Queer Histories: Zygote Press at the LGBT Center

Array
(
    [0] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 16382
            [display_name] => Jo Steigerwald
            [first_name] => 
            [last_name] => 
            [user_login] => jo-steigerwald
            [user_email] => 
            [linked_account] => 
            [website] => 
            [description] => 
            [user_nicename] => jo-steigerwald
            [type] => guest-author
            [nickname] => 
        )

)

If we don’t recognize our ancestors, we don’t know who we are. Stories and histories are the anchors of resilience in a turbulent river that can feel like a whirlpool. In Queer Histories, a collaborative exhibit between the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland and Zygote Press, tributes to and calls to action from the queer community resonate through the halls of the Center. This exhibit opened in October, in honor of LGBT History Month, and runs through November 22, 2024.

Here, the personal is the political. Broadside posters proclaiming radical truths hang near intricate webs of molecules that embrace (or contain?) a couple frozen in a kiss. Portraits of queer icons look beyond the viewer at other portraits of queer folx not as iconic, but just as monumental. This is an unapologetic collection of queer histories: calling out oppression with demands and vibrance; living in moments of intimacy and connection.

Co-curated by Kelly Pontoni and Brittany Hudak, the show features work from fourteen Zygote Press artists who identify as queer: Scout Bach, Fi Burnham, Leo Covault, Jen P. Harris, Brittany M. Hudak, Lawrence Hudson, R Kauff, Josie Krampitz, Last Pages of Humanity, tahm lytle, Wendy Partridge, Andy Passchier, Gina Washington, and Jan Zorman.

For 28 years, Zygote Press—a nonprofit community printmaking studio—has been a safe haven for queer artists that provides an open and collaborative environment, residency programs, and studio access. Queer Histories highlights intergenerational artists currently working at Zygote, from young, emerging printmakers to established artists who have been a part of Zygote for decades.

Queer Histories features a range of printmaking techniques—risograph and watercolor, handset type printed letterpress, screenprint (some with oil pastels), monotype, linocut, reduction screenprint, and collage—which explore queer stories of gender, identity, joy, and rage.

“One of the best things about this show is who it features,” says Hudak, senior program manager at Zygote. “There are artists who are just out of high school and artists in their 70s and 80s. It was very important for me to show the wide range of artists who work at Zygote and who happen to be queer, as well as showing Zygote as being an accessible place for artists who might not feel as comfortable in other spaces.”

Pontoni and Hudak kept the show’s theme of queer histories is deliberately broad, to elicit a wide range of artist interpretation. “There are incredibly personal peeks into parts of artists’ lives not always seen, as well as more brazen examples,” notes Hudak. “But the connecting thread is that these are printmakers working at Zygote who have found a community there. When you work in a printmaking shop with others, it is inherently collaborative—some prints require two people to pull them—and as queer people, we tend to connect with printmaking because it leads to collaboration, and community. I see that rising to the surface in this show.”

Queer Histories is on view in the main hallways of the LGBT Community Center during its open hours: Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. Please check in with the front reception desk before seeing the show.

To learn more about the historical intersection of printmaking and the queer community, attend Hudak’s print history lecture on Blanche Lazzell, a 19^th century queer printmaker, and the “Independent Women” of Provincetown: Queerness and Networks of Printmaking on Friday, November 8, 2024, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. at the Center.