In Plain Sight: Five Queer Artists Showcasing Work in Breckenridge
Five queer artist will be featured in Breck Create’s upcoming exhibition In Plain Sight: Queer Rural Narratives From the Water and the Land set to open on January 27 in Breckenridge.
Looking for something queer and artsy to fill your little LGBTQ+ heart and calendar? How about a date night on Valentine’s Day filled with LGBTQ+ love letters, poetry, and queer artists? Or are you more into performance art? If any of this is you, my friend, you have arrived in bliss, queer art heaven.
Supporting local queer art preserves and enables the existence of LGBTQ+ art in a not-always-accepting world. And the exhibits’ lengthy run time, January 27 through April 28, should give every art lover enough time to make a trip up to Breckenridge.
Breck Create, a renowned arts and cultural organization, is launching a exhibition that aims at challenging assumptions about queer history and visibility. Avery Glassman, director of programs and special projects for Breck Create, says, “One of the goals of the exhibition is to question the idea that cultural influence only flow one way, from the city to the country.”
The exhibition, In Plain Sight, explores how the ebb and flow of cultural influences from diverse populations creates a wide-spanning variety of stories and narratives. Though the exhibition will be open through April, there will be two dates that will offer interactive events exploring different aspects of queer art, and featured artists will be present.
Opening Reception, Saturday January 27
Performance with Jose Villalobos, Campus Crawl, and Artist Talk (5 p.m – 8 p.m.)
Location: Arts District Campus and Lawn (Next to Robert Whyte House) and Old Masonic Hall
In Plain Sight sets to open Saturday, January 27 at the Old Masonic Hall in correlation with the Campus Crawl, a community event offered by Break Create. Guest will be invited to explore Breckenridge’s art campus, meet artists, and attend a performance art piece.
José Villalobos, the artist from the exhibition, will be off kicking off the night at 5 p.m. with his performance piece A Las Escondidas. The performance will take place next door to the Robert Whyte House on the Art District lawn.
Starting at 6 p.m., Villalobos, as well as two other artists in the exhibit, Lindsey Cherek Wallaer and Robert Martin, will be hosting an artist talk in the Old Masonic Hall. The event will be free and will offer guests time to experience the art with the creators.
Gay Love Letters, Wednesday, February 14
Gay Love Letters and Artist Talk with Ben Cuevas and Janie Stamm (starts at 5:30 p.m.)
Location: Old Masonic Hall
The other two artists, Jannie Stamm and Ben Cuevas, will be present at a Valentine’s Day Cerebration, Gay Love Letters. The event will feature poetry and history in collaboration the New York based Queer public history collective Close Friends Collective, and Mountain Pride, a Colorado LGBTQ+ advocacy group. The night will present a time capsule of gay love with Stamm and Cuevas set to read letters and poems by Queer authors of the 20th century. The event will be pay-what-you-can, and guests can expect a night to fill their queer hearts.
Artist at a Glance
Ben Cuevas (he/him) is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist. His artist statement explains that he is “an artist whose work is rooted in concepts of otherness, inspired by my queer, nonbinary, HIV-positive, Latinx identity.” His work incorporates textiles, photography, sculpture, installation, and more, with intersectionality being a key inspiration behind the wide variety of media.
On the piece Queering the Landscape, an upcoming art piece in the exhibit, he states it challenges “the heteronormative and art historical narrative surrounding the American West,” while, “underscoring Queer/feminist ideologies within the gendered history of women’s work.”
Lindsey Cherek Waller (they/she) is a painter based out of Red Wing, Minnesota and a studio artist at the Anderson Center. She writes that she paints to “create a queer, nonbinary world where pleasure can be experienced beyond what capitalism wants.”
Her pieces in the exhibition include portraits of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people. On their website, she writes they want their paintings, “to be a space to document and honor the existence and vibrance of my community” in a world where LGBTQ+ communities have been removed from the public eye for centuries.
Robert Martin (they/them) is a painter and installation artist based in their hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. Martin recently returned to Appleton after a living in Chicago. In their artist statement, they say, “Much of my practice over the last six years has been devoted to building rural-queer community.
Their pieces in the exhibition reimagine the present in the pursuit of envisioning a utopian future that normalizes and welcomes queerness.
Janie Stamm (she/her) is a craft-based artist who is based on the western banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, Missouri. Before moving to St. Louis, she grew up in the Florida Everglades.
On her work, which consists of embroidery and assemblage, she says, “I make work that builds a bridge between queerness and Floridian ecology by finding similarities in the two histories. Both are interconnected in how society (in a broad sense) has turned a cold shoulder to them through habitat destruction/loss of queer space and ignoring vulnerabilities both nature and queer people face on a daily basis.”
José Villalobos (he/him) is a sculptor, an installation artist, and a performance artist who grew up on the U.S./Mexico border between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In his artist statement, he states his work, “reconciles the identity challenges in his life, caught in between traditional Mexican customs and American mire, as well as growing up with religious ideals that conflict and condemn being gay.”
Villalobos’ performance piece A Las Escondidas (translated as “hide and seek”) is meant to make a statement about his identity, critique machismo, and protest the derogatory terms and attitudes that continue to persist.
*All Images Courtesy From Artists’ Instagram Pages
