By Leah Smolin
Found Family: Queerness and Community in the South opened in September at Furman University’s Thompson Art Gallery, displaying a range of experiences and philosophies from fourteen Queer Southern artists, from performance and dating to nostalgia, grief, and vulnerability.
According to Kylie Fisher, who organized the show along with fellow professor Stephen Mandravelis and student Alex Aradas, the exhibition was part of a larger mission to contribute to Greenville’s growing reputation as an arts hub. “When I invest in my community, I invest hard,” Fisher says. She also emphasizes the need to make sure Queer students, who often go unsupported by large institutions, feel represented and included.
Showing work by artists who have been pushed to the margins, she believes, creates a more welcoming space that also extends to community outside of the university walls. The goal is "to break down these silos that have been put up, you know, between a private PWI with a longstanding Baptist tradition in Greenville, and allow community members to come into this space and see themselves represented.” Part of the outreach to the larger community was collaborating with the Queer Arts Initiative and inviting artists Marty Epp-Carter and Rae Clark to be jurors alongside Fisher.
“I was overwhelmed by the amount and quality of submissions,” says Clark, who represented the QAI. “There were a lot of good artists we had to say no to.” The number of submissions also surprised Fisher. "I felt like it was a testament to the flourishing arts community in the South,” she says.
Epp-Carter, whose own work is focused on printmaking and mixed media, was excited about the project from the start: “First of all, I thought it was very interesting to think about Queer community in the South. I lived in Boston for many years and there was a great sort of concentration of clear delineated Queer space versus straight space.” In South Carolina, those distinctions can be less clear, and Epp-Carter says, “There’s two sides to that coin.”
“Every one of them deserves some thoughtful time spent with it,” Epp-Carter says of the pieces in the exhibition. It surprised them “how much each artist wrote about their work and the research that went into doing it and the other art that they're looking at as practicing artists. These are very engaged artists . . . their work can stand up anywhere—it would not have to be a siloed queer exhibit.”
One of the pieces that invited a slow, thoughtful approach from viewers was Catherine Paul’s Ill, On Being, an interactive artist’s book in the form of a library card catalogue that can be flipped through. Each card contains literary quotations about illness. “Like the human body, the paper cards possess a certain fragility,” write Fisher and Aradas.
Much of the work has to do with resilience in the face of discrimination against the Queer community and backlash from lawmakers, churches, and one’s own family. Will Lattman’s series of photographs, Rainbow Road, are of drag performers getting ready backstage at The Hideaway in Rock Hill, SC. “Produced at a time when the proposal of local anti-trans and anti-drag legislation threatens the legality of these shows,” write Fisher and Aradas, these photos “reveal a vulnerable side of drag that is not often seen by audiences: the process of inspiring self-confidence and the dedication involved in being stage ready.”
Sculptor Brad Silk contributed three pieces, including a a reimagining of Narcissus, gazing at himself in a daffodil-carved mirror and a transmasculine version of Michelangelo’s David. Silk’s For Hammoud is a portrait bust of a Queer Palestinian artist named Hammoud mourning the death of his first love.
Fisher was was stunned at "just how well the works worked together, the synergy and different motifs. [. . .]There were these natural connections both visually and conceptually that came out, and yet we were still able to focus on diverse voices and intersectionality within Queer identities and think about how race, ethnicity, citizen status, disability came into play—which I think made it into a more rich show.”
One such repeated motif was mirrors and reflection. Rial Rye, who featured in Rattlesnake Vol. 8, contributed the mixed media sculpture I Don’t See Color (Blue) which asks viewers to look in a warped, tinted mirror and see themselves as “other.”
All three jurors felt the show had an emotional impact on visitors. Clark was moved when students told stories of how much the show meant to them, and remarked, “I wished I had something like that when I was that age.”
"This is just the beginning,” says Fisher. “What I would love to see is more spaces to show Queer art, not just visual art but performing arts, installation, poetry.” Fisher also noted, “. . . there is Queer history here that not a lot of people know about.” With this and future projects, she hopes that “we can revive some of that.”
When asked about parallels between the works in Found Family, Epp-Carter says, “What I saw was resilience and a sense of humor, irony. And just kind of a way of saying—I guess this is more the resilience part—’You know what, I’m gonna make art. I’m gonna make it what I think is beautiful and joyful and strong.’” When it comes to suffering, Epp-Carter says, “artists have the job of presenting it and almost saying to people: ‘This can be survived. This can be gotten through, and look what’s on the other side. And you’re not alone.’ I think there was a big thread of ‘You’re not alone.’”
Found Family: Queerness and Community in the South
Artists: Jenna Casey, Ashley Felder, Maggie Genoble, Claire Harvey, Jules Jackson, Huan LaPlante, Will Lattman, Jacob Lehmann, Cole Miller, Catherine Paul, Savannah Ralph, Zachary Riga, Rial Rye, Brad Silk
Jurors: Kylie Fisher, Marty Epp Carter, Rae Clark
Organizers: Alex Aradas, Kylie Fisher, Stephen Mandravelis