For the month of June, LGBTQIA* folks and allies across New England come together in thoughtful reflection and celebration of Pride, which highlights progress since the Stonewall Riots. While much progress has been made, it is also an important time to reflect on what work our LGBTQIA* communities need to do in order to promote inclusivity, safety, and basic civil rights in the face of a hostile political system. We at Take want to acknowledge this important month by highlighting the artists whose work engages with LGBTQIA* themes and issues, as well as the creatives who claim these sexuality, minority, and gender non-conforming identities. All the folks featured on this list enlivened our editorial by challenging normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and identity in general through their unique work.

The following stories are about all kinds artists: previously pregnant butch dykes, rural drag queens of color, cis gay Asian-Americans, trans femmes, lesbian separatists, non-binary babes, and many individuals and groups of people whose identities aren’t as easily summarized. This diversity in our editorial exists because that is the diversity of our region. Though it’s true that we live in a society that constantly works to erase and delegitimize the existence of LGBTQIA* people, we’re still finding artists and cultural leaders who boldly embrace this sometimes fraught, yet always beautiful, spectrum of existence.

While we are proud to present our highlighted list of artists we’ve covered since January 2015, we’re not so naive to think that these are the only LGBTQIA* folks we’ve featured. While some artists openly share their identities with our staff and contributors, other artists have asked us to keep their identities off the record, or choose to never disclose for privacy and safety concerns.

Take is proud to feature these artists and our team will work harder to bring you more creative voices from the LGBTQIA* community as we expand our web edition and return to print this fall.

Massachusetts

Car Wash

Wading In

This Ain’t No Game

Comfort & Discomfort

Catastrophe in Provincetown

The Insider’s Take: Eternal Slumber Party

Come Closer

Tender, Forever

Becoming The Gold Dust Orphans

Facebook-to-Face

The Kids Are Alright

Cave and the Art of Community

Connecticut

Women of Abstraction

Gender Bender

Feminine Mystique

BL&D Interview – Arien Wilkerson

From Clay to Catastasis

Life is Gross

Sacred Stones

Crossing Equators with Arien Wilkerson

Maine

Portland’s Cherry Lemonade

Notes from an Expat: Where Are You From

Not-so-Little Women

Take Q&A: Crystal Williams—Writer, Advocate, Advisor

Slow Boat to Iceland

The Simple Power of the Cup

New Hampshire

Manchester’s “Sexy Industrialist”

Hood is Downtown…For Now

Rhode Island

Kitty Eyes & Spandex

Taken: Todd Oldham at RISD

Rachel Blumberg Sees And Hears More Than You

Hustler of Providence

Aurora Catalyzes Variety and Community in Providence

ART/Crush: J.R. Uretsky

Meet Rhode Island’s Newest City Boy

Nine Months in Drag

Vermont

The Rainbow Cattle Co.

Make Some Time for Angus McCullough

What Happened Before Homosexuals?

New England

Artists to Watch 2017

10 New England Tattooers You Need to Follow on Instagram

7 New England Niche Film Festivals You Can’t Miss

The post Take Magazine Pride Month Round-up appeared first on Take Magazine.

Casey Spectacular’s art breathes with the stained humanity of a life pulled through cigarette filters: the works cry, wrinkle, cough, and pustulate, occasionally smiling with lopsided lips and browned teeth. The characters who appear in his work are varied, often very old or very young, and usually suburban: in the collection I Used to Be a Dancer it is a friend from art school—a first generation Chinese immigrant depicted as a child in a series of awkward dance costumes; in “Suburban Dreams,” from the collection Connecticut, they are three white men in athletic gear embracing one another and giving a thumbs up in the parking lot of a Cumberland Farms. In others, they are distorted babies, female serial killers, and drag queens.

Wanda Jean Allen, These Women Are Dead series | Photo courtesy the artist’s website

“I think I am a visual artist, but they’re more illustrations,” he says of his work. “I’m really into storytelling, I think that’s where it’s at. Humans create drama, and that’s really cool to me.” Spectacular produces paintings most frequently but also outputs video and performance, as well as an upcoming novel.

Frequent motifs across mediums include parents, bodily fluids, and bad skin. Some works elicit embarrassment, often humor, sometimes fear, and all bare grossness as an ever present qualifier to life rather than an infrequent extreme. It never feels vulgar, nor do the gross details ever mock their subject. Their inclusion feels presented as an act of love for these sorts of characters, a way of presenting people as they are, unfiltered.

When Spectacular shows his paintings in galleries, many viewers respond with repulsion. “I don’t think there’s anything shocking about them,” he says. “People hate seeing crying babies or an old person’s veiny hand but it’s important to see these things as beautiful. They’re real stories.” Teenagers in particular, he says, seem to really relate to it.

Poor Casey

Spectacular’s art is largely concerned with themes of growing up, and the dynamics of the families we are born into as well as the families we find through culture. The youngest of four siblings in Norwich, Connecticut, Casey’s youth was spent surrounded by the teenage drama of his older family members, a facet of adolescence he has come to embrace as humorous and human. When he went to MassArt, he found familiars among the artists and goofballs in Boston’s punk and drag scenes. Though never feeling fully a part of either, these cultures exposed him to creative communities as well as ideas of performance and rethinking cultural symbolism.

Although many of the motifs in his work reflect those of his life, Spectacular says that the art is never really about him, but rather that the stories serve as a personal mythology: he is less interested in exploring the specifics of his own experiences than he is in a grander arc parallel not only to his life but to the lives of others. He says there is an element of folk art in how he focuses on the ways people from this area construct their worldview and how different lives react to living here.

Confusion

“When I was a kid I had a way easier time connecting with mythology than church. That was the only way I understood religion,” he says. “The idea that gods had personal drama that shaped everything – It made sense to me.”

Casey’s next project, Queef: A Novel, follows a young person in southern Connecticut as he grows out of an unwanted youth and begins to find value through his first encounters with queerness, drug use, and meeting the kinds of people they tell you not to spend time with.

On August 12th, a show will open to coincide with the completion of the book at the Hygienic Gallery in New London. It is a presentation of moments and details from the novel featuring stylized excerpts and illustrations from Casey and 26 other artists.

A painting of the novel’s main character wears a secondhand gym uniform with the collar torn so that it hangs of the teenager’s shoulder. “The shirt was real. If we couldn’t afford new ones the school gave us secondhand ones, and of course I’m like the only gay kid in the school and I got the one that hangs halfway off my chest.”

Casey likens the shirt to a natural symbol of New England outsider mythology, “It was perfect, I had to put it in the writing,” before adding, “but the face came out too pretty and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m not sure I like it.”

Casey Spectacular–Artist
New London, Connecticut
Website
Facebook

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