Amy Cousins
Amy Cousins
website: www.amycousins.com
Instagram: @amyvcousins
Bio: Amy Cousins is an artist and educator from Houston, Texas living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Tyler School of Art & Architecture. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, the Visual Arts Center at Boise State University, and the Lawrence Arts Center in Kansas. Cousins was an artist-in-residence at Illinois State University in 2018 and at ACRE Residency in 2019. She is a 2021 recipient of InLiquid’s Wind Fellowship.
Statement: I work across media including printmaking, fabric, and sculpture to investigate queerness and its relationship to history, futurity, and desire. I look to archives and material culture to locate revolutionary potential within tightly policed narratives and objects. My research involves digging through radical queer archives, a poorly documented history remembered largely through ephemera, which in its sparseness raises unanswered questions and proposes new possibilities. I am especially inspired by histories of activism, in the decidedly queer ingenuity and playfulness historically wielded to combat oppression. I am interested in my own relationship to this past, in our contemporary desire to rescue figures from the realities of their time and their subsequent erasure in ours.