Reconsidering What’s Truly Important in Life and Art
As serene as Miami has been lately, I cannot take my mind off of LA.
My heartfelt thoughts and sympathies go out to tens of thousands impacted by the fires — CT’s clients among them.
For now, it seems that plans for LA’s Art Week — Frieze Los Angeles and the LA Art Show — are under reconsideration.
Yet despite the immense devastation of real property — including an unknown amount of valuable art — its importance pales in comparison to the gift of life.
Pool with Two Figures (2023), by Eric Yahnker (b. 1976), shown that same year in an exhibition Lost Angeles at West Hollywood’s The Hole Gallery. Yahnker’s drawing pays homage to a very famous painting by David Hockney (b. 1937), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold at auction in 2018 for $90M.
A friend recently wrote of losing her home and effects to the Eaton Fire.
I found her words so wise that I’d like to share them:
Nothing that was lost is irreplaceable. People ask me about heirlooms or photos, and while, at first, I saw the potential for that to make me sad, just as quickly that thought was replaced by a different thought.
I am so lucky to have had the experience that made it so good that I wanted the memento. I don’t need the memorabilia when I have had such a wealth of positive experiences.
I am lucky. If anything, losing the things, has helped me realize how rich a tapestry of experiences I have in me and no one or nothing can take that away. Nothing lost is irreplaceable.
Possessions are far more easily replaced than life, which for each of us is a uniquely rich tapestry of shared human experience.
With utmost sensitivity for the suffering and loss of the people of Los Angeles, I emphasize art as an essential experience, inextricable from life, that can never be taken from us by any catastrophe.
Consciously choosing to celebrate life and resistance lies at the core of why I share my (com)passion with the world through Charting Transcendence.
Queer Art: Why Different Experiences Matter
Choreographer Michael Spencer Phillips improvisationally interprets two newly unveiled acquisitions from queer artists at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami, highlighting a January 11 event at the former De La Cruz Collection in the Miami Design District. Thanks to artistic director Alex Gartenfeld, this barely decade-old museum has already amassed one of the best and largest collections of queer art in the country.
Some of today’s best contemporary art identifies as queer, an umbrella term that defies heteronormative assumptions of gender, love, and identity.
From an academic standpoint, I might say that queer art or identity-focused art made by LGBTQ artists challenges established aesthetic boundaries and ideologies about sexuality and identity, while providing a framework for understanding creative expressions and fostering awareness and advocacy within a broader cultural landscape,
But I’d rather say it plainly: there’s something about feeling different or apart from the herd that resonates in how I have navigated a lifelong exploration of culture, art and humanity.
It’s about seeing beauty in different ways that I might not have known existed; about embracing perspectives on love that don’t conform to constrictive, proscriptive values narrated by society.
And if you must, please take it from a cisgendered, straight, Ivy League educated, white male who acknowledges the considerable privileges conferred on him by our patriarchal American democracy — you do not have to be gay, lesbian, queer, or anyone but your truest self to appreciate the wealth of art that celebrates diverse identities and inclusive values.
The ICA Miami’s newly-acquired sculpture by Leilah Babirye (b. 1985), who fled her native Uganda for New York in 2015 under threat of arrest after being publicly outed in a newspaper. Her use of discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is abasiyazi, meaning sugarcane husk.
Pepe Mar (b. 1977) is probably Miami’s most celebrated queer contemporary artist — someone whose work has always fascinated me for its collage-like assemblage of personal and found objects in unusually strange and beautiful ways. Pepe shows with Miami’s David Castillo Gallery and has been celebrated in multiple museum exhibitions both within and beyond South Florida.
The iconicity of the deeply contrasted, black-and-white photographs of queer, non-binary South African artist Zanele Muholi (b. 1972) appealed so greatly to a client of Charting Transcendence that he bought several for both his corporate and personal collections. Seen here: Buhlalu I, The Decks, Cape Town (2019).
Galleries across the country are rich in queer art of all mediums. This grommeted work on paper by Juan Arango Palacios (b. 1997), who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, showed in late 2023 at Miami’s influential Spinello Projects.
A Queer Photographer Intimately and Vulnerably Shares Their Story
Once in a blue moon, like a gift from the universe, an art exhibition leaves me in a puddle of tears.
This edition’s rare honor goes to Jess T. Dugan’s I want you to know my story, on display at The Ringling, Florida’s de facto state art museum under the auspices of Florida State University.
I’ve been following Jess’s work for nearly five years now and, just after New Year’s, drove several hours to Sarasota to see it.
Jess is a queer, non-binary artist who has grappled with questions of acceptance by their family and society as a child, a person, and more recently as the parent of a young daughter.
Self-portrait of the writer of this newsletter next to the photographer’s self-portrait at the entrance to their exhibition in Sarasota, just a few hundred meters from the campus of the New College of Florida, a state-run school that recently underwent politically-motivated political and ideological changes that have rendered it unwelcoming towards genderqueer individuals.
Oskar and Zach (embrace) (2020), one of Jess T. Dugan’s photographs of couples, delicately emphasizing neutrality of their gender identity.
A self-portrait by Jess T. Dugan featured in their narrated 15-minute slideshow Letter to My Father, vulnerably conveying the story of the artist’s relationship with a parent who could not accept them for who they are as a person.
Red Tulips (2020), one of Jess T. Dugan’s photographs currently exhibited in their show at The Ringling in Sarasota, Florida. The photographer masterfully captures light and shadow in a classical manner reminiscent of Dutch still life painting.
Through their photography, Jess casts a very soft and gentle light on notions of beauty, ephemerality, and the nature of what it means to love and be loved as mortal beings.
The show’s curators made a bold and declarative statement by mounting it within a few hundred yards of the New College of Florida (the liberal arts honors college of the State University System of Florida) whose faculty and programs Florida Governor Ron DeSantis eviscerated in order to reshape its curriculum to match that of Hillsdale College, a very conservative private school in Michigan.
(Sadly, such institutions do not tend to support the rights of queer and non-binary individuals to express themselves freely in 2025.)
As a connoisseur of outstanding contemporary photography, I do believe that much of Jess’s work will be the most highly acclaimed photographs of our time celebrating queerness, beauty, ephemerality and love.
Self Portrait (reaching) (2021), by Jess T. Dugan.
Some viewers may find it uncomfortable to confront subject matter blending masculine and feminine elements and energy with tattoos and visible scars, even as others find it profoundly affirming and beautiful.
Tulips (2024), one of Jess T. Dugan’s masterful still life photographs of flowers. They are probably the best I have ever seen in this classic genre — and much more realistic (and affordable) than paintings embodying the same flavor of ephemerality.
Screenshot from Jess T. Dugan’s slideshow film Letter to My Daughter, which narrates the profoundly intimate story of the artist’s fertility journey towards parenthood with their partner, Vanessa.
Pink Irises (2021), a photograph whose forms are provocative as they are ordinary, a perfect subversion of the notion of queer identity for those willing to look intently and deeply.
