To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, Jess T. Dugan
CompletedAugust 16, 2022 to December 10, 2022
Organizing institution: Barrett Barrera Projects Jess T. Dugan is a photography-based artist whose work explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality and community. For over five years, Dugan traveled throughout the United States to create To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults in collaboration with Vanessa Fabbre, social worker and Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, whose research focuses on the intersection of LGBTQ issues and aging. Seeking subjects whose lived experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and geographic location, they traveled from coast to coast, to big cities and small towns, documenting the life stories of this important but largely underrepresented group of older adults. The project represents a wide variety of life narratives spanning the last ninety years, offering an important historical record of transgender experience and activism in the United States. The resulting portraits and narratives provide a nuanced view into the struggles and joys of growing older as a transgender person and offer a poignant reflection on what it means to live authentically despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
The exhibition features 22 selected portraits and interviews conducted with 88 individuals throughout the United States. It is accompanied by a monograph published by Kehrer Verlag that includes 65 portraits and interviews as well as an interview by Karen Irvine, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.
Organized by Barrett Barrera Projects, and coordinated for the Newcomb Art Museum by Curator Laura Blereau and Curatorial Assistant Alex Landry
Learn more at the To Survive on This Shore website
Exhibition Images (18)
