Dreaming of Home Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

Painters Christina Quarles and Jenna Gribbon join curator and host Gemma Rolls-Bentley in discussing their methods for constructing queerness in their lives and artworks, the importance of holding a viewers gaze, lesbian intensity, and CAMP! This episodes title is a line from “School Note,” a poem by Audre Lorde.
Jenna Gribbon’s oil paintings constitute an important new entry in the long lineage of figurative art, extending its narrative possibilities to explore the act of looking. Her vivid portraits, frequently nudes or partial nudes, depict those closest to her, and sometimes the artist herself, in candid poses, during uncanny moments. Her recent work most prominently features her partner, Mackenzie Scott, whose recurrence both personalizes and simultaneously establishes her as a kind of avatar; shifting the focus of the painting away from the figure and toward the way the figure is framed. By painting otherwise fleeting scenes, the artist adds texture, depth, and a sense of permanency to these temporal images, highlighting themes of pleasure, joy, and expanding the lexicon of queer iconography. Recent exhibitions include Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, The Frick Collection, New York (2022); and I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); and Paint, also known as Blood: Women, Affect and Desire in Contemporary Painting, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Poland (2019). Find her on IG @jennagribbon.
Christina Quarles lives and works in Los Angeles. She received an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and holds a B.A. from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize and in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. In 2021 Quarles joined the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Learn more about her practice at www.christinaquarles.com. Find her on IG @cequarles.
Christina's work in the exhibition, Tilt/Shift, is acrylic on canvas, see the work here.
Jenna's works, Me looking at her looking at me, and To share a common memory, are two of three pieces in the exhibition.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal, with thanks to Globe Town Records.

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"The image is the least important thing about what went on."
Photographers Rene Matić and Clifford Prince King explore the risks and rewards of photography, lenses of love and connection, and the power of preserving community through imaging à la Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie, with host Gemma Rolls-Bentley.
Clifford Prince King is an artist living and working in New York and Los Angeles. He documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak on his experiences as a queer black man. In these instances, communion begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. Within Clifford's images are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge. Learn more about his practice at www.cliffordprinceking.com. Find him on IG at @cliffordprinceking.
Rene Matić is a London-based artist and writer whose practice spans across photography, film, and sculpture, converging in a meeting place they describe as "rude(ness)" - an evidencing and honouring of the in-between. Rene draws inspiration from dance and music movements such as Northern soul, Ska, and 2-Tone as a tool to delve into the complex relationship between West Indian and white working-class culture in Britain, whilst privileging queer/ing intimacies, partnerships and pleasure as modes of survival. Learn more about their practice at www.renematic.com. Find them on IG at @rene.matic.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
Rene's exhibition kiss them from me runs until December 9, 2023, at Chapter, NY. Their new commission Mid Land is on view at The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum as a part of Coventry Biennial 2023.
Clifford's exhibition keep a place for me, with Ryan Patrick Krueger, is on view at Rivalry Projects, Buffalo, NY, through December 20, 2023.
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal

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How do we reclaim traditions of home for our queer futures? Artists Leilah Babirye and Chiffon Thomas and host Gemma Rolls-Bentley discuss reconstructing the self, the permanence of lineage, and the historic weight of the heirlooms and materials they gravitate to in their sculptures.
Chiffon Thomas is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, incorporating embroidery, collage, drawing, and sculpture to explore the self as split, fractured, and transforming. Thomas contends with the crafted body in his work, examining wider issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Thomas holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is currently on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum for his first solo museum exhibition, The Cavernous, and at the Hammer Museum for Made in LA 2023. Learn more about his practice at www.chiffonthomas.com. Find him on IG @c.chronicles
The multidisciplinary practice of Leilah Babirye (b. 1985, Kampala) transforms everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights. The artist fled her native Uganda to New York in 2015 after being publicly outed in a local newspaper. In spring 2018, Babirye was granted asylum with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project. Composed of debris collected from the streets of New York, Babirye’s sculptures are woven, whittled, welded, burned and burnished. Her choice to use discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is ‘ebisiyaga’, meaning ‘sugarcane husk’. ‘It’s rubbish,’ explains Babirye, ‘the part of the sugarcane you throw out.’ Learn more about her practice at www.stephenfriedman.com/artists/66-leilah-babirye. Find her on IG @babiryesculptor
Chiffon's piece Rosenwald is made of cement blocks, bible skins, and thread, see the work here.
Leilah's piece Nansamba O'we Ngabi from the Kuchu Antelope Clan is one of three works in the exhibition, made of glazed ceramic and found objects, see the work here.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zackary Drucker and Amos Mac join the show to discuss swimming upstream as queer kids in the 90s, the resurrection of revisiting a home, and the abundance of trans stories yet to be told.
Two photographs from their work, Distance is Where the Heart is, Home is Where You Hang Your Heart, are part of the Dreaming of Home exhibition, as well as Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art's permanent collection, comprised of over 30,000 works.
Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, director, and producer who has dedicated her work to telling stories that expand our cultural understanding of difference. Los Angeles-based Drucker is a trans woman and activist who often works collaboratively to share narratives about gender-expansive people and women to humanize the impact of transphobia and misogyny. She seeks to reach the broadest possible audience to liberate the maximum number of people. Follow her on Instagram @zackarydrucker, and view her portfolio at zackarydrucker.com.
AMOS MAC is an out trans artist and screenwriter originally from Augusta, GA, and Philadelphia, PA with a history that includes a career as a photographer, magazine editor and indie publisher. Amos is a proud WGA West member who has written and produced on shows including two seasons of GOSSIP GIRL for HBO Max, Y: THE LAST MAN on FX , and most recently on the upcoming Norman Lear comedy – CLEAN SLATE for Amazon Freevee. He co-wrote the award-winning process documentary, NO ORDINARY MAN, focusing on the life and death of jazz musician and unlikely trans icon, Billy TIpton. Follow him on Instagram @amosmac, and view his portfolio at amosmac.com.
Stream Zackary's recent documentaries, Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl, on Hulu, and HBO’s The Stroll, co-directed with Kristen Lovell.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Artists Whiskey Chow and Charmaine Poh join host Gemma Rolls-Bentley in a conversation on the legacy of home for queer Asian diaspora. We discuss how they developed their transformative works, the history that informs artmaking, and how we create a shared playground and queer homeland with each other, for each other.
Whiskey Chow is a London-based artist, activist and Chinese drag king. Chow’s practice engages with political issues and related topics: from queer(ing) masculinity, problematizing the nation-state across geographic boundaries, interrogating stereotypical projections of Chinese/Asian identity, to enabling empowerment by queer-reading ancient Chinese myth. Her work is interdisciplinary: performance, moving image, experimental sound, installation, and experimental printmaking. As artist-curator with activism ambitions, Chow launched, curated and performed in ‘Queering Now 酷兒鬧’ since 2020; a curatorial programme amplifying and championing queer Chinese/Asian diaspora voices in the West. Learn more about her practice at https://www.whiskeychow.com/.
Charmaine Poh is an artist working across media and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. Her current focus, THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE, is a series of enactments considering the potentialities of the feminist techno-body. She is based between Berlin and Singapore. She is a co-founder of longform magazine, Jom, and a PhD candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin. Learn more about her practice at https://charmainepoh.com/.
How They Love explores the complexities of performing queer feminine identity in Singapore, see the works here.
you must everywhere wander 你必顧盼 is an imaginative queer masculine body-scape, see the work here.
Referenced at 17:10, kin is a short film by Charmaine Poh that looks at the notion of home, queerness, and belonging.
Referenced at 36:00, in the shadow of the cosmic is a lecture-performance by Charmaine Poh exploring the avatar and techno-orientalism.
Referenced at 34:25, SOFT & HARD: Beyond Recognition and Queer Coding is an exhibition curated by Whiskey Chow
Referenced at 35:10, Queering Now 酷兒鬧 is an artist-led curatorial programme featuring works by 16 Sino queer artists, directed by Whiskey Chow.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal, with thanks to Globe Town Records.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Catherine Opie’s 1993 photograph Self-Portrait/Cutting serves as the starting point to the Dreaming of Home exhibition. From this seminal work, the show highlights the dissonances experienced by queer people in their desires to live and thrive, alongside the routine restrictions imposed by wider society.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Opie’s seminal work. Gemma Rolls-Bentley joins Opie in discussing the queer body in history, the importance of poking at the "why?", what she loves about being an artist, and how home has evolved for her from the little house she carved three decades ago.
Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH), is an artist working with photography, film, collage, and ceramics. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad and is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. Her first monograph, “Catherine Opie,” was published by Phaidon in 2021. Opie received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
A full transcript of the episode is available here.
Christina Quarles' Tilt shift, referenced at 14:37: https://www.pilarcorrias.com/artists/26-christina-quarles/works/8918/
Catherine Opie's Walls, windows, blood, referenced at 18:35: https://www.thomasdanegallery.com/news/626
This podcast series is produced by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Dreaming of Home is on view September 7–January 7, 2024. Learn more about the show at leslielohman.org/exhibitions/dreaming-of-home
Show music: Fantasy Island Obsession by Tom Rasmussen ft. Kai-Isaiah Jamal, with thanks to Globe Town Records.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.