Queer Craft

with Wells Chandler
FIBER 629 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 9 - 22, 2024

This course will consider queer aesthetics and contributions to the development of visual, literary, filmic and philosophical culture with an emphasis on craft. Queer culture is not a separate or parallel function of a larger culture, but is central to and generative for it. We will address how the inclusivity and resistance of the queer movement offers productive models for artistic production now. Demonstrations and assignments will introduce crochet, dyeing, activist performance techniques and anarchist publishing strategies to the group who will also use collaboration, exploring in nature, narrative, upscaling and play as a way to contextualize queer craft, queer activism, making kin, and queer mysticism. Readings will include Larry Mitchell + Ned Asta’s The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977, Audre Lorde Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978 and Jose Esteban Munoz Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2010.  We will look at the work of Vaginal Davis, Sheila Pepe and Joe Brainard and we will screen Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2004 film Tropical Malady and Jennie Livingston's 1990 film Paris is Burning among others. Assignments will encourage surprise, discovery, and world building. In addition to working on proposed personal projects, artists will work collaboratively on polymorphously perverse drawings, mycelium networks, and historical lesbian structures.  The class will culminate in a runway presentation of crafted wearables.

Wells Chandler is a Bronx based artist who explores ecology, community, gender and queer iconography through the mediums of crochet, embroidery, drawing and cake. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2011 where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. From 2016-17 he was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Eric Mouchet (Brussels, Belgium), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), Diablo Rosso (Panama City, Panama), and Galerie Eric Mouchet (Paris, France). Recent group exhibitions include International Objects (Brooklyn), Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago), and Helena Anrather (New York). His work has been reviewed by Roxane Gay, Art Forum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, The Huffington
Post, TimeOut, Modern Painters, and Two Coats of Paint. Chandler is a Soloway gallery
member. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Purchase where he has taught for four
years. In the Spring of 2023, Chandler was appointed the Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell.

Wells Chandler, Isn’t She Lovely, 2023, hand crocheted assorted fibers, 20 x 18 in