Berkshire LGBTQ+ Pride Art Exhibit in Becket: Amplifying Queer Creativity

(Pictured: "Self Portrait" by Jacob Clayton)

June 11–July 5, artist panel Sunday, June 21, 2–3:30pm | Becket, MA | Free

The Becket Arts Center's second annual Berkshire LGBTQ+ Pride Art Exhibit is a show built around rebellion. As government, education, and arts institutions nationally roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion funding, a coalition of Berkshire organizations is responding by making queer creativity more visible, not less.

The exhibition, titled "Amplifying Queer Creativity," runs through July 5 and is presented by Becket Arts Center in partnership with Queer Men of the Berkshires (Q-MoB) and the Berkshire Queer History Project, with support from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.

Fifteen artists make up the show. from Saemi, a NYC-based Korean photographer who has spent a decade exploring the coexistence of delicate beauty and destruction, to Pops Peterson, whose "Reinventing Rockwell" series got him featured in the New York Times and on CBS Sunday Morning. Well into his sixties, Peterson is recasting the painter's iconic Americana through a more queer lens.

Several artists' statements get directly at what queerness has to do with the work itself. Lisa Slavid, who has spent recent years deepening an oil painting practice focused on landscape, writes that her queerness set her on a path of being authentically herself and pushing boundaries. It's the same instinct she brings to pushing color saturation in her paintings of places to pause and breathe.

Rachel Kaufmann, who studied at Bard and works out of the Muse studios in Housatonic, is currently painting a series called "Queer Scenes from the Berkshires," documenting queer community events she's attended over the past two years. James Jasper's contribution reinterprets the zodiac through anatomical figures, botanical forms, and celestial mapping, drawing on literary traditions that engage with queer themes to treat the zodiac as a coded, flexible system rather than a fixed one.

Jacob Clayton, a panelist at the June 21 artist talk, is showing three mixed-media self-portraits from his ongoing series "Deprivation of Self." Clayton has written about the show in personal terms—as a gay transgender man, he describes the exhibition as a chance to visibly show up for the community's most vulnerable members.

The exhibit was juried by Chris Borschel, Ilene Spiewak, Patrick Koshewa, and Victoria Frey. The June 21 panel digs into what inspires the group, how their work has evolved, and the different ways their queerness does and doesn't shape what they make.

Becket Arts Center, 7 Brooker Hill Rd., Becket, MA. Free. More at becketartscenter.org.