The art department and Class of 1960s Scholars kicked off their lecture series on Feb. 8th with Elle Pérez, a Brooklyn-based photographer. Previously a visiting lecturer in the College’s art department, Pérez returned to give students insight into their development as an artist and into their explorations of intimacy and gender.
Pérez’s love of photography emerged around the age of 14 when they began documenting the budding punk-rock scene in the Bronx with their parents’ point-and-shoot camera. The photos captured the frenetic closeness of this community of teenagers and young adults: couples wrapped in embraces, mosh pits spilling onto the stage, and boxed hair-dye melting onto the white-washed walls. Pérez discovered the freedom and agency of being an artist in this diverse environment, they said. The camera gave them something to do, a reason to approach people, and a way to feel comfortable in the party. These events were the “perfect subject,” Pérez added in their lecture. “Anywhere you looked something was happening … and I fell in love with that.”
From then on, art was a force in Pérez’s life, leading them to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. There, Pérez won a grant to take a road trip across the country and photograph nonbinary people that they contacted through Tumblr. In their lecture, Pérez said that by the time they graduated college in 2011 conversations about gender had not filtered into mainstream culture in the same way they have today — using nonbinary pronouns was often seen as unusual. Their work put faces to the myriad of queer experiences neglected by mainstream art. More personally, in their lecture Pérez said it helped bond them to other nonbinary people who felt similarly.
Before pursuing graduate school, Pérez chose to visit Puerto Rico to reconnect with their family heritage and create a new portfolio of photographic work. The people they photographed, initially only artistic subjects behind the lens, became family. In one of their photographs, a woman — to whom Pérez said they are related but are unsure exactly how — stands in a graveyard surrounded by shocks of color in the patterns of her clothes and the flowers in her hands. Since Pérez photographed the woman, she has become like a grandmother to Pérez, and Puerto Rico a second home — enduring proof of photography’s power to connect. Pérez’s time in Puerto Rico sparked a series of black-and-white photographs distilling the calmness and chaos of nature: the shadows of a palm leaf in a garden traced with light or the streets overrun with water during Hurricane Maria.
Returning from Puerto Rico, Pérez felt ready to continue their education at the Yale School of Arts. There, they were expected to generate extensive portfolios of work that they submitted for critique. On the hunt for new material, Pérez discovered two settings that they felt spoke to their work’s themes of gender and performativity. The first emerged from an unexpected phone call with their cousin, inviting them to see his new venture: entertainment wrestling. While their cousin practiced, Pérez said they would orchestrate the perfect photo, anticipating the wrestlers’ every move and asking them to rehearse the same pose again and again in order to capture dynamic photos at close angles.
Around the same time, Pérez began photographing drag shows. The photographs of this setting, juxtaposed with the former setting, emphasized the performative aspect of gender identity. Entertainment wrestlers and drag queens both put on a persona for a show, but rather than being constricting, it was a form of artistic expression akin to Pérez’s own work, they said.
After receiving a Masters in Fine Arts in photography from Yale, Pérez had the opportunity to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture — a summer artist residency in Maine — and continued to work there as a dean for five years. At Skowhegan, they discovered their passion for helping others achieve their artistic visions. Shortly after their first summer at Skowhegan, they were offered a visiting lecturer position at the College. Arriving in 2015, they knew nothing about the College, the Berkshires, or the kind of students they would be teaching. Lightheartedly poking at the voraciousness of students at the College, they noted how one of their first challenges was trying to come up with enough homework to “keep you entertained,” they said of arts students who would breeze through the assigned readings. Pérez credits the College as the place where they discovered their voice as a teacher and an artist.
Back in New York City, Pérez started to work on a new exhibition at 47 Canal, a contemporary art gallery in downtown Manhattan. For their new body of work, Pérez reflected on how separate themes could overlap, ultimately realizing the importance of sequence — how two photos together could allude to something beyond the images alone. During the lecture, Pérez said that ideas of hypermasculinity in boxing and gender performance in the drag shows, intimacy and violence, and homecoming in Puerto Rico were now “concentric circles.” This interconnectedness was conveyed through collages, combining different bodies of work with the images that inspired their craft, becoming both a final exhibition of art and a window into their artistic process.
Pérez’s latest project “Elle Pérez: Intimacies” is currently on display at The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. For this exhibit, Pérez said they chose to use new techniques to hang up the photographs, opting for different amounts of glue and pins to display their art in a way that doesn’t protect them from the environment. Peréz said they want time to collaborate in their artistic process. They described it as a sort of experiment.
