Lex Morgan Lancaster spoke to a group of students at the Art Building on Tuesday April 4th discussing Queer and Trans Abstractions in Contemporary Art.

Lancaster is an assistant professor of art history and gallery director at the University of South Carolina-Upstate. They have a book called Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art and are working on a second book.

During the lecture, Lancaster highlighted different points of their book.

• Lancaster stated, “my book stages transhistorical conversations between contemporary works and certain forms of modernist abstractions that they recite and reimagine.”
• They showed art that was made of only shapes that represented people’s bodies. One piece was made of mud and hair with  disembodied feet. Another piece was a black rainbow with black, brown, and blonde synthetic and human hair.
• According to Lancaster, this art would “resonate effectively and engage with the fraud histories of certain material that are marked by their own gender, sex, racialized and class dynamics.”

From their lecture, Lancaster wants people to have “a broader understanding of what [social] political art can be and how we can think about queer, trans, anti-racist, and critical disability approaches in art in broader ways than what they thought before.”

For more information about Lex Morgan Lancaster, you can visit their website https://www.lexmorganlancaster.com/.