Circling Home: A Roundtable

Arete Xu
→BFA SC 2026

Home is as familiar as it is elusive. We intrinsically know “home” by the place of it, the feel of it, the weight of it. But defining it is something else entirely. Is it home if it’s temporary? Is it home if there’s no one there to call your name? For many of us, home is constantly plural. For the LGBTQIA+ community, home could look like a refuge or a perpetual rude awakening.

If you could choose, what would your home look like? This semester, a group of students co-curated Homecoming, an exhibition celebrating queer voices and experiences at the RISD Museum. The project emerged from Queer People/Places/Things, a course facilitated by the Museum and RISD alum Liz Collins (TX BFA 91, MFA 99), in dialogue with Motherlode, her mid-career retrospective opening this summer. The exhibition will transform the Skylight Gallery—a transitional space between the Contemporary (Metcalf) Gallery and the New Media Gallery—into a queer social space, showcasing artworks from a community-wide open call and the Museum’s permanent collection. Through a meticulous curatorial and installation process, the class is reimagining the room into a domestic space for the whole community.

The team—Callie Coccia (MFA PT 2026), Cindy Li (BFA ID 2026), Farnaz Dastranj (MDes INTAR 2025), Kati Lowe (MFA PT 2026), Mary Mitchell (MA GAC 2025), and Xiao Guo (BFA TX 2024, MA TLAD 2025)—shared extensive conversations about the multifaceted meanings of a queer home. In their open call, they evoke “homecoming as an invitation for a queer intergenerational gathering at RISD.” They affirm that “for many queer people, ‘home’ is not always a given, but something intentionally built—often in defiance of exclusion.”

Before the team got to a neatly packaged open call, they grappled with the outlines of this home they were scaffolding. As they set the stage for an intimate, collective homecoming moment, they had to negotiate what a queer home should feel like, who is family in this home, what a queer space even is, and what connects generations of queer community members. With each outline committed to the blueprint, the question of “What is Home?” comes up again and again, followed by a new forthcoming reply each time.

Home Is Somewhere You Return To

Constructing a space with the idea it will become home is one thing, but how do you nest in it? Perhaps by returning to that place, leaving breadcrumbs, wall scratches and pillow-prints in your wake. For Liz Collins, Homecoming is both a literal return to RISD and a symbolic return to the original source of her creativity.

LC Between ’86 and ’91, in undergrad, I was still conducting life as a straight person. As a kid I was definitely queer. But I didn’t have access to my own queerness in a way I wish I had. Then, between undergrad and grad school I had my first girlfriend. I think I just needed some kind of permission.

Although Collins admitted she mostly focused on work as an under-grad, she reflects that her queer identity was already coming through in her pieces. “My work is all about my emotions. manifestation of queer desire, and sublimation of desire.” Her experience was less a grand coming out, more a “coming home to yourself, into a space that feels comfortable [to you].” For this reason, Collins’s works gravitate towards the language of domestic interiors—patterns, tapestries, and wallpaper galore—as an expression of her identity and a means for claiming spaces that were not always hers to inhabit.

As a student, Collins went to Brown’s Sarah Doyle Center for resources to learn more about her sexuality because “RISD didn’t have anything [like it].” She made efforts to amend this lack during her time teaching in Textiles, where she served as the advisor to RISD’s queer affinity group. Now, coming back once more, Collins was adamant about giving students the creative agency to design a queer social space as part of her exhibition.

Home Is Something to Be Negotiated

We may all love to decorate our homes, but we all know the drudgery of moving in, the dread of unopened boxes in an empty apartment. Before Homecoming was set to open, the Skylight Gallery existed in much the same state: a blank, impersonal space waiting to be transformed. One of the main challenges the team faced was a distinctly undomestic elongated vertical space with two staircases and little floor space.

The team meeting with Museum staff members in the Skylight Gallery

Farnaz Dastranj (FD) The room is primarily a passageway. It initially felt neutral, almost invisible, reinforcing the idea of the space being functional rather than expressive. With the remaining walls, we are carefully planning the placement of artworks and furniture to keep circulation convenient. We also plan to hang larger pieces higher up on the walls [to optimize accessibility].

Mary Mitchell (MM) There’s a huge thing within the bureaucracy of Salon-style hanging. Hanging works from the permanent collection above open call works might not read well. And also most museums have conservation standards that present some challenges in the works we were able to include.

Cindy Li (CL)   So no works on paper, sculptures, or textiles, or anything sensitive to light, which really pushed us towards the direction of the open call.

These challenges were soon overshadowed by the excitement of furnishing the room with a “beautiful gay pink couch,” bean bags, carpet, and wallpaper, as well as by creating the “guest list” for the ‘housewarming’. The students wanted to create an “intergenerational dialogue for the queer community at RISD” during the open call process.

CL We reached out to RISD Dining, Residence Life, facilities staff, and museum guards. And we’re spreading posters out to local coffee shops to reach Providence-based alumni as well. We actually spent a lot of time discussing what the parameters of being RISD-affiliated really means. There’s a socio-economic association with being able to attend college, but RISD’s influence goes so far beyond people who can afford tuition. Unfortunately it just became too unwieldy to include every sort of affiliation. A queer space, a queer home, is the freedom to transform that initial “empty apartment”—the structures that confine us—into a party. Home will always have its private negotiations, but it all starts to make sense once you invite guests in and energy spills over—laughter echoing, bodies shifting to make space, the air thick with the unspoken promise: This is where we belong.

Home Is Safe and Subversive

The idea of making a “queer space” and a “home” is entangled, yet not one in the same. A “queer home” should be safe and subversive, intimate and loud. The tension between these opposing dynamics makes sense, but what does it feel like to hold both true at the same time? Xiao Guo reflects on how space-making relates to her pedagogy practice in TLAD.
XG I always think about the idea of safe space or brave space. That’s something that stuck with me from working with teens. A safe space can mean a place where they can talk about identity, politics, and everything they’re facing. For others, it can mean practicing quiet care. As for how to figure out what those needs are, I learned to be flexible and reciprocal.

Indirectly, Homecoming poses the question: Can you feel comfortable whilst taking on the risk of opposing the status quo? During the discussion about the team’s curatorial process, we landed on an integral part of their intent for the exhibition: How deliberately would this queer space resist the normative conditions of museums? To my surprise, the team was not fully convinced that this queer social space would actually “queer the museum.” They were in fact reluctant to use the term queering to describe the project.

Callie Coccia (CC) “Queering” is sort of a fraught theoretical term. At a certain point it does begin to feel mushy, which is okay. I know a lot of gay people who are not subversive. I don’t think being gay makes you subversive. I think you have to be subversive first, and being gay makes it better.

CL   I’m not a big believer in the idea of queering the space. To me, trying to build a community space out of this area in the Museum that is usually not used for socializing is already exciting. If that resonates with people, then great, we did it. But I wouldn’t call it queering the space. I feel like that’s throwing too much theory into something that is otherwise pretty straightforward in terms of mission and drive.

MM   At one point, a museum staff member asked us: “Are you guys going to follow the quote straight model of wall text, or are you going to queer it?” And I thought, that’s such an interesting use of that word.

XG   Throughout this project, I felt a disconnection between my queerness and the act of queering the museum space. I am queer identifying but somehow I feel weird about the act of identifying myself in the Museum and this show. I don’t have work directly about my queer identity. The fact that we landed on this solution of a homey domestic space is familiar within Textiles. Sometimes I don’t think there’s anything too queer about it because we’re already bringing these ideas into crit and studio.

The queer home is inherently subversive to heteronormative family dynamics. Yet within the home’s sanctity, a space of unconditional trust among kin, there should be no burden of explanation. In con-trast to the embodied feeling of home, “queering” has a degree of depersonalization; the language itself automatically puts you in a third-person point of view. Could it be that this generation is re-reclaiming the term, decoupling “queer” from “queering”? Home is a language and feeling almost universally understood. If we were to compare a “queer home” and a “straight home,” would it really look all that different? Would “queer space” have certain motifs? Would it ride that perfect line between cosy and unusual? The answer I got is “you’ll know it when you feel it.”

Open Call Poster by Cindy Li

Home Is Difficult

The RISD bubble, however isolating, permits a degree of safety for its queer community. RISD’s queerness in general is not “slap it on JP Morgan kind of way,” as my friend Henry put it. In other words, it’s not trying to be palatable. Given the density and openness of queer people here, could we not argue that anywhere is a queer space? The old-timey buildings are being taken over by the likes of Mango Street and BAAD’s annual ballroom event at the Old Library. There’s a lot of queer representation among leadership and staff. So why is it urgent to have this queer space?

CC The difference between queer community in the ’90s versus now, having not lived it, is that now people almost take it for granted, and there’s a more broad, social-media-influenced way of how queer people connect. Now we have a sprawling, less organized connection between queer people, and that can sometimes make it feel like there is no direction, or there is no specific space or community to go to.

XG Liz asked us once: What do you think about the queer community here? I wasn’t really sure what she meant when she said “the queer community” then. It was so natural to her that she didn’t really explain it to us. She also asked us to name queer clubs and student organizations. [...] Maybe there aren’t specific LGBTQ student organizations because queerness is so ubiquitous here. Maybe it was more queer than when she experienced it as a student.

The Homecoming exhibition traces an encouraging evolution in queer visibility at RISD—from lacking an LGBT student club due to the absence of representation to no longer needing one because queer culture is so thoroughly pervasive on campus. Yet this progress does not eliminate the need for intentional spaces like Homecoming. We have inherited a different form of urgency.The need now is to build collectivity across queer cultures, not only cultures here at RISD, but cultures back “home.”

XG Freshman year was the first time I got asked: What are your pronouns? At first I was thinking: Why do I have to elaborate on this? That was the beginning of my journey of learning about queerness and having the language for it. So much of what I have learned, albeit in this culturally elitist education, I agree with. At RISD, we are already at a stage of critiquing whether things are actually subversive or queering, when back home they aren't even established. Sometimes, I ask myself: Could this happen in China? Maybe? Or maybe things aren't established to be critiqued in the first place.

When I mentioned some peer perspectives about the queer com-munity feeling divided, Guo agreed RISD’s queer culture is stratified internally. What divides spaces now is not entirely gender or sexual orientation but different levels of wealth, privilege, as well as race, all intersecting in a delicate balance. And this is where the “chosen family” is complicated by what we can actually choose. While we celebrate the promise of relational freedom, the way we go about building these relations is not all that ‘queer’. The moments where we can voice our unspoken inhibitions are few and far between, which is ultimately why we need Homecoming—as a space potentially dedicated to full expression.

Home Is Chosen

One compelling perspective I’ve encountered offers that student activism forms the connective tissue between queer generations. There’s a shared understanding that queer culture doesn’t exist in isolation but rather cross-pollinates with other emancipatory movements.

CL RISD’s demographic has shifted a lot. There’s a letter in the RISD Archive from the 1970s, called We Demand, which calls to admit international students, students of color, and students of lower income. RISD students fought to make this happen. I have a general sense that what connects queer students intergenerationally is being against the establishment more so than like being queer. Given the recent precedence of the RSJP [RISD Students for Justice in Palestine] Carr Haus show [To Every Orange Tree, March 2025], which was also an open call student artworks exhibition, we wanted to make sure students would feel like they can trust us when we say, “we’re going to take care of your work,”

In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler calls for “the norms that govern legitimate and illegitimate modes of kin association [to] be ... radically redrawn.” I come from a religious background where community is both a tether and a negotiation. For me, home is bittersweet and messy—somewhere on the periphery, but implicated in decisions I’m not always able to extricate myself from, one reason out of many for falling behind. I started this roundtable to understand queer people/places/things and to find remedies for my conundrum and perhaps someday to defiantly make home on my own terms. In Homecoming, we are still circling our not-quite-here homes, but this time, we get to choose our desired renovations.

Home Is ______.
Homecoming opens on July 19, 2025, and will stay open until January 2026. Go for a visit, and let me know if it feels like home to you.

Arete Xu realized that home is always a thousand li away.