The Griffin Museum is excited to offer this amazing artist talk with Boston-based artist Caleb Cole. In Lieu of Flowers is an ongoing series of memorial portraits of the trans people murdered in the United States and Puerto Rico due to transphobia, state violence, and institutional neglect. Part mourning ritual and part photograph, Cole use the roses from his garden and portraits primarily made by the subjects themselves to create a series of anthotypes, images created using photosensitive material from plants and the sun that cannot be fixed, therefore will eventually fade. This process is an act of devotion and extended witnessing over the course of the days- to weeks-long exposures. When the artist moves the prints each day to keep them in direct sunlight, Cole spends time looking into each person's eyes, connecting with their joy and grieving for their absence. The sun, the source of life, cannot revive them, yet the sunlight that creates each anthotype is the same light that once illuminated each original selfie, connecting us to one another. The resulting work is an examination of community, loss, time, and the impossible effort to extend both the life of my roses and the memory of these stolen lives. About The Speaker
Caleb Cole is a Midwest-born, Boston-based artist whose work addresses the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging. Using collage, assemblage, photography, and video, they bring secondhand objects and media together for chance encounters, deliberately placing materials from different time periods into conversation with one another as a means of thinking about a lineage of queer culture while resisting a singular progressive genealogy. Caleb has received an Artadia Finalist Award, Hearst 8×10 Biennial Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships, Magenta Flash Forward Foundation Fellowships, and Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist awards, among other distinctions. Caleb exhibits regularly at a variety of national venues and has held solo shows in Boston, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Newport Art Museum, Davis Art Museum, Brown University Art Museum, and Leslie Lohman Museum of Art. Caleb currently teaches at Boston College and Lesley University. To learn more about Caleb Cole click here