When I was asked to participate in 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, I wanted to approach my project for the show site-specifically and responsive to art made by the older generation of feminists artists in the exhibition.  I had made a series of light boxes in 2019 that examined narrative and visibility pertaining to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in New York City, which is a critically important event in the timeline of queer and trans liberation.  When I visited the Aldrich and the town of Ridgefield, I noticed that there were actual “ stone walls” threading through the terrain. The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art itself sits on “stone walls.”

Ridgefield also happens to be where my friend Julie lives. Julie was my camp counselor when I was thirteen years old (1994) at a summer weight loss camp for children and teens.  Julie was my first queer friend and I credit that friendship for saving my life as an adolescent.

For 52 Artists, I dug up stones from the grounds of the Aldrich and stones from Julie’s yard in Ridgefield and built my own “stone wall” in the museum. Titled Anywhere, Everywhere, the work acknowledges friendships as revolutionary. These life-sustaining friendships are just as critically vital as large-scale revolutionary events cause a sea change of culture.  The project also dialogues with the stone walls found in the landscape that surrounds the Aldrich, acknowledging colonialism and the occupation of land through violence and borders. This particular “stonewall,” built by my hands, is a re-contextualization of the stone walls in this area, localizing queer liberation.   

 Anywhere, Everywhere also takes the shape of a make-shift monument.  A steel plinth protrudes from the stonewall casing a double-sided lightbox with two photos from my personal queer photo archive. The images on the light box--graffiti and textiles— reinforce the idea of “anywhere, everywhere,” as graffiti is an act of improvised mark making, and textiles permeate everyday life with the possibility of being transformed in infinite ways.  A small analog television is embedded into the rocks of the wall documenting the laborious digging of the stones from the land to construct the wall.

The stones were returned to the grounds of the Aldrich and Julie’s yard post-exhibition. Like much of feminist art, the piece is one that can be dismantled, shape-shift, and scattered, and holds the potential to be built again in similar or altered ways, or left to the earth forever.