Ecstatic Architecture
Imagination and Re-Envisioning on Trans Day of Visibility
Helloooooo my wonderful GUT family.
So happy to be with you this week. There is a special announcement for GUT members on a local bay area meet up in May, and as always a collection of your gorgeous work from last week at the end of this dispatch. Y’all never fail to awe me.
Today is Trans Day of Visibility. It’s a day of celebration for folks who are transgender, or gender non-conforming in any way, really. So if you know someone who falls under that joyful umbrella, give them a hug and high five today.
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about trans issues in the media - at least here in the USA it feels non-stop, and it’s rarely good news. People who are transgender have been the focus of weekly (daily!) media stories: getting medical care blocked, debating their right to participate in sports, people freaking out over who goes into which bathroom… which is IMHO absolutely nuts, because the entire trans population of the United States is literally only one half of one percent of the population. Talk about picking on the powerless. And while they are trying to pee, no less!
According to a 2023 report, only 28% of people in the US know someone who identifies as trans. That means 72% of people have zero friends and family who are transgender. That’s A LOT of us. Most of us. And that, my friends, makes trans people extra vulnerable. If we don’t have a friend or family member who is trans, all the stories we’re hearing on the news attacking trans people can seem ideological and abstract. But once we do know someone who is trans - or someone in any minority group for that matter - these media stories become real, and it’s pretty impossible not to care.
While I’m not trans (I’m cis, which means my gender aligns with the gender I was assigned at birth: female), I am queer. And I watched my own very hetero-normative family’s interests, opinions, understanding, comfort and respect around queer people change after I came out. While my family of origin will never be the type to hit the streets in solidarity, their concern and consideration around equality and protection for all LGBT people has grown a great deal since they realized that includes me. (NOTE: I’ve included a Glossary of gender related words at the bottom of this dispatch. As always, DT learns together!)
Similarly, while over the years I’ve had friends across the gender spectrum, it’s only since I started dating a trans person (Hi, Kyle!) that I really took notice of all the little and big things that I take for granted about gender. And yes, that same wonderful human who curates your artwork every week is also my boyfriend. (Everyone say hi,
!) (Kyle is transmasculine, which means he was assigned female-at-birth, transitioned, and now identifies as a man. Again, see the glossary at the end!)Before, when I read things like, oh, say the governor of Idaho signing a bill making it illegal to offer gender-affirming care to transgender youth, I thought, “well that’s wrong.” Now that I really have a sense of what that means for trans youth and their families in Idaho, and how scary it is for trans people everywhere to see protection being whittled away, I think “Well, that’s wrong, and terrifying and terrible and what can I do to help protect this tiny group of people who have ZERO power in this country but are being targeted left and right??”
Which brings us to Trans Day of Visibility, which started 15 years ago, in 2009, as a day of celebration. Sobering fact: Until then the only thing honoring transgender folks was Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is dedicated to honoring trans people who have been killed in acts of anti-trans violence.
As we all know, when we don’t see other people, really SEE them, it becomes too easy to dehumanize them. And while we can’t always know everyone, we can all do our best to learn about people different from ourselves. And like we’ve discussed before, one of the best ways to get know people’s culture and history and community is through art.
So this week, on Trans Day of Visibility, I thought we could take a look at a transgender artist whose work I am obsessed with - formally and conceptually - and learn a little about how their art reflects their gender experience and expressions. And with our assignment, we’ll do a little drawing in their shoes. I’m also including some links to other amazing trans and genderqueer artists’ projects I think we at the GUT will find interesting, and that we can all learn from. And there’s a mini-glossary of gender-related words at the end.
Sound good?
Cool cool.
Let’s do this.
(And thank you Kyle for all your help with this one!)
Artist Spotlight: Edie Fake
Edie Fake’s “ecstatic architecture” triggers us into thinking beyond what IS and helps us start to imagine what COULD BE.
Edie Fake is an artist living and working in 29 Palms, near the Joshua Tree desert in southern California. His graphic, colorful, decorative paintings and murals imagine queer, fantastical, hopeful architectural spaces he calls “ecstatic architecture.” His hope is these “ecstatic architecture” paintings will trigger the viewers into thinking beyond what is and start to imagine what could be.
The mural above in the Berkeley Museum of Art is a space Edie imagined for trans seniors - a generally under-resourced group without much structural support - where they could live in community in the Bay Area (a place with a large queer community but not a lot of housing.) The space it not literal, it’s more “about” creating a space - how it would feel, what it would represent and offer, what it would reference and the story it would tell.
For the colors of the mural, Edie took inspiration from the LGBTQ flag 🏳️🌈and Trans flag 🏳️⚧️, then went to the hardware store and chose colors out of the “oops paint” pile (those are the wall paint colors that have been returned by customers.) The result is a far stretch from the rainbow and blue and pink flags, but you can kind of see the influence. He calls this an “aesthetic of resourcefulness.” We work with what we’ve got. Constraints are gifts.
His series of paintings called Memory Palaces has a great origin story: Edie was living in Chicago and working in a bookstore when he found ads in an old magazine advertising queer gathering spaces in Chicago. He began wondering what these since-closed spaces could’ve looked like on the outside. What would drawings of queer architecture that fully embraced its colorful culture and community look like?
The architectural facades he imagines in his small, intimate paintings, are celebratory and attractive, and inviting and reference the long history of a very present community that is not always visible. These building paintings also became about the body, relationships, change and gender self-actualization.
Edie invites viewers to imagine the celebratory things that could happen inside these buildings: conversations, parties, creative work, sex… He leaves people out of the spaces so the viewer can imagine themselves inside the imaginary structure.
Edie also plays with the titles of his work, combining text with the image of the artwork to form a kind of riddle, provoking the viewer to come up with a story around the subject, the place, its history, who and what has been there..
What I love about Edie’s work is the meditative attention to detail, the looping and overlapping lines like we created in our Hunderwasser/Haring drawing. His shapes wind around each other , and create new and unexpected relationships and compositions. Edie’s architectural drawings invite us the opportunity to imagine beyond the expected and concrete. What he offers us is the possibility of a fantastical and playful and fun and relational and colorful future. His paintings expand ideas of how we can live in and fully express ourselves in our buildings, and in our bodies.
One last project: Edie created a room at Meow Wolf, an interactive art museum meets amusement park in Santa Fe. Wow. The combination of 350 degree painting, sharp angles and mirrors creates a surreal space that makes me both want to run into and escape from. The video of Edie talking about the creation of the installation below gives you a little peek into his process creating the piece at his home in the desert.
Notice the print-outs he uses to guide the painting (that tells me he figures it all out before he paints the full scale piece, which makes me think he does a lot of sketches before hand.) Also, notice how he uses make-shift straight edges, sponge paint brushes and paint pens. Nothing fancy. And he works with assistants to complete the large scale project. Remember when we scaled up with our GO BIG assignment? How would YOU work if you were turning your smaller drawing into a giant 360 degree installation?
I lied, one last project. This is in a different medium all together. Edie also creates his buildings and ecstatic architecture in collage. I know some of you will just plot over this, I know I did.
Here’s another great interview with Edie, and there are a bunch more videos and interviews online if you google. Thinking about the body as architecture - how we re-imagine our lived spaced, inside and out, public and private, and how that reflects who we are to ourselves and the world - can open up a new area of imagination and creativity for all of us, no matter what our gender is. I think we all experience rules and expectations being put on our bodies and on our artwork at one time or another. Some feel true and helpful, and some definitely do not. Trans people show us that we do not have to accept norms that do not feel right for us, and we can create a new way of being in the world. One that leads with imagination, creativity, celebration, change, and love. Cis folks like me (and maybe you) have so much to learn from the trans community.
Happy trans day of visibility, y’all.
Other things to look at and read:
I mean, if you aren’t reading
‘s weekly substack publication “Being Alive” you are really missing out.Jess Dugan’s photos of older trans adults in their book “To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Noncomforming Older Adults.”
also has a Substack on photography and I highly recommend following them.Gender Queer: A Memoir is a very sweet, approachable and helpful graphic novel memoir about a young persons’ evolving understanding of their own gender.
The forthcoming book Trans History in 99 Objects by Chris Vargas is going to be amazing (Thanks Ali Leibgott!)
Trans artist Kiyan Williams has two pieces in the new Whitney Biennial.
I can’t wait to get my hands on this book: About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art
Susan Stryker’s Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution is fantastic, accessible and I’m learning a lot reading it right now.
Got anything else to recommend? Questions? Throw it all in the comments!
And with that, let’s DRAW.
Assignment
Your drawing assignment this week is to imagine and draw an ecstatic architectural space that celebrates your community.
Edie wants to create an inclusive, queer, joyful space, and he does it with color, shapes, and lines, and how they all interact with each other and the viewer.
If you were going to create a space for a community you are proud to be a part of, what would it look like? What community would it be? How would you represent that community in a building? Would it look like a “real” building, or totally surreal, or something else? (No rules in art!) What colors, shapes and lines would you use. Size? Shape? Windows? Doors? Would mediums would you use? Paint? Colored Pencils? Pens? Collage? Chalk on the ground??
This drawing can be any size, any medium, but keep in mind Edie’s “aesthetic of resourcefulness” - let’s work with what we have and consider constraints a gift! Less is often more.
If you want to use text and give your building a name or sign, or write a little about the space you create, go for it. No rules in art.
After you’re done, take a photo and share it in the GUT ART SHARE (aka the chat.) I can’t wait to see all the different communities we are a part of and that are important to us.
Alright, thanks everyone for reading and drawing and imagining with me today. The past few GUT dispatches have clearly been extra close to my heart (hooray for last week’s celebration of Caroline Paul’s Tough Broad, drawings to process big emotions, and the work of Palestinian artists before that.) It means so much to me to share my own explorations and learning and love with you.
PENCILS UP.
xoxo,
w
PS - I am thrilled to share that local GUT member meetups are happening all around the world! And they are all self-organized by GUT Subscribing members. There will be a local SF Bay Area meet up on May 11, and I will be there! I hope all Bay Area GUT Subscribers can make it for some outdoor drawing. RSVP to Kathleen and we will be in touch with more info.
What: SF Bay Area GUT Meetup
When: Saturday, May 11, 2024
Where: Foothills Nature Preserve, Palo Alto
Time: 10am to 2pm, drop in any time
Must RSVP to Art Auntie Kathleen at kleenguard@sonic.net to be put on the guest list (with full name and number in your party), and to receive location and other information. YOU MUST BE A SUBSCRIBING GUT MEMBER TO ATTEND IN PERSON GUT EVENTS. This keeps things safe and financially sustainable.
Mini Gender Glossary
Thank you to Susan Stryker, author of the book “Transgender History.” for the definitions I’ve inadequately paraphrased here, but I’ve done my best.
Gender vs Sex: “Gender is not the same thing as sex, though the two terms are often used interchangeably… gender is considered to be cultural, and sex is considered to be biological. It’s usually a safe bet to use the terms man and woman to refer to gender just as male and female refer to sex. Though we are all born with a certain kind of body that dominant culture calls our sex, no one is born as a boy or a girl., a woman or a man; rather, we are all assigned to a gender and come to identify (or not) with that gender through a complex process of socialization.” (Stryker, p. 14) (Wendy note: also, Gender and Sexuality are different, and both are not static, and can change and develop over time.)
Cisgender: “The prefix cis- means “on the same side as” (That is, the opposite of trans- which means “across.”) It is meant to mark the typically unstated or assumed privilege of being nontransgender.” (Stryker, p. 13)
Transgender: “This term… implies movement away from the assigned, unchosen gender position… when the word broke out into wider use in the 1990s, it was used to encompass any and all kinds of variation from gender norms and expectations, similar to what genderqueer, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary mean now. In recent years, some people have begun to use the term transgender to refer only to those who identify with a binary gender other than the one they were assigned at birth…” (Stryker, p 36.) (Note from Wendy: language is always changing and evolving.)
Queer: “…Now often used as a synonym for gay or lesbian, the people who first reappropriated this term [from when it was pejorative back in the day] were trying to find a way to talk about their opposite to heterosexist social norms. Queer was less a sexual orientation than it was a political one…” (Stryker, p. 30) (Note from Wendy: As someone who came of age in the 90s, I have moved between calling myself bisexual, lesbian and “just me” over the years. Today, I think Queer is a wonderful umbrella that aligns me with others with whom I share some overlapping identities and experiences. So it’s what I use today.)
Genderqueer, Gender Non-conforming, Nonbinary: “These terms all refer to people who do not conform to binary notions of the alignment of sex, gender, gender identity, gender role, gender expression, or gender presentation.” (Stryker, p 24)
Selections from last week’s Grown-Ups Table Assignment: AWE WALK!
Drawings inspired by Caroline Paul’s Tough Broad and her assignment for all of us to get outside, get active, and take an awe walk. These were ALL SO BEAUTIFUL, GUT MEMBERS!!! And your conversation and cheers for one another is always so heartening.
Ahhh, thank you, Wendy and Kyle! I was struck by Edie’s comment in the video about the possibility of creating spaces (and art) that are “wild, joyful, lively and connected”—the GUT! ❤️
Thank you so much for this! As a cis queer mama with cherished trans family members, it touches my heart that you’re shining a light on trans artists and issues, and inviting the GUT to celebrate TDOV 🩷🤍🩵❤️🧡💛💚💙💜