Tucker Pierce, a cofounder of Westminster Press (center), screen-prints in the Bixby Hall printmaking studio. Courtesy of the Sam Fox School.
As an artist, senior Tucker Pierce explores the intentional construction of identity and what happens when it encounters the surrounding world. As cofounder of Westminster Press, Pierce is hoping to create both metaphoric and literal space for artists from marginalized communities. Pierce will graduate with a BFA in art.
Your background is in painting and printmaking, but your thesis project is more photo-based. Can you describe the series?
An image from “Untitled (Too Real is this Feeling of Make-Believe).”
It’s called “Untitled (Too Real is this Feeling of Make-Believe),” which is a Dolly Parton quote. Basically I was dressing up in drag, going out into public and documenting it. The project was really about border crossing — about crossing physically from the private to public sphere and stepping outside society’s expectations of gender expression.
You describe your work in terms of camp, but the resulting images feel quite sincere, even melancholy. Is that a contradiction?
There’s a difference between camp and kitsch. Camp is about earnestly exploring this metaphor of life-as-theater. It’s about being completely invested but then failing ever so slightly. If you’re not doing that, it just becomes kitsch.
You founded Westminster Press with Nicholas Curry last year and are currently raising funds, via Kickstarter, for a permanent gallery space. How did the press get started?
We do these sort of cheeky, provocative prints and posters that deal with queer sexuality and marginalized identities. And when we started taking them to local art fairs and other events, we found real interest. There was a market, but not a marketplace.
A drawing Tucker Pierce created, based on an earlier woodcut, for the Westminster Press Kickstarter campaign.
The work we’re doing with Westminster Press is different from the work I make for my personal practice. But politically, I think the work is aligned. In both cases, the idea is to take something from the margins and bring it into the center.