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.

When I first met Kristine Roan back in 2012, her mouth was stained from eating six popsicles in a row for breakfast. Thankfully, not much about her personality has changed since then. She can always be found wearing an assortment of soft textiles, fluorescent spandex, and one of her many sculpture necklaces, an eclectic hodge-podge reflecting her artistic style and playful sensibility to the world around her.

perennial grasses, 2016 | found material, polymer clay, and spray paint | Photo Kristine Roan

As a multidisciplinary artist, Roan engages with painting, sculpture, and collage, creating a neon dreamscape from objects that she obsessively collected over the years from various thrift stores. “I collect objects with curious surfaces and shapes—usually mimetic of organic material—which can easily be decontextualized from their original use,” she explains. Objects that you might recognize in everyday life, such as deconstructed children’s games and toys, plastic fruit, seeds, discarded metals and wood blocks, are all repurposed to create small sculptures. It’s a process that she refers to as “formaliz[ing] unexpected friendships…between the natural and artificial, the austere and goofy.”

Her current work focuses on sculpture and “para-painting,” a self-actualized collaging method that involves layering and piecing together various flat materials, such as placemats and paper scraps, that have been sanded down to reveal their layers and are then sometimes painted upon. Roan refers to this work as “para-painting” because she feels that it is more adjacent to painting than collage. “Para means beside…like paranormal,” she says playfully, adding that she spends far more time gluing these orphan objects together than focusing on the process of painting, which she considers only a microcosm of her work as an artist.

flappery, 2016 | found material, spray paint, acrylic, and paper on wood panel | Photo Kristine Roan

Kristine notes that the layered, textural landscape of her work often makes viewers want to touch the art. “Shelf-life,” her curated series of found objects and sculptures that, at first glance, looks like a shelf of plants, inspires onlookers to interact, to want to hold and rearrange. “I want [my work] to whisper, Come closer. Look closer,” she says. While her art is not interactive, Roan enjoys the tension between familiarity and curiosity in her found objects. Her practice also enables her to preserve objects that were once loved and later discarded, keeping them both out of landfills and in the minds of her viewers.

Roan’s work will be making an appearance at Distillery Gallery for an anti-Trump pop up show on inauguration day, but future shows are temporarily on hiatus. Since the election, she has felt slow to work, spending her time reading and reflecting, contemplating what direction she will move in as an artist. With the new year, however, she plans on jumping back on the artistic wagon.

stone, seed, and shriveling, 2015 | found material and polymer clay | Photo Kristine Roan

Kristine Roan is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Beverly, Massachusetts. Follow her on Instagram for more of her strange magic.

Top photo Kristine Roan | Photo by Jena Tegeler

The post Come Closer appeared first on Take Magazine.