Welcome to the 212th episode of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. In honor of Pride Month, we’ve invited queer artists to share their thoughts, in which they create a studio wherever their journeys take them, explore portraiture as a means of empowerment, carve out a safe space for themselves while ‘they create and consider the power of intergenerational memory. .
Want to participate? Discover our submission guidelines and share a bit of your studio with us! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio.
Jaime JohnTraverse City, Michigan
This is the view I see when I work at the table I pushed against my bed on my studio floor. This means that my studio space and my living space have always been the same. Growing up in precarious housing meant learning to be a resourceful artist, someone who could make something out of nothing. Even still, being a working class artist facing housing insecurity means that I have developed a way of creating and taking some form of my work anywhere.
Art has been part of my life since the death of my maternal grandfather, Raymond John, when I was 6 years old. It was after he passed away that my mother placed me in a children’s art therapy and gardening group at the Traverse City District Library. It was from this point that art in all mediums became a way for me to communicate my lived experience as a queer and trans Anishinaabe and Korean-American person while keeping my feet on the ground while working with ideas of ancestry, historical memory and cultural loss. This is sometimes reflected in a poem, a watercolor, a print, a film or a zine.
My studio is my safe space. As a gay woman, it’s a constant reflection on what a safe space means. This is about the environments I create in my work called placeless spaces. This place is new to me – vast, full of possibilities and safe for anyone to enter. My studio is located in Ridgewood, Queens in a building bustling with creatives. I am most creative early in the morning around 7am to 12pm, or in the evening from 7pm. The studio has been a lot of things to me, a corner of a room, a table in my kitchen, a closet in my apartment, and I’m glad I was able to stretch out somewhere where I can be endlessly messy and creative.
Alma LandetaRoot Division in San Francisco, CA
June is a beautifully busy time for me as a queer artist and educator. I’m simultaneously wrapping up the school year with students, showing work in various Pride exhibits and trying to take my time to celebrate queer resilience. My studio reflects this abundance with notes of encouragement and installation plans taped to the wall, while portraits in progress are ubiquitous. In this image you can see some of the portraits I worked on as part of a series in collaboration with my queer and trans community. Portraiture has been a way for me to uplift and honor individuals. Each new work in this series begins with a conversation between me and the individual I am about to paint in which we explore the question, What is it like to feel at home and empowered in your body?
Being on the road, whether physically, through books, memories, or imagination, disrupts my intensive research practice and leads to unexpected turns and discoveries. Although currently based in Los Angeles, I am interested in screening parallel stories to Thai political history, where I come from, the influence of French critical and revolutionary thought, which I grew up with and the Asian immigrant communities around me and their place in the shaping of the United States.
Through these divergent narratives, I attempt to shift our understanding of place, memory and history from single and fixed to plural, fluctuating and in relation to larger global networks.
