Between the Lines Broadside Collaboration:
Tranzquility
About Between the Lines
Center for Book Arts 2021 Workspace Artist in Residence Rowan Renée‘s year-long project Between the Lines—consisting of correspondence based workshop series with LGBTQ+ artists incarcerated in Texas and Florida—concluded with an in-person reading & print launch event at CBA (28 West 27th St, 3rd Fl) on Wednesday, October 27, 2021.
Six limited-edition broadsides produced by collaborative pairs of NYC-based artists and queer incarcerated artists are available for pre-order to pick up at the event. Individual broadsides are $15 and the entire series can be purchased for $75. All proceeds directly benefit organizations supporting queer incarcerated artists.
About Tranzquility
Tranzquility is an edition of 100 broadsides produced in collaboration by NYC-based artist Rowan Renee & queer incarcerated artist Edee Allynnah Davis.
Tranzquility, explores everyday rituals of comfort and joy, alongside the larger vision for systemic change that brings together trans-liberation and prison abolition movements. The design is vibrant and uplifting with the intention that art, community, and friendship can bring light and love into some of the harshest environments.
Rowan Renee
Rowan Renee (they/them) (b. 1985, West Palm Beach, Florida) is a genderqueer artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. Their work explores how queer identity is mediated by the law. Through image, text, and installation, they address the impact of intergenerational trauma and gender-based violence within the criminal justice system. Their solo exhibitions include Z at Pioneer Works (2015) and Bodies of Wood at the Aperture Foundation (2017). They have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, and the Red Bull House of Art in Detroit. Between the Lines, their current project with We, Women Photo, is a collaboration with LGBTQ+ incarcerated artists in Florida. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), is included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, at MoMA PS1.
Edee Allynnah Davis
Edee Allynnah Davis envisions the intersection of tranz-liberation and prison abolition through comix, illustration, and erotic art. In 2016, her work was included in On the Inside, a group exhibition of currently incarcerated LGBTQ+ artists at Abrons Art Center, curated by Tatiana von Fürstenberg in collaboration with Black and Pink. She serves on the advisory board for A.B.O. Comix, in Oakland, California, alongside the wonderful founder Casper Cendre and other members of her inside LGBTQ+ family.
Her comix are included in A Queer Prisoner’s Anthology volumes 2, 3, and 4, published by A.B.O, which led to her contributions being recognized in 2021, when she was awarded the Gender Reveal Artist Grant for Trans/POC artists committed to expanding gender diversity. She participates in the pARTner project, a correspondence-based art mentorship program supported by Justice Arts Coalition, through which she was paired with the beautiful and inspiring mentor Rowan Renee.
She is of Native ancestral descent; her mother and grandmother were both beautiful women of the Blackfoot Confederation. Accordingly, as a Tranzfemale, she is to be respected and revered within Native cultures as having extraordinary spiritual insight and wisdom, as do all two-spirited LGBTQ+ Natives.
She is held as a Prisoner of War currently sentenced to LIFE in an all-male facility in Texas, just as her ancestors were held prisoner upon reservations after they were forced off their sacred homeland. She envisions universal harmony among humanity where Different is Not a Dirty Word. For everyone reading this, if you are different you are not dirty. You always have been and always will be Uniquely Beautiful.
Other Broadsides in the Series
Claudia Cortínez + Scott Munro–>
Adama Delphine Fawundu + Bro. Truth–>