Rowan Renee is a Brooklyn-based artist who explores how queer identity is mediated by the law. In their research-led practice, they collect imagery, text and documents that address the intergenerational impact of gender-based violence and incarceration from State records and family archives. They use analog techniques – including darkroom photography, printmaking, loom-weaving, and stained-glass – to engage their genderqueer body in labor that materially transforms histories of trauma. Installed as immersive installations, these artifacts become counter-archives that complicate official narratives of truth and justice. Their work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon (2021), Anchorage Museum of Art (2021), Five Myles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015). Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, and is now on a multi-city tour. They are currently the 2022 Artist-in-Residence at Green-Wood Cemetery.
