~ COMING SOON! ROY in Dialogue: Julie Rae Powers / Jacob Kopcienski / Marcus Morris
~ COMING SOON! ROY in Dialogue: Julie Rae Powers / Jacob Kopcienski / Marcus Morris
ROY G BIV Gallery is proud to present new and expanded programming.
ROY in Dialogue adds to our already exciting exhibition calendar as we look
toward a discursive space to engage with topical and thematic works of art.
Scatter These Hills with Beauty: Queer Appalachian Art
Featuring Julie Rae Powers, Jacob Kopcienski, and Marcus Morris
With Guest Essayist Kelsey Sucena, Guest Exhibition Curator: Marcus Morris
Programming Curator: Amy Schuessler, Director
New works on view April 12 - May 3, 2024
Please join us for an opening reception on Franklinton Friday
April 12 @ 6-8 pm
Beauty is a kind of resistance. Imagining this show, I wanted to find space for beauty. The artists featured in this exhibition were asked to center beauty in the way they think of Appalachia as a way to push back at tropes that have dominated the cultural conversation. bell hooks, who inspired the title of this exhibition with a line from a poem in Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place, says “Learning to see and appreciate the presence of beauty is an act of resistance in a culture of domination that recognizes the production of a pervasive feeling of lack, both material and spiritual, as a useful colonizing strategy…”
-Marcus Morris
ROY in Dialogue: Jacob Kopcienski presents:
Archives and Community:
Remembering Queer Cultural Activism in Appalachia
April 13 @ 1-3 pm @ROY G BIV Gallery
In this presentation, Jacob will explore the relationship between LGBTQ music, performance, and organizing in Appalachia during the 1980s and 1990s. Using archival materials and oral histories, the presentation focuses on how Feminist, Lesbian/Gay, and Trans* organizers and artists in West Virginia curated cultural events, concert series and performances to build local social connection and communities.
We will consider how organizers used publications (newsletters and calendars) as tools to translate cultural labor of listening, networking, and organizing into community support, mutual aid projects and regional/national political movements. Attendees will be invited to reflect on archival materials and connect them to present-day LGBTQ performance, community building, organizing, and activism in Central Ohio and Appalachia.
Jacob Kopcienski (He/They) is a multifaceted scholar and artist whose work explores music, listening, and community through writing, teaching, collaboration, and community-engaged projects. The research they share in this exhibition is part of a new project tracing queer performance, political, and care networks between Appalachia and surrounding regions from the 1970s through the late 1990s. Jacob currently lives in Boone, North Carolina, where they work at Appalachian State University as an Assistant Professor in Musicology and Affiliate Faculty member with the Center for Appalachian Studies.
We invite you to use the QR code to explore the digital and physical archival materials documenting queer community, performance, and organizing in Appalachia. We hope that the people, stories, and strategies you find will inspire you to connect and organize your local community, and to “scatter these hills with beauty.”
The images of Mountain Lace issues on this handout and in the exhibition were reproduced with permission from the Digital Transgender Archive, and the University of Victoria Mearns-Mcpherson Library Special Collections.
Guest Essayist, Kelsey Sucena (she/they, b.1994) is a trans* photographer, writer, editor, educator and former Park Ranger. Her work rests at the intersection of photography and text, often within the bodies of performative slideshows, zines, postal exhibitions, and photo-text-books. It is centered broadly upon the United States as a site for post-capitalist, queer, and critical reflection. Her practice documents her personal struggle as a trans*feminine subject against broader political struggles within the contemporary U.S. Kelsey is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at the New York State College of Ceramics and Managing Editor of Photocaptionist.
Please find the free printable version of the essay HERE
ROY in Dialogue: Julie Rae Powers:
Deep Ruts
Photobook Launch
April 27 @ 6-9 pm @ROY G BIV Gallery with
Julie Rae Powers is from West Virginia and Virginia. They come from a working-class family of homemakers, teachers, coal miners, and railroad laborers. They received their MFA in Photography from The Ohio State University and their BFA in Photography from James Madison University. Their photographic and written work has focused on family history, coal, Appalachia, and Queerness. Their photographic work is held in the collection by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, was awarded the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2016 and 2020, and was selected by Photo Lucida Critical Mass' Top 200 for 2021. Recently, they were named as part of Silver Eye Center for Photography's Silver List for 2023. Julie Rae is a part of "Y'all Means All: Queering Appalachian Voices," edited by Z. Zane McNeil. Soft Lightning Studio, an inclusive photo book publisher created and run by Julie Rae, published "The Home We Know" by Ben Willis, featured in the Washington Post, and is collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Watson Library. Additionally, they are the author and editor of a forthcoming collection of Queer Appalachian photographers.
