TLP: Marissa, we are beyond grateful to be hosting Cruising the Horizon: New York at NYU in the Spring. Can you provide some context to our community about the history of this important show?

MDT: Cruising the Horizon: New York is based on a project developed during my Curatorial Fellowship at the Phoenix Art Museum. Originally planned to open in 2020 it was unfortunately cancelled due to COVID-19 closure and lay-offs at the museum, including my own. This iteration of the exhibition is slightly different from the original checklist/plans for Phoenix, but still holds the same artistic foundation and vision. 

This exhibition looks towards the writing and theory of queer futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, renowned art critic and queer theorist, specifically from his book “Cruising Utopia.” In his writing, Muñoz denotes that the “here and now is a prison house” and simply not enough. He calls for dreams and imaginations to drive us forward from the oppressive present of the “here and now” in order to arrive at a future “then and there,” where true queerness and “greater openness to the world” exists. He explains that we have never been queer that queerness only exists as an ideality rooted in the past, albeit with momentary personifications, that have guided our present existence and will guide our future being. The present or straight time is continuously restricted by normative expectations: especially in terms of gender and sexuality, majoritarian belonging, capitalism, white supremacy and authoritarian systems. For many, our desires and sense of ecstasy often remain unfulfilled and inert. To break from this cycle and reach a “then and there” of true liberation we must use the past and the current present to imagine and perform a future world of possibilities that exists outside these normative expectations, realities, and times.  

I hope this exhibition conjures a way forward to a horizon of utopic possibilities and imagination through art, specifically via craft aesthetics. I view the exhibition as a converging vessel for emerging contemporary art that push the boundaries of the “here and now” in the pursuit of a queer time, a euphoric sense of stepping out towards a “then and there.” 

TLP: Can you share a bit about the participating artists and how they lend their work to the thematics of the exhibition? 

MDT: Included artists in Cruising the Horizon: New York, present various worlds and visions that challenge contemporary systems of oppressions in varying ways from both a collective and individual positioning of identities through mainly a craft aesthetic. I view craft aesthetic as ranging from a traditional sense of craft production seen in the textile work of Sarah Zapata’s work and the steel work by mujero, to the inclusion of quotidian craft elements such as glitter and crochet in Moises Salazar’s work and Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s use of sequins to create refracted light. 

 A lot of the featured artists intersect in terms of thematics for the show, some more clearly than others, such as Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski and ray ferrerira. In DeJesus Moleski’s work she creates iridescent colors and refracted light from uncanny elements, such as holographic sequins, as a way to encapsulate a cosmic space of rainbow light on her gouache paintings and installations that centers femme queer existence and explore the liminal realities of hybridity, the diaspora, and the uncanny. In ray ferreira’s work, she also uses decorative and iridescence materials but in tandem with text-based images, installations, and performance. ferreria’s work incorporates and fuses the rhythms and movement of her body with the materiality to cruise a sense of time and space. Her work reverberates between time where histories and the realities of colonialism, ideologies of normative, and oppressive power structures are visible but are collapsed and broken down into liberating realizations. mujero also incorporates their body into their work, playing with how it responds to the sculptural environments and installations while also transmitting Black Latinx/Queer/Caribbean-Dominican histories across time and space – across the oceans and lands that divide, connect, make visible and invisible. 

While Angel Lartigue explores the relationship between body and land specifically in terms of identification and politics of bodies with a specific regard to transformation, liminality, and decomposition. Their performances, mainly held in notable queer clubs and spaces, often incorporate biological processes with household items and raw materials, such as fungi, insects, bodily residue and odors, as themes of transformation that goes beyond the traditional binary sense of medicine-science and transgender identity. Whereas Leslie Martinez’s core interests lie in the overlapping parallels between transgender subjectivity and border consciousness, while seemingly separate these two sites share imaginative futures, transgressive acts, and self-negation for survival, all in order to get beyond the boundaries. Using found materials and fragmented byproducts of previous works their work is rooted in ideas around material embodiment, fragmentation, and reconfiguration that evoke the spiritual transformation and future-oriented desires from the queer margins of spirits, bodies, and society through. Their current work extends beyond the gender and sexuality of queerness and trans-ness; instead, it reaches into uncanny materiality and exuberant color of the borderlands. Similarly, Moises Salazar’s work also reflects a borderland and liminal consciousness that is based on their background as a member of immigrant and queer communities where the body is constantly put into question, trauma, and alienation by society overall but also by those within and outside of their own communities. Their use of clay, papier-mâché, glitter, and crochet are accessible materials that are also a form of cultural heritage and generational traditions reflective of their family’s experience and endurance. Their paintings reflect colorful and soft portraits where their body is able to exist in various momentary spaces and scenes of innocence, truth, and safety. 

The work by Marco DaSilva looks toward unrequited love and desire in a city of 8.3 million people – although his work evokes a sense of romantic disappointment it also arouses a sense of hope and possible future of desire fulfilled. Amy Bravo’s work also speaks on a sense of desire but one that is rooted in a historical setting. Her painting, Queen of Moro Castle, creates a visionary scene influenced by the writing of Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban poet and writer who was imprisoned in El Morro Castle between 1974-76. Notorious for being a former Spanish fortress, El Morro Castle was also a hellish prison in post-revolutionary Cuba where violent offenders were imprisoned and tortured but so were others considered deviant, such as queer individuals, or political dissenter by the Cuban government. Bravo’s painting reconstructs a poetic scene described by Arenas, showing figures climbing atop the prison roof at night performing and acting in various acts. Despite their imprisonment and the pain from it, there’s a sense and slight performativity of resilience and desire in Bravo’s narration where the detained exist and perform in their truth as momentary glimpse of freedom from their oppressive state. Lastly, Sarah Zapata’s work Siempre X invokes Peruvian indigenous textile design and techniques, along with arpilleras, a style of brightly colored hand-sewn narrative works made predominately by women that became widely popular during guerilla occupation in Peru and Chile detailing human rights abuses, especially for the latter as it was well-known as a tool of political dissent against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973–90. The work’s techniques and lineage to a significant historical protest against authoritarianism activates an echo to the current political landscape within the U.S. but also offers an abstracted vision of femininity and womanhood. 

3. Lastly (and without divulging too much) what are your hopes for the trajectory of Cruising the Horizon? Will it live on elsewhere? 

I’m actively pursuing other venues for Cruising the Horizon with the hope that it will exist and manifest in various regions, cities, and communities. The original exhibition includes a set roster of artists that I planned for Phoenix but I would love for it to travel to different cities and pull in other artists, essentially creating a network of visible imagination and utopic creations across the U.S.