• EDYE IN BLOOM (FAN NO.1) by Alanna Fields
  • EDYE IN BLOOM (FAN NO.1) by Alanna Fields

    EDYE IN BLOOM (FAN NO.1) by Alanna Fields

    2024
    From the series Fans
    Archival pigment print on coated Hahnemühle Daguerre canvas and acrylic on constructed wood
    26.25 × 47.75 × 1.5  in
    Edition of 1
    Price upon request

     

    “Edye in Bloom (Fan No. 1)” was featured in The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024. 

    “Edye in Bloom (Fan No. 1)” features a 1977 archival portrait of Edye Gregory, one of Kansas City’s first Black drag queens. This artwork highlights Edye emerging from behind a fan, symbolizing both protection and cultural significance in queer performance. This work is the premiere piece in an ongoing series of sculptural works focusing on queer icons from small towns, exploring queer life beyond major east coast cities into the Midwest and South. Driven by the complex politics of the gaze, my practice continues to investigate ideas of concealment, fragmentation, and representation, through remixing and reactivating archival images of 20th-century Black queer figures.”

    —Alanna Fields 

    The subject of Alanna Fields’s piece reveals herself to us, blooming from an unfurled fan as she smiles head-on. Edye Gregory was one of the first and only Black Drag Queens to perform at the Jewel Box Lounge, a prominent drag nightclub in the United States, though the Kansas City Defender notes it is unclear if Jewel Box officially hired or represented her (with a probable cause being her race). Edye Gregory, alongside Ray Rondell, are some of Kansas City’s first documented Black Drag Queens and part of the only recorded histories of Black, Queer Kansas Citians at large. For those who knew her, she was a beloved entertainer known for her live vocal singing in performances across the Midwest and is missed since her passing in 2014. 

    Alanna Fields (born 1990 in Baltimore, Maryland) is a lens-based mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. She examines the dialogue between black queer bodies in the photographic space through gesture, and the negotiation between legibility and masking. Working intimately with black queer vernacular photography, her work aims to reconstruct and decontextualize images and ephemera of the past, pushing them past nostalgia. Through mixed media collages, her incorporation of found materials and experimentations in showing and hiding through various techniques serves as a means and investigation in blurring legibility and to address the intro-cultural and historical suppression of black queer narratives.

    Fields’s work has been exhibited at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, MoCADA, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Baxter St. CCNY, Expo Chicago, Felix Art Fair in LA, and UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St. CCNY, and Gallery Aferro. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a Lecturer of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design (a division of the New School), Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Aperture Magazine, FOAM Magazine, and The Atlantic. As of Lucid Pleasures, Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

     

    The artwork is a mixed media piece that incorporates archival pigment printing. 

    Archival pigment prints use refined pigment particles to create exquisite, high-resolution artwork. This printing method creates museum-quality artwork designed to last; ink and paper are critical elements in an archival pigment print’s life span.

    Hahnemühle Daguerre Canvas is a matte coated, poly-cotton inkjet canvas with a fine, uniform surface texture. The bright white canvas is characterised by its high degree of whiteness. When combined with the premium matt inkjet coating, it produces clean, fresh colours, fine details and black and white reproductions that are rich in contrast. 

    Please reach out to Strata Editions for purchase inquiries: will@strata-editions.com