Wild Waysides: Queer Ecology and the New Natural

February 6 - March 1, 2026
Curated by Kristy Boyce

RIT City Art Space
30 Adventure Place
Downtown Rochester, NY

Wild Waysides: Queer Ecology and the New Natural is a multidisciplinary exhibition exploring how queer thinking reshapes our understanding of nature and belonging. Originally curated by Pearl Van Geest and James Fowler, the project has toured across Canada, presenting works that challenge conventional ideas of landscape, identity, and the natural world.

For its next presentation — curated by Kristy Boyce — Wild Waysides comes to the RIT City Art Space, where selections from the original exhibition will be shown alongside new contributions from artists in the LGBTQIA+ community. The aim is to create a conversation between existing works and those responding directly to this context — to think about how queer relationships to land, place, and more-than-human worlds can be expressed in new ways.

Queer ecology offers a lens through which to question the binaries that shape dominant narratives: nature and culture, human and animal, native and invasive, self and other. It calls for more complex and interconnected understandings of how we exist within our environments — ones that value interdependence, care, and reciprocity. We are interested in works that take up these ideas materially, conceptually, or sensorially, that unsettle inherited ideas of land, examine the colonial construction of nature, or create space for alternative relationships to place.

What does it mean to be natural—and who is permitted to inhabit the landscape as if they belong? The language of nature has long been used to enforce hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and species — shaping not only which human bodies are seen as belonging, but also which forms of nonhuman life are valued, controlled, or erased. Wild Waysides asks how queerness might unsettle these narratives — blurring the boundaries between human and nonhuman, self and environment, and proposing new ways of living in relation to the world around us.

CALL FOR ENTRIES
Deadline December 1, 2025

Open to 2SLGBTQIA+ artists, makers, and researchers based in New York State, the wider region, and Canada.

Artists at all stages of their careers are encouraged to apply. Submissions from Indigenous 2SLGBTQIA+ artists, artists of color, trans and non-binary artists are especially welcomed and encouraged. Collaborative, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged projects are also invited.