Jose Villalobos/Courtesy photo
Before Robert Martin began booking exhibitions branded as a queer artist, they were a kid wandering the woods of rural Wisconsin and identifying different species of trees with their father.
Growing up in a town with a population of 4,000 in the northern part of the state, Martin said representation of queer, rural-living Wisconsinites was essentially absent from their childhood. While examples of queer people such as Martin were seemingly missing from rural Wisconsin, queerness itself was not.
“I grew up understanding that queerness existed in nature,” Martin said. “I saw the anomalies and strangeness in the world around me.”
As Martin aged and began to get a grasp of the world around them, they came to recognize the ways in which the woods that surrounded their childhood shaped their view on queerness.
It was not that Martin found validation for queerness in nature, as they explained that the concept of putting human experience to a nonhuman thing can get tricky. It’s that Martin found a landscape of fluidity and something that lacked a uniform identity different from the heteronormativity in society they were accustomed to.
Martin would go on to obtain a Master’s of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021 and meet more queer artists with rural backgrounds, all with varying experiences.
Realizing the potential that an exhibition on queer, rural narratives could have, they posted the idea on Instagram and included a line-up of queer artists they would feature. Martin said that they posted this framing it as a “dream exhibition,” something they did not think would actually come into fruition.
That’s when a friend from graduate school, who went on to become an arts curator and strategist, reached out and said “Hey, we should actually do this.”
Avery Glassman, Martin’s former classmate and a current employee of Breck Create, got to actualizing Martin’s idea.
Glassman began collecting queer artists, with ties to rural areas, across the nation to participate in what would become Breck Creates’ “In Plain Sight: Queer Rural Narratives from the Water and the Land” exhibition. It will run from Jan. 27 through April 28 at the Old Masonic Hall in Breckenridge and feature five artists.
Another one of Martin’s connections, an artist whose college course they were a teacher’s assistant for, Lindsey Cherek Waller, is also having work featured in this event.
Waller is a Canadian, non-binary artist whose rural surroundings serve as the muse for their art. Waller looks to highlight the fact that while queer art is now a norm in the mainstream creative scene, it is nothing new.
“Queer artists have always existed in rural landscapes, and my work will document that truth and that joy in history,” Waller said. “It is an honor to be part of an exhibition that centers rural queer narratives, as many of our stories are often erased and silenced.”
While Waller brings perspective from up north to the exhibition, artist Janie Stamm will bring perspective from both down south and the rural midwest.
With her roots in the Florida Everglades, a lot of Stamm’s work “centers on preserving Florida’s queer and environmental history in the face of climate change.”
Stamm said what drives her to amply her identity as a queer artist through her work is providing the younger generations something that she never had, an example.
“It’s important to highlight queer people because if there’s queer adults out here in rural areas, that means there’s queer children out here, and having that representation is critical,” Stamm said.
Another featured creator, Ben Cuevas, is a nonbinary artist whose gender and work operates without societal constraints. Cuevas has experience in rural landscapes on both the east and west coasts.
“My work spans a wide range of media. I work in sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance, and sound,” Cuevas said. “I really enjoy knitting and the gender connotations that are kind of baked into knitting and like playing with those meanings in my work.”
Cuevas’s history with rural areas is as eclectic as their work. They describe themselves in their artist statement as “an artist whose work is rooted in concepts of otherness, inspired by my queer, non-binary, HIV-positive, Latinx identity.”
The fifth artist in this exhibition, Jose Villalobos, draws experiences from growing up in a rural area on the border of the United States and Mexico.
He brands himself as a “LatinX Queer Artist deconstructing machismo and toxic masculinity” in his artist statement. This sculptor and installation artist has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, who described his work as “striking.”
The exhibition opens Jan. 27 as part of the Campus Crawl community event, which invites guests to explore Breck Create’s arts campus in downtown Breckenridge. Performance piece “A Las Escondidas” by Villalobos kicks off the event at 5 p.m. on the Arts District lawn next door to the Robert Whyte House. The opening reception and artist talk with exhibiting artists Waller, Martin and Villalobos follows at 6 p.m. at Old Masonic Hall.
More information can be found at Breck Create’s site, TinyURL.com/54dp37ww.
