'Over Yonder': A love letter to Rural Queerness
- jacob grant
- Jul 11
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Queerness exists- and flourishes- far beyond the nation's major metropolises. In the hills and small towns of Kentucky, where it is often at tension, queerness long finds itself in artistic expression, poetic escapism, and memory.
Presented at the University of Louisville’s Cressman Center for Visual Arts and curated by graduate student Gray Koesters as the culmination of their thesis research, Over Yonder gathers artworks, photography, archival materials and ephemera into a richly textured portrait of rural Kentucky's queer life. The exhibit expands on utopian ideas described by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, to push back against the "metronarrative" of abandoning one's own small town to pursue progressive living. By placing contemporary works by emerging and established artists in dialogue with archival materials that illuminate the region’s history, the exhibition affirms that queer community has long flourished just over yonder. Perhaps the answer, against the tradition of big-city escapism is the radical resistance of hope and joy in these areas.
The painterly works in this show offer a few different outlooks of this exhibit. Intimacy, whether sensual or platonic, is a throughline of these pieces. Cierra Evans' In Spite of Ourselves (2025) depicts a young couple finding solace together in a field, their quiet tenderness unfolding beneath clouds of smoke from a nearby plant. In doing so, the painting locates queer intimacy firmly within the textures and conditions of rural life, rather than apart from them. Likewise, Daisy Slucher's Public Displays (2025) revisits the intimate scene as something open and free. Both give a sense that queerness is not buried in the conditions of rural culture, but instead reemerges through public and private spaces. Moments of memory are further situated in the photos of Julie Rae Powers, where an exterior shot of a forest clad porch creates a sense of place in Nostalgia Sneaks On (2017), and turns inward in Celina and Archer Nap Together (2023). What's suggested here are acts of resistance that unfold, sometimes, in the quietude of home.
This movement from the personal to the communal is echoed in the exhibition’s treatment of place itself. Nature becomes a fixture of the exhibit’s relationship to the rural region, particularly in Kat Smith’s lichen that decorates the gallery walls and forms as poetry in Knowing I am of it (2025). If nature grounds the exhibition in the landscape of rural Kentucky, the spaces its inhabitants create within that landscape reveal how queer life takes root and endures. In a public sense, Daisy Slucher's painting As Close to Worship We'll Ever Get (2023) evokes both hilarity and belonging, suggesting how even a dive bar can become a sanctuary where community gathers and flourishes while christa kaodi's installation come home with me (2026) rearticulates the depth of which queerness begins in the sanctity of a childhood bedroom. Using found furniture, keepsakes, archival material, and paperback poetry titled "Adolescence," the artist reconstructs a space of memory: a place where queer identity is not only imbued through a process of self-discovery, but nurtured into existence. The archival material insinuates a sort of queering the object, where these little bits and pieces of life become imbued with the journey of self discovery.
Koesters’ attention to the ephemeral is a testament to the depth of the queer experience. Objects become repositories of memory, carrying the traces of lives, relationships, and unsung stories. Accompanying William Joseph Petrie’s Untitled (made before his death in 1995) painting are various materials loaned from the Faulkner Morgan Archive. These include scrapbook digital photography of the Tri-State Gay Rodeo Association and a personal handwritten letter from Petrie to his partner Matt. While branching off the artistic implications of the exhibit, the show memorializes as much as it celebrates.
The arrangement of works throughout the Cressman Center reinforces the exhibition’s understanding of queerness as both intimate and communal. Rather than separating contemporary practices from archival histories, Koesters poignantly allows these materials to exist in conversation, creating a space where personal memory and collective history overlap.
Queer utopias— our tendencies to visualize something over the rainbow— exists beyond the living and non-living. Beyond the drive to create, the show is sustained by an act of remembering, preserving, and reimagining these spaces. Over Yonder challenges the assumption that queer histories are primarily produced and preserved within urban centers. Instead, the exhibition reveals rural Kentucky as a site of ongoing queer world-making. Here, there is no “discovery” of queer rural existence, but a reminder that these stories exist in the past and present, sometimes in a holler.
Over Yonder: Queer Rural Utopias is on view 7/10/26 - 8/29/26 and features the work of Bayley Hope Amburgey, Cierra Evans, Tanner Hammock, Levi River House, christi kaodi, Sirene Martin, William Joseph Petrie, Tiffany Pyette, Kat Smith, Daisy Slucher, and material from the Faulkner Morgan Archive.
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