BRIAN HITSELBERGER
Artist / Writer / Publisher










For the Reading Room gallery in New Orleans-based artist space Antenna, I was invited to create an exhibition on the subject of queer reading and community.

I brought together my Counterspell wall installation with my artist book of the same name, installing the book’s pages as prints across a corner in the space.



I also created a group of new mailer projects, including two multi-panel text works drawing language from David Wojnarowicz’s peerless memoir Close to the Knives, a crucial text for me.  

These pieces were mailed in parts to New Orleans-based artists, each of whom became collaborators in the work.

Queer voices, language and writing will travel, and make their ways to those who need them.


Chosen Family, Collage on cardstock, tape, ink, postage, 44” x 68”, 2022














I was interested in the type of community and identifications that can form around the written word. Much of my own queer identity was initially formed by reading the novels and books of queer writers - early on, these were the only queer people I knew.  

Chosen Family is a 16-part mailer piece that brings together a portrait of every queer writer whose work I have on my bookshelves, or whose writing I could recall having read.





These pieces were mailed from my studio directly to the gallery. Because I accidentally used the wrong zip code when addressing them, they didn’t all make it in time for the opening.  

Rather, they arrived in the mail in stages during the 7 weeks  of the exhibition, which allowed the piece to “grow” over time.  One panel never showed up, and remains lost.


Chosen Family - detail
Chosen Family - detail


Within this show, I also curated two tables of queer zines and artist books, many drawn from my own collection, in order to create a kind show-within-a-show.

I often reflect on Nayland Blake’s observation that “queer people are the only minority whose culture is not transmitted within the biological family.” The types of spaces opened by these books are amiable, inconvenient, argumentative, contradictory, lurid, fractious, tender and everything in-between.

In other words, they are earnestly and faithfully human.



  






More World
Curated by Amelia Broussard

Antenna Gallery Reading Room, New Orleans, Louisiana
May-June, 2022

More information here.
BRIAN HITSELBERGER  © 2010 - 2025