The Family We Choose: Chris Cinque's Portraits in "KinShip"

 

Chris Cinque, Kim, 2024. Mixed media, 38" H x 62" W. Courtesy of the artist.

While I have relationships of various kinds with all the people represented in this exhibit, the story I am telling is of my own attempt to understand what it means to belong to a family. I am not attempting to speak for the other people represented here. 

My search is universal in that all people long to be part of something larger than themselves. This exhibit explores the varieties of female personhood and the expansive potential of the humanity that we all share, something massively under attack at the moment, where history is being rewritten and people’s lives and well-being are in danger.

Who are we and who are our families? I grew up in a heterosexual family and assumed I belonged there, having been raised to also be heterosexual. No other possibility existed. I was expected to marry a man and have children in order to create the next generation and please my parents by living a life that reflected their own. Instead, I grew up and ran away with another woman to a state unknown to my family, both literally (Minnesota) and culturally (Lesbian). But I was an exile and a stranger to myself and to others. I wrote about this in my one-woman trilogy "Growing Up Queer in America". 

"There is no loss above that of one’s homeland, to see your family recede in the distance, their arms at their sides, their backs turned to you. How do we recover from this exile, from this failure of love? When we are outcast from our families, we are outcast from ourselves. We live among strangers. We eat their bread. We walk their streets. We make these strangers our families. But nothing has deep roots. And few things are familiar."

While the loss of my relatives was initially devastating, I was lucky. After decades of estrangement, my parents made peace with their disappointment and welcomed me back into their lives. And I was glad for that. But in the meantime, I created a life for myself separate from them. I have had no home among blood relatives since I was a teenager. 

It wasn't an easy choice to make, to leave home for the complete unknown. But how can a woman become herself when she has to dress, act, and speak in proscribed ways? She can resist the clothes, the behaviors, the unacceptable language but then her energies are half spent in refuting the most basic elements of life.

 

Chris Cinque, Eleanor, 2024. Mixed media, 50" H x 38" W. Courtesy of the artist.

 

One complicating factor in not being part of an extended family is not being sure who I actually am. I've often felt the need to shapeshift, hide, deflect, speak in accents not my own in order to have the life I wanted. Whether this was a good choice is debatable but it was a survival mechanism. The world is a hostile place for those who don’t fit in. We can be blindsided by hatred, real and imagined. Often these adaptive measures are effective. But they can also be confusing. I never had a deep understanding of my own lesbian identity. While women all over the country were figuring these things out with each other, experimenting and writing treatises and just being themselves, I kept myself apart due to my own deep-seated homophobia, shame, and confusion, so I wasn’t privy to this kind of knowledge. I did my own experimenting but it depended on who my partner was: I tried being Fem when my partner was Butch, tried being Butch when my partner was Fem, tried being neither when that seemed appropriate, but never until this final iteration, my marriage to Randa, have I found some peace with my own identity. 

When I came out in 1969, I felt I had to warn people like potential roommates that I was a Lesbian because the message I had internalized was that my personhood was deeply problematic for straight people and therefore dangerous to them and to me. It was also to save time and my sanity: suppose I moved in and then had to move right back out again? 

Maybe because of this my work is for people who are hard pressed. Furious. Damaged. Protective. Generous. Idiosyncratic. Curious. Lonely. One of the purposes of these portraits is healing from misogyny, lesbophobia and ageism. To provide a place where the viewer can engage with herself and others in a state of energized looking.

So, that’s the emotional context for this work. 

Then there is the visual context within which these drawings were made. What instinctive right-brained impulses were at work? According to Sean Scully, "Line represents the desire to define, delineate, and control." In this instance, lines are the accumulated marks that make up the drawings.

In my last series, I did use line to control the story I wanted to tell: of a child finding her way through sexual violence and predation. (Each One Was Heard: A Visual Memoir) I cut myself out of old family photos and used the cutouts to embody the story of how I survived random terrifying attacks on my body and psyche. Each representation was a testament to my own survival. By drawing myself as a two year old when the attacks began and continuing to show myself growing up until I was 19 when the attacks ended and then including a drawing of my current self-possessed adult self, I was able to capture visually what I had lived through as well as show that I had survived.

In this current work, I pair charcoal and red Conte crayon drawings to present a variety of narratives of women and nonbinary people’s own self-expression. I also excised them from their surroundings. All the drawings are based on the subjects' self-selected photographs that they let me use as models. By the intimate act of copying them, I experienced some of what they were experiencing when the photos were taken: desire, defiance, non-chalance, sorrow, joy, serenity, and provocation.

 

Chris Cinque, Kelly, 2024. Mixed media, 59 1/2 x 28 1/2. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Scully also says, "Color is an abandonment of control." The only color I used in the childhood drawings was a variety of pinks as an appeal to the viewers and my own unconscious, pink being both a color of female oppression as well as a universal color of healing. In these new drawings, I added more vibrant colors and collage elements to, as Scully says, "appeal to the unconscious, the spirit, and the senses." But again, this was an intuitive process and when I said "recently" before, I meant just now as I am writing this article. I searched through my favorite books and found Scully’s words to explicate my process only after I had finished the drawings. 

My aesthetic as an artist includes using random, non-archival materials, such as builders' boards, cardboard, and newsprint, as representative of my belief that nothing lasts, that decay is inevitable. Yet by creating art with substandard materials, I also honor these materials. This serves as a metaphor of my own journey where I found myself discarded by a homophobic, violently misogynist culture. Yet against all odds,  this lesbian, this violated child, this woman, has survived. Art does save lives. Maybe these pictures will last as long as I have managed to.

There is an age gap between some of the charcoal drawings and their accompanying Conte crayon drawings. These are "Stephanie", "Chris", "Kim", and "Eleanor". This was because of the pictures I was given to choose from and had no other significance than that at the time. However, after the fact, meaning can be intuited here as well: The age gap pictures speak to historicity, continuity and survival on the part of the subjects. Chris’s pictures were taken in 1993 and 2024. Kim’s are from 1995 and 2024. Eleanor’s 2003 and 2018. Stephanie’s are 2015 and 2022. These indications of survival are no small thing for an oppressed sexual minority two of whom are also African American and all of whom came out long before there was anything remotely celebratory about being queer.

The other pairings are contemporaneous to each other: "Marisa", "Kelly", "Pat", and "Randa". These pictures from the same time period speak to these same elements as those I already mentioned, but also show a range of feeling within the person happening in real time. This is especially true of "Kelly" and "Pat". Kelly’s outspoken challenge to the viewer is juxtaposed with her calm demeanor as she sews drawings she made of her turbulent life onto a t-shirt. Pat’s happy participation in the picnic is paired with the confusion and pain of approaching dementia.  Both of the "Marisa" drawings show a serene self-containment, seemingly undisturbed by the emotional chaos in which all the subjects in this body of work came of age. Marisa’s back is turned to us as she gazes at a favorite landscape in the Badlands, over which I collaged the gates of the orphanage where she lived in Colombia before being adopted by a family in the US. 

John Dewey said, "If all meaning could be adequately expressed by words, painting and music would not exist." While I’ve provided a lot of words to help explicate this body of work, my primary intention as always is to create meaning first and foremost that connects to the viewer visually, viscerally, and emotionally. Hopefully you looked at the work before you started reading! 

To circle back to my opening remarks, ultimately these drawings represent a kind of family or clan. While none of the people could be like parents to me, some are like siblings, some are like either close or distant cousins, one is my actual wife. We are all related by a bloodline of shared experiences, of having lived through a particular kind of fire and having survived to tell our stories. I am grateful to all of my friends represented in these drawings both for participating in this project and for being an integral part of my life. ◼︎ 

 

KinShip: New Work by Chris Cinque with Ceramics by Sharon Jaffe, is on view at Form+Content Gallery up through October 4 with an opening reception Saturday, August 30, from 4-7 pm and an artist talk Sunday, September 14, 2-3 pm.

To see more of the artist's work, visit Chris Cinque's website or follow her in on Instagram @cinquechris.