2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition

My work 20 Church Street responds to the way that queer communities form, and (in my experience) ultimately end. It responds to both the joy and the grief associated with a community constantly shifting and changing.

20 Church Street was a Victorian mansion in New Paltz where I lived alongside eight other trans/nonbinary people, mainly drag and burlesque performers, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of 2021, we were informed that the Mayor of New Paltz was going to buy the house, and we were all to be evicted by 2022.

20 Church Street is about the experience of living in this house, and losing it. The mansion was a place of transition—many of us were between homes, careers, stages of life, between communities. Most of us were able to start gender transitions while living in the house. The space allowed us the privacy, safety, and flexibility to change our minds. The work is a love letter to my community. I pose that if this experience happened once—as it has happened many times in the past for other people in different contexts—it can happen again.

Mauve Martineau (b. 1998, Canmore, Alberta, Canada) is an artist working in video, performance, soft sculpture, and textiles. Martineau graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts with a BFA in painting and is currently pursuing an MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design/The New School. Martineau has presented work at the Higashikawa International Photography Festival in Higashikawa, Japan; the Springboard Performance Festival in Calgary, Canada; and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center in New York, NY. They have had solo exhibitions at the Hub Gallery in Canmore, Alberta, and at the Marion Nicoll Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Martineau was the recipient of the AUArts Governor General’s Award in 2020 and the Canmore Mayor’s Spotlight on the Arts Emerging Artist Award in 2018.