The University of New Mexico Arts Museum (UNMAM) opened the exhibition, “To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender Community Members and Nonconforming Adults,” on Aug. 23. Food and music accompanied the opening night as people entered the exhibit downstairs.
The people featured in the exhibit were photographed and interviewed by artists Jess Dugan and Venessa Fabbre.
Mariah Carrillo, the press contact for the Art Museum, said in a press release that Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of gender, sexuality, identity and community. For the past decade, she has photographed people within queer and transgender communities, focusing on the complexities of identity, gender and sexuality.
Fabbre is an assistant professor at the Brown School of Social Work and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Carrillo said in a press release. Carrillo continued to explain that Fabbre’s research explores the conditions under which LGBT people age well, and what this means in the context of structural forces such as heteronormativity, heterosexism and transphobia.
The collection, curated by Mary Statzer, is a breathtaking series of photographs of older members of the transgender and gender-nonconforming community, alongside moments and feelings from their lives.
“As an exhibition, To Survive on This Shore is the product of over five years of research and photography by Dugan and Fabbre, who traveled across the United States to document the life stories of older transgender adults,” Carrillo said. “The project is a response to the absence of nuanced representation of older transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals in US culture.”
The exhibit evoked many emotions from the audience. Many contemplative faces were produced while wandering the room quietly reading or gazing at the subjects. In tandem with the photography, the impact of the artwork on the subjects seemed to produce an overall feeling of heartwarming and inspiration.
“I thought it was a very interesting exhibit,” said Nichole Hendrix, a sophomore majoring in fine arts, said. “Reading about the different stories about these different people and their journey was insightful because you normally don’t hear about them, so being able to read them makes you feel like you know what they went through.”
Devin Geraci, the event coordinator, spoke about the exhibit’s impact on students.
“I think it’s awesome. I think it’s something really great to have up. It's really relevant right now, and also helpful to students who might relate to it, and being able to see older adults specifically is a really good thing,” Geraci said.
In many ways, the exhibit seemed to leave notions of joy and sorrow as the interviews carried the weight of a lifetime. The art collection in today's climate encapsulated many topical, social and political issues.
Even in some of the more intense interviews within the collection, covering topics of discrimination of choice, ethnicity and gender, the exhibit found ways to lighten outlooks, and invite change.
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“To Survive on This Shore” will be accessible to view in the UNM Art Museum until Dec. 7.
