Pride takes many forms — celebration, resistance, remembrance, self-discovery — and in the Michigan Pride Juried Exhibition, it takes shape through art.
Scheduled through July 23 at (SCENE) Metrospace in downtown East Lansing, the Michigan Pride Juried Exhibition, presented in partnership with Michigan State University’s Department of Art, Art History, and Design and the city of East Lansing, celebrates the creativity, diversity and resilience of LGBTQ+ artists from across Michigan.
Bringing together a wide range of voices, artistic practices and perspectives, the exhibition creates space for LGBTQ+ artists to share their work rooted in identity, memory, community, resistance and joy.
The works presented reflect personal reflections and collective experiences, highlighting the complexity of queer life while honoring the histories and futures of LGBTQ+ communities. Through various disciplines, the exhibition embraces the many ways artists explore visibility, belonging, transformation, self-expression and care.
The featured artists are:
- Jesse Amburgey
- Cait Anders
- Elliot Anulewicz
- Gustavo Uriel Ayala
- Li Harper
- Tristian Laney
- Mia Lenning
- Victoria Marcetti
- Blake Matthews
- Leo Pratt
- Martin Schapiro
- Mackenzie Sheehan-D’Arrigo
- Jamie Weinfurter
Jesse Amburgey
Jesse Amburgey graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in Studio Art and is a Museum Exhibitions Trades Aide for the MSU Broad Art Museum. His work investigates lived experience, tracing spaces between routine and the hidden intimacies of domestic life. Viewed through a queer lens, he examines the transitory boundaries of selfhood and the ways fantasies and belief systems shape our relationships with the world, the self and each other.
Cait Anders
Cait Anders, a painter, muralist and interdisciplinary artist, graduated from MSU with a degree in Studio Art and Graphic Design. Their work explores the power of the erotic in the queer experience of self-determination through large acrylic paintings that are figurative and dynamic, full of movement, tension and vibrant color.
Elliot Anulewicz
Elliot Anulewicz is an MSU student pursing a BFA in Art Education, with a focus in Photography. Anulewicz’s work often focuses on the ambivalence and confusion that comes both with her feminine identity and her queerness. Finding a strange tension point between masculine and feminine, between conformity and expressionism, Anulewicz often works in photography, using portraiture and models other than herself to communicate the stories she wishes to tell about being caught in the middle of many worlds.
Gustavo Uriel Ayala
Gustavo Uriel Ayala graduated from MSU with an MFA and is the Gallery Preparator at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids. As an artist, he creates colorful works that harness visibility to explore the intersections between masculinity and marginalized identities. His work uses wrestling as a framework to grapple with the legacy of masculine competition and its continued veneration as the ideal masculinity.
Li Harper
A trans non-binary adoptee, Li Harper is always thinking, dreaming and fantasizing about home. Their piece, Home Sweet Home, which is part of the Michigan Pride Juried Exhibition, was inspired by and created while listening to “Love Song” by artist Star Path. A section of the song repeats: “I, I feel, feel like, I am, in a burning building.” This song came to Harper at a time when home felt particularly precious and challenged.
Tristian Laney
Tristian Laney, a MSU student majoring in Apparel and Textile Design, struggled to find clothing he could identify with and had a closet full of textiles that were going to waste. In an act to reclaim these textiles, Laney created a unique quilted textile from garments that triggered his gender dysphoria or resulted in being misgendered. Laney’s ultimate dysphoria hoodie, displayed in the Michigan Pride Juried Exhibition, is made of textiles that once were the cause of the dysphoria itself.
Mia Lenning
Mia Lenning is a MSU student majoring in Art Education. She uses a variety of mediums and makes art as a way to start a conversation with the viewer about topics that are important to her and her journey as an educator. In her work, she often uses words as a form of communication.
Victoria Marcetti
Victoria Marcetti, working under the banner of Lïmen Creative, is an interdisciplinary artist and youth development worker living, working and creating on Potawatomi and Peoria Land, or so-called Kalamazoo. They make art because without it they might be swallowed up by the magnitude of the suffering and hardships of the world and because they need to scream but screaming can’t ever last long enough. They have an insatiable appetite for reading and learning fueled by their need to make sense of the world and their place in it. Art is where this information is metabolized- through their heart, brain and then hands. Their work is available online at www.limencreative.com.
Blake Matthews
Blake Matthews’ work addresses aspects of their ever-changing queer identity as it relates to their small-town, Midwest upbringing. By identifying a shared spirit of ingenuity, resilience and respect for family — chosen or otherwise — Matthews emphasizes the overlap of queer and Midwest identities and traditions. While playful in choice of color and subject matter, Matthews’ works point to the struggle Queer Midwesterners face when breaking out of the often restrictive social expectations of small-town culture.
Leo Pratt
A lifelong Lansing-area resident, Leo Pratt is a MSU student pursuing a BFA in Apparel and Textile Design. With a background in cosplay, drag and eveningwear, Pratt’s work focuses on collaborating directly with clients to create one-of-a-kind custom pieces for competition and performance. His work centers authentic queer expression through larger-than-life design and has been featured in drag pageants at both local and national levels.
Martin Schapiro
Martin Schapiro received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art this past May. His work explores the two-faced promise of new technologies entering the artist’s studio. Digital methods promise to save time and grant accessibility, but they also threaten to devalue skilled craft labor. Despite his techno-scepticism, digital methods — like 3D clay printing — are central to Schapiro’s work. These tools give the objects they produce access to a conversation about the ethics of their making. In the fall, he will join the adjunct faculty at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Mackenzie Sheehan-D’Arrigo
Mackenzie Sheehan-D’Arrigo graduated from MSU with a BFA in Studio Art. Curious about the ways humans position themselves in relation to human and non-human organisms, and how we interact within different environments, Sheehan-D’Arrigo’s ceramic sculptures explore relationships through enlarged scale, repetition and grotesque glazing, informed by sociology and ecology.
Jamie Weinfurter
Jamie Weinfurter is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at MSU whose work examines discarded household objects, rebuilding them to celebrate Queer homemaking and the “little things” in life, while exposing the negative effects of consumer culture, unsustainable materialism and discredited disability in American capitalistic systems of societal value.
This story was featured on the College of Arts & Letters website.
