Gallery Director + Curator
Serving as Gallery Director at the University of South Carolina - Upstate from 2021-2023, Lex Lancaster established the USC Upstate Art Gallery at the Chapman Cultural Center in downtown Spartanburg, SC. Lancaster envisioned this gallery as a space to connect the academic and creative missions of their university to the broader regional community through the presentation, interpretation, and discussion of contemporary art. The gallery presents exhibitions and programming that highlights the artistic innovations and cultural contributions of diverse artists working in the Upstate region, the broader Southeast, and beyond. The gallery also provides hands-on learning opportunities for students through internships and artist-led workshops. Lancaster is dedicated to highlighting the work of emerging artists from historically oppressed and underrepresented communities in the South and Appalachia, generating conversations about how art shapes our culture, promotes social justice, facilitates transcultural conversations, and helps us to view the world from multiple perspectives.
Lancaster planned the 2023-24 exhibitions for the Upstate Gallery before leaving the university - view that exhibition plan here.
Exhibitions 2022-2023
Jessica Scott-Felder: What’s Left Undone
March 16-April 29, 2023
Co-sponsored by the Center for African American Studies
Jessica Scott-Felder uses drawing, installation, and performance to create social-psychological spaces that facilitate exploration of ancestral narratives and folklore, history and memory, and Afrofuturism. “What’s Left Undone” is a performative exercise in sharing Scott-Felder’s creative process of large-scale drawings. Using personal and site-specific Spartanburg narratives and histories as a point of departure, Scott-Felder's drawing references the nature of knowledge unfolding and evolving over time. A nod to the dedication and contributions of African Americans in the City of Spartanburg, the artist continues to develop the work until the close of the exhibition, with openness to audience participation.
Valerie Zimany: Stand long enough among the flowers
January 19 - February 24, 2023
Valerie Zimany’s work blends Asian and European botanical patterns of 18th and 19th century export wares, exploring the transculturation that produced intricate floral designs known as Hanazume from their origins in Japan’s commodity exchanges with Europe. Incorporating advances in digital technology in ceramics, Zimany utilizes both virtual sculpting software and hand-crafting techniques to render densely ornamented surfaces that speak to cultural mixture, conjuring temporal as well as technological incongruencies.
Mo Kessler: Exercises in Dependency
November 3, 2022 - January 6, 2023
Co-sponsored by the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
Mo Kessler is a queer multimedia object maker, installation artist, and community organizer from Kentucky. Using the contradictions inherent in the concept of cheap, Mo investigates how worth is generated under neo-liberal capitalism. Their work relies on repetitive labor and materials that both spark recognition and are accessible. Fascinated by the defiance of “tacky” and the amount of sincerity it can hold, Mo's work reflects the resilience embedded in the craft that is born of necessity. Under the politics of extraction and disposability, to mark value through attention, care and abundance is a small rebellion.
Yehimi Cambrón: Now We Thrive - Venimos a Triunfar
Co-curated with Kim E. Powell
September 1 - October 21st
Co-sponsored by South Carolina Centro Latino
Yehimi Cambrón is a DACAmented artist and activist based in Atlanta and born in San Antonio Villalongín, Michoacán, México. Cambrón’s artwork participates in immigrant rights activism by both celebrating the humanity and dignity of Undocumented Americans, and reflecting on their experiences wrought by injustice and the inhumane treatment of immigrants in the United States. The work in this exhibition was created from a place of vulnerability while processing struggles that are both personal and political. Refusing any singular narrative of what it means to be an immigrant, Cambrón’s work creates space for complexity, multiplicity, and healing as a form of resistance.
Our House
A curatorial project in two iterations
Madison, WI, 2012-2013
Our House! Portraiture and the Queering of Home
“Whose House? Our House!” This was a rallying cry at the Wisconsin Capital during protests of Scott Walker’s efforts to strip union rights in our state during the winter of 2011. We took over the capital building—a place which is not defined as a domestic space—and treated it as a house where we ate, slept, and sang together, building our family through a common cause. This affective experience of belonging in a public space, of being “at home” in a place that was never meant to house us, points to both a comforting affiliation with a place and a group, as well as a discomfiting displacement. While we built our home at the Capital, we did not quite belong.
This exhibition’s queer re-iteration and exclamation of “Our House!” explores portraiture both as a crucial mode of minoritarian self-representation and as active maker of meaning and space, specifically the domestic spaces we call home. These portraits, hanging (out) together within an intimate space that is both public and reminiscent of a private house, operate as ways of taking and claiming space, of making bodies present, and of occupying the space with and for these bodies. At the same time, they point to the ways in which queerness opens up spaces and places for the intimate connections that exceed normative logics of family and home.
Our House!! Unsettling the Domestic, Queering the Spaces of Home
Once again reiterating the imperative exclamation of “Our House!”—a rallying cry at the Wisconsin Capital during protests against Walker’s efforts to strip worker’s rights—this ongoing curatorial project reimagines domestic spaces of home as potential sites of both estrangement and belonging. A second iteration of the first exhibition of portraiture at Evolution Arts Collective on November 2, 2012, “Our House!!” continues to generate the space of home rendered alternatively as a playground for forging new, creatively and affectively bonded domestic arrangements.
Taking up queer concepts of space as a site of critical inquiry, this iteration of the project asks how the domestic might be unsettled and queered through spatial occupation by bodies and objects that radically displace and transform the master’s tools and the master’s house. How can we inhabit the intimate spaces of home, unsettled and re-imagined in order to create something like safe space? How might private intimacies and public experiences exist at once through the queering of home? What might these alternative domesticities and safe spaces look and feel like?
Image: Anna Campbell, Your House, plastic canvas, acrylic yarn, TV tray, 2011-2013