‘Strange Bedfellows’ at MBUS attracts local and academic interest

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The opening reception for Strange Bedfellows attracted many visitors at The College of Architecture + The Arts | Miami Beach Urban Studios. The exhibition attracted some guests from the local community as well as faculty from the FIU Art + Art History Department such as Jacek Kolasinski (Chair and Associate Professor), Mirta Gomez (Professor), Eduardo del Valle (Professor), Kathy Dambach (Professor), Michael Namkung (Assistant Professor), Carmen Tiffany (Visiting Instructor), and Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel (Assistant Professor and Director of the MFA Program in Visual Arts).

Strange Bedfellows, which is sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center, is currently touring. It was presented first at Root Division for the National Queer Arts Festival in June 2013, next at the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, and then at the 2014 College Art Association Conference in Chicago for the Queer Caucus for the Arts.

Amy Cancelmo oversees twelve exhibitions and works with over 500 artists annually at Root Division, where she is the Exhibitions & Events Coordinator. As a curator, Cancelmo chooses work that raises dialogue on social issues. (Source: Root Division)

The College of Architecture + The Arts’s own Brittni Winkler, Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts: Curatorial Practice Major candidate, was the collaborative curator for Strange Bedfellows at Miami Beach Urban Studios. Winkler decided the placement of each piece and received Cancelmo’s approval.

Below is from a curatorial statement by Amy Cancelmo about Strange Bedfellows.

“My interest in the subject of queer collaboration began in a series of questions: Why are there so many collaborative artworks in contemporary queer art practice? Is queerness inherently collaborative, or is collaborative practice inherently queer? What is to be learned about both practices by considering them together? Definitions are sometimes helpful when beginning this kind of inquiry, but the interesting thing about queerness, and about collaboration, is that both of these concepts share the trait of being in a constant state of negotiation and evolution. Queerness and collaboration also share the grey area of being a matter of identification. Postmodern and Post-structuralist theory have provided a framework to understand that nothing exists in a vacuum, and that every action is a collaboration, yet not all artists define as collaborators, or acknowledge multiple authorship.”

To read the full curatorial statement, click here.

Strange Bedfellows will run until Friday, October 17th, 2014 at The College of Architecture + The Arts | Miami Beach Urban Studios: 420 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, FL 33139. Free and open to the public.

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