Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire and identity politics in a range of works including quilts, sculpture, collage, photography and writing. His exhibition record includes numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently The Embedded Message: Quilting in Contemporary Art at Richmond’s Visual Arts Center. He is the recipient of two Windgate Fellowships in 2006 and 2015, a 2017 CultureWorks Grant for his Invasive Queer Kudzu project, and a 2018 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. He has held residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. His critical writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Surface Design Journal, and the Journal of Modern Craft.
Artist Statement
Quilts, weeds, yellowing wallpaper, firewood, a taxidermy bear and Colonial-Revival couch—my works reach across generational divides through a language of form and material dialect. Probing the images and cultural artifacts from my geographical, familial and domestic background reveals gaps in which I can insert and reconstruct my own complicated narrative as a nerdy Appalachian queer guy. In this space, stories of cruising men and family past-times are pieced together as a multi-layered patchwork of text, images, patterned cloth, personal clothing, furniture, wallpaper, drawings and found domestic textiles. These saturated works draw attention to the often murky intersection of personal desires and family institutions, as well as openly question our larger social constructions of deviancy, shame, adolescent imprinting and heteronormativity.
- MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
- BFA, Appalachian Center for Craft, Tennessee Technological University, Smithville, TN
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