President Joe Biden’s National Endowment for the Arts pledged $10,000 to Oregon Arts Watch to produce “photo essays featuring gender nonconforming and transgender people.”
The purpose of the grant is to “support the creation and publication of a series of written and photo essays featuring gender nonconforming and transgender people.”
The funding is going to Oregon Arts Watch, which describes itself as a “leading arts journal, a key source for in-depth, informed arts coverage that organizations and patrons don’t find anywhere else.”
Their page also reads, “Oregon Arts Watch produces arts journalism that is fundamentally useful to the public interest. Our goal is to discover, report on and evaluate art that we think is most important to the public, and then to encourage discussion by the public of that art and the issues it raises.”
The displays are listed on Oregon Arts Watch under the title “Gender Deconstruction.” The page explains, “Hannah Krafcik explores the gender nonconforming and trans experience in a series of essays.”
“This series is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and Oregon Heritage,” it also added.
One article in the “gender deconstruction series” focused on the work of a man who goes by both Lawren and Lawrence Oliver iii, who was described as a “multidisciplinary artist.”
The article focuses on several different pieces of work from Lawren, including one simply called “Joe,” a disturbing mannequin of a man with limp limbs hanging off the side of a chair and his pants pulled down to show a pair of boxers.
Joe is described in the article as “a life-sized man made of paper and tape, dressed in a designer outfit with super saggy jeans. Joe struck me as an animate being trapped in an inanimate body, at once unsettling and familiar.”
An overview of Lawren’s works gives way to a bizarre discussion between him and the author of the article. It reads:
As we wrapped up our time together, Oliver showed me photographs from the iPad—a possum that looked like a cat, a tiny swaddled baby, a goose running with wings spread. While scrolling through the iPad’s camera roll, Oliver came upon some video stills from the Jerry Springer show of a trans woman coming out to her boyfriend. “I’d want to have a look like that,” Oliver said of the woman.
“Oliver asserts an identity as Lawrence and Lawren here, disrupting gendered categories used to control. They manifest dreams, memories, and magic—breathing life into matter as they see fit without the compulsion to explain why,” the article also reads.
Another article, titled “Gender Deconstruction: Transcending the Checkbox,” focuses on the “gender nonconforming and trans experience.” The article explains the series on gender deconstruction, with the author writing, “Even the term ‘nonbinary’ fails me, but I fall back on this in lieu of telling everyone I meet that “amoeba-like” is truly the ideal descriptor for my gender nonconformity.”
Both articles were written by Hannah Krafcik, who describes herself as “a Portland-based interdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer.”
Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com
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