Outside Normativity - Queer Aesthetics in Art, Design + Fashion
Contemplate the intersections of queer identities in art, design, and fashion in this lively conversation with curator and author Gemma Rolls-Bentley, writer and publisher Michael Bullock (RISD BFA 1998, Industrial Design), designer and Chairperson of Fashion Design at Pratt Institute Lisa Z. Morgan, and moderated by Liz Collins. As the exhibit Liz Collins: Motherlode closes, celebrate the queering of social spaces and activating community connection through art. Participate in an intention setting ceremony following the discussion.
Free with museum admission. Registration required for this in-person program. Space is limited.
Registrants are invited to an optional exhibition walk through with Liz Collins (space limited) before the 3:00 pm conversation and a reception following. Details are in the registration confirmation email.
This program is free with admission to the RISD Museum. You can pay in advance or day-of when you arrive. Museum members and artists members, along with college & university member institutions’ students, faculty, and staff, always receive free admission. Check for your college here. Learn more about Museum membership options here.
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Gemma Rolls-Bentley has been at the forefront of contemporary art for two decades, working passionately to champion diversity in the field. Her debut book Queer Art; From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between is a Lambda Literary Award finalist and has been highlighted as a must-read by Them, Dazed, Timeout, The Guardian, Cultured and the FT. Her curatorial practice amplifies the work of female and queer artists and provides a platform for art that explores LGBTQIA+ identity. Gemma has curated for a range of international galleries and institutions. Current exhibitions include Sea State at Wolterton, Norfolk (on until Spring 2026) and She Sells Seashells at the Alice Austen House, NY (on until February 21, 2026). Gemma has taught at numerous institutions including the Royal College of Art, the Glasgow School of Art, and Goldsmiths, and was a juror for the 2025 John Moore’s Painting Prize. She sits on the Courtauld Association Committee and the Leslie Lohman Museum Acquisitions Committee.
Michael Bullock is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and documentary filmmaker focused on art, design and queer culture. He is the author of Roman Catholic Jacuzzi (Karma 2012) the editor of Peter Berlin: Artist, Icon, Photosexual (Damiani 2019), and co-editor of I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean Delear (Semiotext(e) 2023). Bullock serves as associate publisher of PIN–UP and The Whitney Review of New Writing and is a contributing editor to apartamento and BUTT.
For PIN–UP, he co-produced the six-episode MoMA documentary series Built Ecologies (2023) and co-directed Dream Homes, a commissioned work for the Cooper Hewitt’s Design Triennial, Making Home (2024-2025). His writing and interviews regularly appear in apartamento, BUTT, Fantastic Man, PIN–UP, Interview and The Whitney Review of New Writing. His work has also appeared in Aperture, Blau International, Flash Art, Frieze, and New York Magazine.
Lisa Z. Morgan’s work crosses disciplinary borders and shape shifts across a variety of media, ranging from knickers, to perfume, sewn paintings, mixed media installations, performances, short films and the written word. Melding critical ways of knowing with the haptic and embodied, she fosters dialogues around the intricacies of sense-making, desire and the desire impulse.
Morgan is the Co-Founder of STRUMPET & PINK. She writes, plots and schemes for The Laboratory Arts Collective, has been a contributor to SHOWstudio and is the author of Design Behind Desire. She is currently the Chairperson of Fashion Design at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.
As an artist Morgan sometimes uses the pseudonym The Pink Investigator, exhibiting and performing internationally. Her work, both individual and collaborative, has been featured in magazines and newspapers such as W, Elle, Vogue, LOVE, Tatler, Interview, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Wallpaper, The Telegraph, AnOther, Purple Magazine, S Magazine, The Huffington Post. Her work has been reviewed in eight books and is included in several private collections as well as the RISD Museum, Providence and Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Liz Collins graduated with a BFA (1991) and MFA (1999) from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She would later serve as a professor of textiles at RISD from 2003 to 2013. In 1999, Collins launched her own knitwear company, which over the course of five years came to be recognized for its innovative designs. Starting in 2003, she increasingly shifted her focus toward visual arts. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Touchstones Rochdale, England (2022) and Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York (2015–17), and been featured in a range of international exhibitions and within a broad range of galleries and institutions, including at the 60th Venice Biennale exhibition (2024) and in the Woven Histories exhibition presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2024), and Museum of Modern Art (2025). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the USA Fellowship, MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work is held in a range of public and private collections, including the RISD Museum, Museum of Arts & Design (New York, NY), Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil), Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York, NY), and FIT Museum (New York, NY), among others.