Elle Pérez

Mae at Riis

Maker

Elle Pérez (American, b. 1989)

Title

Mae at Riis

Year

2020

Medium

Materials/Techniques

Techniques

Dimensions

Image: 76 x 50.6 cm (29 15/16 x 19 15/16 inches) (sight)

Credit / Object Number

Credit

Museum purchase: gift of the RISD Museum Board of Governors, Fine Arts Committee members, friends, and colleagues in honor of John W. Smith, Museum Director, 2011-2020

Object Number

2021.27

Type

Publications

  • Journal

Manual / Issue 16: Intimacy

RISD Museum’s Manual 16 Embraces Intimacy

Intimacy reveals something deeply human in us. We need each other on a practical level, which means having to trust strangers. It’s analogous to what I understand prayer requires and what writing poems requires: an openness to the unknown, coupled with trust, a belief that we won’t be hurt. It’s at once akin to and the same as devotion.
-Carl Phillips

The RISD Museum’s sixteenth issue of Manual touches on the bonds of intimacy and its many expressions. This issue complements the exhibition Any distance between us, co-curated by Stephen Truax and Dominic Molon, on view at the RISD Museum through March 13, 2022.

Exhibition History

Any distance between us
Jul 17, 2021 – Mar 13, 2022

Label copy

“In a way, my work has always been made collaboratively, and because of that, that’s why I don’t think of it as documentary. Because my work has such a raw, visceral relationship to emotional authenticity, people often would recommend that I would go into documentary, but I could never figure out the ethics of it.”

-Elle Pérez, 2019

This image presents the writer Aurora Mattia at New York’s Riis Park beach-a popular site for the LGBTQ+ community. Pérez is celebrated for creating honest and affectingly intimate portraits of friends and gender-non-conforming individuals. Text by Mattia, excerpted from The Fifth Wound, is presented in this exhibition.

Image use

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Tombstone

Elle Pérez (American, b. 1989)
Mae at Riis, 2020
Archival pigment print
Image: 76 x 50.6 cm (29 15/16 x 19 15/16 inches) (sight)
Museum purchase: gift of the RISD Museum Board of Governors, Fine Arts Committee members, friends, and colleagues in honor of John W. Smith, Museum Director, 2011-2020 2021.27

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