listen to a Queer Reading by Elena Friedman '24 of "A Head of Ourselves (Lez We Get)" by Christina Quarles
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Listen to an Interview with Christina Quarles
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Listen to a Description of Works in the Exhibition by Christina Quarles
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Featured works by Christina Quarles
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Home ▵ Fratino △ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▵ Sepuya ▿ Shimoyama ▿
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Paul Mpagi Sepuya
he/him/his -
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Figure (_2100934)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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Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Darkroom Mirror (_2070527)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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Listen to an Interview with Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Listen to a Queer Reading by Jenny Rodrigues Santos of "Mirror Study (0X5A6571)" by Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Listen to a Description of Works in the Exhibition by Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Featured works by Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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Home ▵ Fratino △ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▵ Sepuya ▵ Shimoyama ▿
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Devan Shimoyama
he/him/his -
Devan Shimoyama
Untitled (For Tamir), detail, 2019Not 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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Devan Shimoyama
Potted, 2018I 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.
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Listen to an Interview with Devan Shimoyama
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Listen to a Description of Works in the Exhibition by Devan Shimoyama
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Featured works by Devan Shimoyama
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Home ▵ Fratino △ King ▵ Laing ▵ Langberg ▵ Opie ▵ Quarles ▵ Sepuya ▵ Shimoyama ▵
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About the Curators
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DANIEL STRONG
He/him/his
Daniel Strong has been Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the Grinnell College Museum of Art since 1999. He holds master’s degrees in art history from Williams College/Clark Art Institute and Princeton University.
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Greg Manuel
He/him/his
Greg is an independent curator with over 20 years experience in the art world including 12 years working at one of the most successful contemporary galleries in Canada. He is Co-Director of CArt Caribbean Art Fair and is currently a member of the Curatorial Advisory Committee for BAND Gallery (Toronto CA).
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Queer/Dialogue
Acknowledgements
The concept of this exhibition was initially presented to GCMoA staff by a student, Tucker Haddock ’21. We expected to present the exhibition in the spring of 2021, at the culmination of their final semester at Grinnell, but the pandemic compelled its delay until fall 2021. We present it in recognition of Tucker’s original inspiration and their desire to energize this space with open and provocative exchange. Milton Severe, Director of Exhibition Design, deftly installed the exhibition to highlight the artists’ achievements as individuals while honoring their commitment to community. Works by two of the artists, Catherine Opie and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, are drawn from the permanent collection of the Grinnell College Museum of Art, itself dedicated to the preservation and celebration of diverse voices and the life enrichment that diversity generates. These works in our collection serve as anchors of this and future explorations of LGBTQ+ expression at GCMoA, expanding the dialogue and engaging communities that Grinnell College students will occupy and activate far beyond this time and place.
— Daniel Strong and Greg Manuel, Curators
Current viewing_room