Liz Harvey
Yellow Shift, Blue Shift, and Red Shift, 2022
Digital print on fabric, zippers, thread
The background for these three banners by Oakland-based artist Liz Harvey feature saturated colors and conflicting patterns printed on linen. Zippers, overlaid on the fabric backing, form looping lettering. The text is barely legible, as the letters are spaced inconsistently. However, each banner features excerpts from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickenson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. The text compiles thirty-six years of correspondence between the poet and her sister-in-law and neighbor, with whom she shared a romantic, if closeted, relationship. The banner form asserts this historical queer love in the material language of protest. The imagery, as the love affair, is complex and multi-faceted, utilizing pattern and color to obscure the text itself.
Harvey moved to the Bay Area out of familial responsibility, but remains in Oakland thanks to finding her chosen community and the mutual aid of communal living. Her banner series speaks to the spirit of the queer community in the Bay Area, as an assertion of identity and as historic leaders in activism.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Liz Harvey is a queer artist who makes textile-based works, collage, and performance. She dismantles cultural ephemera and text itself in ways that utilize disorientation to point to the erasure of queer and environmental stories as well as to call up a liberatory future. Most recently, her work has been shown at Round Weather Gallery in Oakland; the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles; and Plan-d Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Feral Fabric Journal and 48hills newsletter.
