Beyond Gender | Relational Space

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 22, 6-8 pm

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human
An Arts + Science Collaborative Exhibition

An immersive non-binary story, told collectively by six artists and six scientists. Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human challenges us to envision a world of equity, inclusivity, and emotional connections, where a range of human identities and expression are revered.

What would a future look like where we were simply allowed to show up as we are?

Through blended empirical knowledge and contemporary artworks, the exhibition aims to: 1-Challenge the binary and, reflect the threads of intertwined, systemic inequalities; 2- Convey how strict gender roles impact us; and, how release from those norms could change us; 3 - Envision a non-binary world, and the ripples it may spark; and, 4 - Set an example for systemic change that nurtures activism.

Twelve international artists and scientists exchanged talents and expertise in three facilitated sessions to co-curate this extraordinary and compelling exhibition.

“By embracing identities in all their forms, we can challenge and dismantle a power structure that stifles every person’s right to self-determination.”

RSVP

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human

Opening night - Thursday, June 22nd

Exhibition runs June 22, 23, 24th, 2023

Hosted by Ceres Gallery

547 W. 27th Street, Gallery 201 NYC

Gallery Hours - Thursday 12:00 - 8:00 pm

Friday & Saturday 12:00 - 6:00 pm

The Collective click each name to view bios

(she/ella) Esmilda Abreu, M. Psych, DM received Governor Whitman’s Pride Award for working with diverse populations, developed the first hospital credentialing program for complementary medicine in the country, served as Co-Chair of the Mentoring Committee on the Presidential Commission of Affirmative Action and Diversity at Montclair State University, and established the Bias Education and Response Taskforce at Pratt Institute. Dr. Abreu is the Founding President of the New Jersey Coalition Against Human Trafficking, served as a Board Member of the Mental Health Clinic of Passaic, and a Steering Committee Member of the Alliance for Arts and Health New Jersey. She established the Women’s Leadership Committee for the North Jersey Regional Chamber of Commerce and served as Co-President of the New Jersey Consortium of Women and Gender Studies. She was the inaugural Director of Equity and Diversity at Montclair State University, the first Latina Executive Director of the Women’s Rights Information Center, and the inaugural Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs at Pratt Institute where she established their Center for Equity and Inclusion. She is currently the Associate Vice President for Student Life at Manhattan College, teaches at Feliciano School of Business at Montclair State, and serves as the Chair of the Bergen County Human Relations Committee. She was nominated as the 2023 Compassionate Leader for her work establishing the Mindfulness Collaboratory. Dr. Abreu has studied meditation and contemplation and has had a personal mindfulness practice for more than 40 years.

(they/them or any/all) Dr. Marquis Bey is a professor of African American Studies, Gender Studies, and Critical Theory at Northwestern University. Academically, they work on black feminism, transgender and nonbinary theory, and abolition. Most recently, Marquis authored Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke University Press, 2022). Nonacademically, Marquis enjoys playing video games, going on walks, working out, and playing the collectible card game Magic the Gathering.

(he/him) Originally from Texas, George Evan Davis has lived in Honolulu, Hawaii for almost 40 years. He started painting in high school and graduated from college in 1978 with a BA in Art and Psychology. After declining acceptance into a graduate program in Art Therapy, he moved to Dallas to pursue his dream of taking the art world by storm. However, after living the life of a starving artist he put his dream on hold and over the course of the next 45 years had two successful careers, one as an illustrator and graphic designer, and one as a massage therapist and body worker. Now, on the precipice of retirement (and no longer starving), he has picked up where he left off and is following his dream of creating art full time. His portfolio consists of portraits/figures, “Moments In Time”, abstracts, and photography. In his portraits and figures his goal is to convey the essence of the person or to communicate to the viewer something about who that person is. The moment in time images are painted snapshots from his travels, environment, or everyday life. His abstract works run the gamut from brightly colored images that are experiments with different techniques, to the random unplanned patterns that happen on his painting shirts, to images that have a deep meaning and background story. Working primarily in oils and acrylics he has developed a style that, like gender, can be fluid and undefined. Sometimes his work is realistic and representative, and other times it’s abstract and the concept determines the process and medium(s). Sometimes he has something very personal or political to say but at other times he paints just for the joy of creating something cool and beautiful. But, whatever the topic or medium, his goal is to create art that spreads a message of love…of acceptance..of beauty.

(they/them) Opal Ecker DeRuvo is a transfeminine transdisciplinary artist and collaborative printmaker. Using historic photo-processes, large scale image transfers onto architectural substrates, and laser imaging techniques (re-engineered from machine vision technology), their practice connects the materiality of photography with experiences of trans-embodiment. They began printmaking as an apprentice to a master printmaker at the age of 14 and received their BFA in printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. For six years following their BFA they worked as a collaborative printmaker at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. They grew up in a family of darkroom photographers, during their MFA at Yale in the painting and printmaking department their work has come to investigate the origins of photography within the materials and history of printmaking. They are interested in the role of images in the formation of identity. Incorporating fundamental physics of light and the intricacy of our perception, their cross-disciplinary research looks to expand trans representation beyond the ways in which we are seen and toward new ways of seeing.

Using fantasy as a guide towards creation, Mimi Doan (they/them) & Cole Stapleton (they/them) of Company [REDACTED] have been collaborating as choreographers since 2019. Expanding beyond the purely imaginary or erotic, Company [REDACTED] utilizes the fantasy of situation and circumstance, emotion and play to create dynamic worlds for their pieces. Their first evening-length work, Some Land of Redemption, premiered with two sold out performances at The Center for Performance Research in February of 2022, and since then they’ve been invited to create work at Judson Church, Impulstanz in Vienna, Spark Theater Festival, and other dance festivals throughout New York City.

(she/her) Bettina Forget directs the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program. In this capacity, she facilitates the collaboration between artists and SETI researchers, foregrounds art-science research practice, and supports a dynamic network of institutional partners active in art, science, and technology. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University, Canada. Her research examines the recontextualization of art and science, and how transdisciplinary education may disrupt gender stereotypes. Bettina has created and taught art-science curricula at Concordia University and has presented transdisciplinary workshops at institutions such as the Ontario Science Center, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the Aga Khan Museum Toronto. Bettina works with traditional as well as new media arts, focusing on astrobiology, sci-fi, and feminism. She has exhibited her artwork in the USA, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Singapore, Russia, and Nicaragua.

(he/him) Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories; Skin Deep Magic: Stories; Bereft (a YA novella), and A Spectral Hue (a novel). He has been a Lambda Literary Finalist three times, was a Carl Brandon Parallax Award Finalist, and won the inaugural Joseph S Pulver Sr Award for Weird Fiction. The Nectar of Nightmares is his most recent collection. He lives in Washington, D.C.

(he/him) Gustavo Gonzalez is a mixed media artist focused on creating art that deals with marginalized groups like immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community. His goal is to break the status quo, explore gender identity, show relevance through my art and depict human raw value inside of everyone, that everyone is afraid of. He explore different mediums sculpting, sketching, photography, performance, fashion and costume design.

(he/him) Dr. Ronald F. Levant is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at The University of Akron; Past President of the American Psychological Association (APA) and APA Division 51, the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities; and two-term Editor of APA Division 51's quarterly journal, Psychology of Men & Masculinities. He earned his doctorate in clinical psychology and public practice from Harvard University and has served as a member of the faculty at Boston, Harvard, Rutgers, and Nova Southeastern Universities, and as dean at Nova Southeastern University and the University of Akron. He is widely considered one of the key people responsible for creating the new field of the psychology of men and masculinities. He was included in the Elsevier-Stanford University database listing the top 2 % of scientists in the world.

(he/him) Peter Erik Lopez is a painter and graduate of Transart Institute for Creative Research. His medium of choice is oil on canvas. He started with portraiture but realized his primary interest in painting people was hearing their stories as he worked: it was narrative and personal histories that attracted him. This initiated a series of portraits of queer men of color using the format of Greek pottery (color, borders, and text telling their stories) done with acrylic on wood. He also began an exploration of personal history by questioning the veracity of the family-album-as-archive and produced work where he painted images from his family album on scraps of loose canvas but reconstituted them through symbols and disruptions to reveal the trauma, inherited trauma, and abuse elided from the archive. This led into working with his mother's family album also on loose scraps of canvas. Peter is half-German and half-Mexican and there are many complexities to explore in having this mixed-race identity. Through her family photo albums, he explored his mother’s German heritage as the daughter of a Nazi soldier and an eventual apologist for her father in another set of paintings. Future work involves an exploration of his father’s history as a dark-skinned Mexican (estranged from his light-skinned family). He is interested in investigating the history and current status of Afro-Mexicans in Mexico through further disruptions of family archives. As a result of the pandemic and missing human connections, Peter has returned to live-sitting portraiture in 2021 and has painted iconic NYC drag performers such as Joey Arias and Kevin Aviance in the Lower East Side studio space he occupies thanks to Artist Alliance Inc. More recently, he has painted drag icon Amanda Lepore and Broadway legend Andre de Shields at his new studio space located in Gowanus, Brooklyn and currently has a large body of work consisting of many figures, well-known known and not-so-known, from the LGBTQ+ community.

(she/her) Kiera Stuart is a classically trained artist who focuses on surreal figurative oil paintings. Stuart’s art practice explores relationship dynamics, vulnerability and the overlap of science and spirituality. She creates surreal figurative paintings as psychological maps to process complex emotions and as a form of inward discovery. The figures in her paintings are androgynous and racially nonspecific to consider that people have more in common than without. Her characters find dialogue with each other in surrealistic planes which challenge the viewer's perception, yet evoke feelings of healing and safety. Stuart grew up in rural Long Island and moved to NYC as a teenager to study art. She received a BFA from Hunter College in 2018 and an MFA from Brooklyn College in 2022 while working as a fine art framer, art handler and studio assistant in NYC. She is currently one of the directors & curators of the Box Factory Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens and maintains a studio practice in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

(she/her) The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox is the Rector of Christ Episcopal Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge New Jersey, a wonderfully diverse parish engaged in social justice, spiritual renewal, and inclusive mission. On the diocesan and larger church level, Mother Wilcox serves on a number of governing bodies and visioning groups, including the Episcopal Church’s Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility. From 2010 – 2017, she was a Chaplain at Montclair State University, a diverse and growing campus in northern New Jersey. Mother Wilcox is a frequent speaker on justice issues including LGBTQ+ rights, women’s equality, racism, and the environment, and has lobbied in Washington on behalf of immigrants and refugees. Mother Wilcox holds a Masters of Divinity from Drew University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 2019, she authored an award winning children’s book, Why Isn’t God A Girl? A Young Girl’s Journey To See The Image Of God In Herself, published by Imagine & Wonder. Prior to ordained life, Mother Wilcox worked in the business world, including as a management consultant for large multi-national companies, partnering with her clients to clarify their mission, and facilitate the transformation to an agile and responsive organization, leveraging new resources, processes, and technology. A devoted sports fan, she also enjoys golf & kayaking, good food, good humor, painting, photography, and hanging out with friends. A widow, Mother Wilcox lives in a rural part of the Garden State with my two cats, and my three-legged black lab.

For more information please contact the founding director of Relational Space, Leigh W. Jerome, Ph.D. at 808.783.4455 / Leigh@LeighJerome.com

GALLERY

+ FORUM

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human
An Arts + Science Collaborative Exhibition

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human

Subscribe for updates on our latest exhibition.

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human​ An Arts + Science Collaborative Exhibition

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human

Subscribe for updates on our latest exhibition.

Beyond Gender: The Future of Being Human
An Arts + Science Collaborative Exhibition