Lex Lancaster

A recording of the first in my speaker series on Trans Ecologies: Art, Theory, Praxis - a generous and much needed conversation between Ohan Breiding and Jill Casid - is available! Link in bio. Endless thanks to @ohanbreiding and @jillhcasid for the worlds and words they make possible 💚

So pleased to receive my copies of Camera Obscura with my essay on the work of @youngjoonkwak and @kiyanwilliams —Trans Abstractions, Decomposing Figurations— reprinted in this special issue on abstraction and the materialities of race, gender, and sexuality edited by Tess Takahashi. The essay originally appeared in the “trans perspectives” issue of Texte Zur Kunst, and constitutes part of my current book project.

My article out now in Art Journal! Laying the theoretical foundation for my book project on what I call Dysphoric Aesthetics, this essay reclaims dysphoria for trans ethics and aesthetics through embodied encounters with current trans art practices—here, the generative work of @p___staff and @ashtonsphillips , to whom I am very grateful. So pleased to put this into the world. ✨ Open Access link in bio ✨

Spring break getaway to Hudson with my love @bereil - Deb’s Oasis first and many delicious meals to follow, plus the biggest antique warehouse I’ve ever seen and a gorgeous river view at Olana (Frederick Church estate - this house is wild). Such cuteness. 10/10 recommend.

Join me for the first in a series of speaker events I’m organizing on Trans Ecologies at Cooper Union, with the most wonderful @ohanbreiding and @jillhcasid !! 🧊 March 26 from 4-6pm in Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Square 🧊 Registration Required (link in bio). Image: Ohan Breiding, Speculative Glacier Funeral (Belly of a Glacier), 2024 Ohan Breiding is a Swiss artist and filmmaker based in New York. Through photography, photographic and filmic archives, video and collaboration they employ a trans-feminist lens to the discussion of ecological care by amplifying landscapes as witness. Most recently, their work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, Arts and Letters, Hesse Flatow, Oceanside Museum (Getty PST), FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Kunsthaus Zürich, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Breiding is a 2025–2026 Sharpe-Walentas Artist in Residence and has previously held residencies at the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), Triangle Arts, TBA21–Academy Ocean Space, LMCC on Governors Island, the Millay Colony, and Shandaken: Storm King. Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Williams College and is represented by Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles. An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid is professor of visual studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ’23 in Graz.

Such a delight to take my Trans Aesthetics class to experience the genderqueer punk fever dream that is Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product . Radical reimaginings and whimsical interventions animate texts and sites we think we know, including the Oz book series, the tween bedroom, the celebrity portrait, the home with an almost dangerously slanted floor that disorients our bodies and gazes. This is what we call praxis, I tell my students, methods of living that also make that living possible… like living inside the prism vs looking through it. Catch it at PS1 before it closes.

After 17 years with my precious Roxy, it was time to say goodbye. Roxy was 3 years old when she came to me in Cleveland, just after college. She moved with me and Lily to grad school in Madison, then to jobs in Kentucky and South Carolina before we landed in NYC. She helped me survive early adulthood, always by my side (or on top of me) when I was sick or upset, and she kept Lily company and comforted her through so much. She was a fierce indoor hunter who took down a couple of bats and quite a few mice who dared enter our homes. She played fetch with tiny poof balls before drowning them in her water and then pretending to eat them along with her dry food. She stared into her water bowl like she could see the future—she probably could. She reminded me that the most important things in life are food, water, sleep, playing, healthy boundaries, and all the love that a tiny furry body could give and hold. I will always miss her cuddles and her tiny mews and her little paw on my arm asking for pets. And I’m so grateful and lucky to have had her for so long, and to have held her at the end.

I turned 40! It’s been a wild time of upheaval and change these past couple of years, and I’m most grateful for all my loved ones who have been sticking with me on this roller coaster. I intend to keep learning how to preserve and protect my time and energy for what really matters — my dear loves, most of all ✨ 💚 🪐 🪩 🌊 🪄

As generous a writer as they are a friend, @sklimnagem offers Mega Milk—a sexy and deeply imaginative blending of personal essays with experiential research on cows, dairy farms, lactation, transmasculinity, whiteness, muscles, ejaculation, hugs, and the squeeze of capitalism. I’m honored to be cited. Cheers, Milks!

My hometown has a lesbian bar!! This is a @broadslounge appreciation post. Delicious drinks, fabulous decor, cool merch, 10/10

It’s been a…semester. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving my first year students. It took me a long time to realize how much it matters to trans students to have me as a professor, but they keep reminding me with these small and precious gestures. I suppose we keep reminding each other that we can and will keep on living, together.

How to install a painting! Reveling in the visceral mess of it all with the iconic Ashley Hans Scheirl who so generously walked me through their exhibition *In and Out of Painting* @belvedere21wien — thinking about tensions between representation and abstraction, the pleasures of discomfort in the embodied space of looking, queer trans legacy, and how to play with what is given but never settled. I also got to see a screening of their 1998 film Dandy Dust! An honor I’ll never forget.