The Picker Art Gallery formally debuted their newest exhibit “X: Gender, Identity, Presence” on Thursday, Sept. 11 in the Dana Arts Center. The exhibit works in coordination with Colgate’s Arts, Creativity and Innovation Initiative, Living Writers, University Museums and the Ryan Family Film Series as the first piece of the Fall 2025 Queer X-travaganza event series.
Museum Operations Manager Darwin Rodriguez commented on the ways that exhibitions can touch the campus community.
“Events and exhibits such as this require a lot of coordination with curators, campus workers and other departments within Dana and the college,” Rodriguez said. “It is an opportunity to show to the campus what we do. We hope to offer a viable learning alternative that is outside the classroom and to convey that everyone can feel welcomed and included.”
The exhibit includes works from a wide array of mediums — paintings, photography, film, sculpture, cut-paper portraits and more — to fully celebrate the unique experiences in the lives of trans artists and people.
One of the principally featured artists in the exhibit is Antonius-Tín Bui, a Vietnamese American whose cut-paper displays are among the largest works in the museum and the first thing visitors see upon entering. Bui’s corpus of work is wide-ranging, including performance and community-engaged projects. There is a beauty to Bui’s work — in combination with the “meditative and subversive” undertones, viewers are taken with the intricacy and elegant design of the paper cutouts. The subjects of their cutouts are purposefully erotic, simultaneously emphasizing a self-assured gaze and challenging stereotypes of Asian Americans and transgender people.
As visitors continue through the presentation of Bui’s works in the gallery, they are met with a cleverly constructed immersive mini theater hidden behind a curtain. The theater features the video installations of Cassils, a transgender Canadian artist whose work contemplates the history of LGBTQ+ violence, representation, struggle and empowerment. Cassils accomplishes this through the use of their own body and movements as well as those of other participants, to capture the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power. The theater is the highlight of the exhibit and a must-see for anyone who wants to feel the full effect of the varying portrayals of the struggles and triumphs of transgender and queer rights.
Junior Julia Bihari was taken by the exhibit’s usage of various mediums to convey themes.
“I really liked the foam room theater and paper cutouts,” Bihari said. “The mixed forms of media and styles goes along with the exhibit’s goal of inclusion and diversity.”
Bihari also expressed that there existed a definite “political undertone” to many of the works of art in the exhibit. These political undertones add a certain dimension of power to the art: a message of inclusion, tolerance and embrace of the different.
The next portion of the exhibit displays the Picker Art Gallery’s permanent collection of LGBTQ+ artists. While the first two sections showcase the specific works of two unique artists, this section of the gallery is meant to portray the various perspectives of queer art. Not only does this section vary in meaning, medium and subject, but it also encompasses artists from 1879 through to the modern day. It can be easy, as an outsider, to generalize a minority group into a small, singular and focused experience; this entire exhibit and its artists challenge that tendency and show the myriad experiences within any minority group.
Many of the artists featured in this third section use their art to explore their own identity and their relation to the social construction of gender at large. One such artist is the late Claude Cahun. Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, Cahun was a French Jewish artist who frequently referred to themselves as gender fluid throughout their life. Cahun is also known for protesting the Nazi occupation of the Isle of Jersey by publishing anti-Nazi propaganda. This example was later followed by others such as Yasumasa Morimura, a Japanese artist who used self-portraits and photography as mediums.
Sophomore Evelia Oropeza works at the Picker Art Gallery and found that the diversity and inclusivity of the exhibition is what made it so appealing.
“I believe that this exhibit is incredibly inclusive and diverse,” Oropeza said. “I think people will enjoy it, as it is an exhibit that focuses on making sure that every single person’s voice is heard.”
The Picker Art Gallery’s latest exhibition highlights specific facets of LGBTQ+ experiences as well as demonstrates the power of art as a medium to speak of matters of oppression, identity and struggle. In that way, “X: Gender, Identity, Presence” is an exhibit that can appeal to all.
