LGBTQ/A Identity Art Project

In 2011, two QuERI Arts-in-Action interns worked in public high schools in Upstate New York with LGBTQ/A identified students in Gay Straight Alliances and other diversity clubs. Students were given canvas and a range of art supplies with the prompt to represent their school experience as a LGBTQ/A student.  200 pieces of visual and textual artwork were created and exhibited in galleries and schools, accompanied by a curriculum guide.

Through this project, we believed change (however small) was possible in two places.  First, we wanted large numbers of students to be introduced to the idea that their own queer identities and experiences were valid content for artistic inspiration in a school space. Second, through the continued presence of the art exhibition in the school community, we took up physical, visible space for queer youth which challenges the school to acknowledge the presence of LGBTQ students and their participation in school life.  Megan Boler (1999) asserts that empathy in response to the arts and stories of others is both insufficient and, to the extent it leads us to believe that “it is possible to fully imagine others,” misleading.  Boler instead calls for “active empathy” where the complicity and social responsibility of the viewer must be part of the viewing experience. Cultural constructions of meaning around sexual diversity shift in part as a function of both queer affirmation of diversity and resistance to narrow categorizations of gender possibilities and assumptions of heterosexuality. We hope in some small way to affirm the diversity of the students’ experiences through their participation in the project and to resist through the presence of the exhibitions the institutional and cultural assumptions of school that all students are heterosexual or that the queer experience is monolithic.