"Gay Gene (pink)" by Scott Wiggerman

 

Many of Scott Wiggerman's art endeavors include gay themes and/or male nudity. No nudity in "Gay Gene (pink)"; however, the bold pink figure, fashioned after the retablos of the Southwest but in vibrant pink ink, he sees as being imbued—even surrounded—with genes from birth onward that indicate his future as a gay man (although the figure is deliberately ambiguous as to gender). It's by accepting his predestined fate as queer that the figure finds the glory of his sexuality. He sees this silkscreen as a very in-your-face, political piece that celebrates the pink genes and pink triangles separating them.

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Scott Wiggerman, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, is primarily known as a poet, instructor, and editor, though he has been interested in art throughout his schooling and career. Since retiring and moving to Albuquerque from Austin ten years ago, where he was librarian at the Fine Arts Academy, he has experienced a renaissance in his love of art. Primarily a collage artist, he has expanded his media into acrylics, ink, charcoal, colored pencil, and prints. Locally, he has had work in shows at Tortuga Gallery, the New Mexico Art League, and the UNM Law Library, as well as a letterpress broadside in collaboration with Holland Hardie in a Remarque Gallery display at the Open Space Visitor Center. As someone who continues to work as both poet and artist, several times he has had his art featured in print: "Dwelling in Possibility," a cut-out paper portrait in We Talked with Each Other About Each Other: Works of Art Inspired by Poems of Emily Dickinson (2019); "Jardin," a two-sided mixed media drawing on parchment paper on the cover of David Meischen's Anyone's Son (2020), and abstract art on the covers of three other books of poetry, Gayle Lauradunn's The Geography of Absence (2002), Lyman Grant's ostraca (2023), and the Haiku Society of America's national anthology Fractured by Cattails (2023). Other artwork has appeared in such journals as ABQ inPrint, Cholla Needles, and Rattle. Various samples of Wiggerman's work can be found at https://scottwiggerman.myportfolio.com/.