Country Lesbians

“RUSTIQUE” is an artist book created by Nicola Godman. This book is sprung out of a residency in September 2021 at Hôtel Chevillon, a former Scandinavian artist colony in Grez-sur-Loing, France. Barbizon, the village where the painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) lived and died, is located 20 km away from there. The book interweaves the life and work of Millet with Godman’s photographs, drawings and personal anecdotes.

“RUSTIQUE” wishes to put forward the artistic gaze towards rural life by artists who themselves are born peasants. Nicola Godman (b. 1989, Rute) is an artist working with photography, video, books and stories, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. Having grown up on an organic dairy farm, she is researching depictions of rural life in art history and contemporary culture.

The Consequences is a hybrid collection of prose and poetry; an autofictional examination of the pain of a transatlantic relocation from New York to the blanketing beige of Paris to rejoin a totemic muse. It also focuses on corgi attacks, Maryland, painful anxiety, the struggle to accept the things one cannot change, the third party and the past as adamantine shackles. The "towering sexual iconography of Mike Immerman" looms over the disorientation of a reluctant resident in “the City of Light.”

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare? –

A facsimile of a 1973 Something Else Press gardening book – the press had then relocated to Vermont, with a shift towards the publication of such lifestyle guides. Hand-drawn and ilustrated by Linda Larisch.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality. 

A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself. 

One part ketamine spiral, one part confessional travelogue from the edge of gender, TGSM is a hallucinatory transmission on sex, identity, the internet, and the flickering wish not to exist in a given body at a given point in time. TGSM raises questions with which we have begun to negotiate broadly as a culture: what is actually happening to someone when they transition? how should we understand or describe such processes? what is the role of drugs, of hallucination, of imagination, in transition? is being a trans person in this moment in history, when the identity is ever more carefully traced [and tracked] by larger cultural forces, more liberated than before? 

Drawing its source material from chance encounters, wordless interactions in basements or bathrooms or hotel rooms, to archives of 20th century critical theory, sleepover secrets exchanged between old friends, rhetorical barbs deployed in the classrooms of elite universities, arguments on the phone with your parents across timezones, the nonverbal codes of high and low fashion, and scribbled notes on the backs of receipts for medicines you don't know how they work, TGSM is a morbid yet strangely hopeful meditation on the possibilities and meanings of gender variation in our time.

Hannah Baer runs the meme account @malefragility on instagram, and studies clinical psychology in new york city.

Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai’i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind. In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space — from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals. Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.

Through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image, the publication considers the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place. Alongside a collection of their works and research, Abigail Lucien weaves written and visual offerings by fellow Caribbean and queer artists, including works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Justin Chance, Cielo Felix-Hernandez, Sucking Salt, and Tamara Santibañez, to create an expanded context for their work rooted in friendship and radical love.

Abigail Lucien (b.1992) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator, auntie, lover, and friend. Working in sculpture, literature, and time-based media, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), Deli Gallery (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA). Residencies include Amant Studio & Research Residency (NY), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI).

Lucien has taught as a full-time faculty member and professor in the Department of Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Interdisciplinary Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In the fall of 2023, they will join the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hunter College in NYC. Deli Gallery represents Abigail Lucien.

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.