I grew up on a ranch in a remote part of eastern Montana, the youngest of four children. The Great Outdoors was my backyard—the area where Lewis and Clark crossed the Musselshell River over a hundred years ago, and where, like these explorers, I found myself collecting everything I found interesting in that great open […]

With his hand nailed to the cross and a halo surrounding his thorn-crowned head, the man Saint Francis embraces in Father William Hart McNichol’s St. Francis ‘Neath the Bitter Tree, is surely Jesus. Yet Kaposi’s sarcoma spots, indicating AIDS, cover this crucified man, and a plaque nailed to the cross identifies him not as Jesus […]

Imagine what a Natural History Museum in the distant future might look like. It is likely that this museum would describe an evolution of the world that is presently so greatly influenced by man. It might portray the effects of climate change on all life on this planet as our transformation of nature works as […]

I began to do my own work at the age of 34 after a long apprenticeship to two of the greatest theatrical visionaries of the 20th century, John Vaccaro and Jack Smith. I named myself Penny Arcade coming down from LSD at 17 in order to amuse Jaimie Andrews, a 27-year-old gay man whose drawing […]

Four years ago I started making prints in response to the murder of a transgendered woman, Gwen Arajo, as well as the murders of other transgenders historically. At the time, I was thinking a lot about body fragmentation—the way gender and sex are constructed, and how body parts and certain behaviors can “give away” transgenders, […]

Argentinian native Graciela Cassel’s latest work soars in Miami; her exhibition at the Women’s History Gallery at the Women’s Park gets off the ground with a series of works that dramatize in a powerful way Cassel’s interior dialogue on the intersections of space, place, time, memory, culture and history.   Graciela Cassel – Christine Kennedy […]

Like most effeminate boys, I was mocked constantly in school. For me, the torment began in the third grade when I started to hear, again and again, that I was a “girly-girl.” Every year after that it got worse, but, because I was ashamed, I waited until middle school before I asked an adult to […]

I've always believed in duality. You can't notice the dark without feeling the light, masculinity isn't interesting unless it's balanced by femininity, the good is boring unless you have the…well, you get the picture. Not only is this represented within my images, but by the very genre of work that I create. First, I am […]

LO: Please explain your works. Rene Lynch: My oil paintings and watercolors reflect my interest in the manipulations of desire and the desirability inherent in the age of adolescence, the moment of balance between innocence and experience. That powerful and vulnerable stage of life full of sexual and intellectual yearning, when a child begins to […]

Leah Oates: Please explain your work. Heidi Cody: I needle consumer culture by lifting and subverting design elements from product packaging and corporate logos. So far it’s been signs, sculpture, painting, prints and drawing. My work shows how visual information is transmitted from corporation to consumer, and how it makes recognition a conscious act on […]