Gallery Q
About Gallery Q
Gallery Q provides an opportunity for community members to experience art and for artists to bring their work to the community. At Gallery Q all of the art and the artists are supportive of LGBTQ+ identities. Gallery Q hosts exhibits of different styles and mediums, including photography, painting, sculpture as well as traditional artisan crafts. No artistic medium is overlooked. Many times, the items in the show will be available for purchase with a percentage of all sales supporting the LGBTQ+ Resource Center and Gallery Q.
First Friday's
First Friday is a monthly citywide gallery night that encourages collaboration between non-profit, university, and commercial art venues in Rochester, NY. This initiative showcases area artists and arts institutions by promoting the First Friday evening of each month from 6-9pm as a community night for experiencing art. First Friday ensures a healthy art scene and a healthy city through regular exchange and discussion between venues, artists and patrons.
Current & Upcoming Exhibitions
On View
All Opening Night receptions are held on the First Friday of the month.
Exhibition Submissions
If you’re an artist interested in submitting your work for consideration, download the file below.
All artists working in any medium are invited to submit work for consideration. The gallery committee reviews submissions every several months. You will receive a response within a few months of submitting.Gallery Location
Located at the Out Alliance Center
100 College Avenue #100
Rochester, NY 14607
Past Exhibits
2017 Shows
17 Emerging: An Exhibition Highlighting Student Artists (January 6 to 27)
Ceramics, Drawings, Glass, Photography, Sculpture
Various artists
Opening Reception: January 6, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm, Closing Reception: January 27, 2017 from 6pm to 8pm
ImageOut and Gallery Q teamed up to present 17 Emerging, an exhibition highlighting seventeen student artists.
[The featured image is by Emily Patten and is titled, James.]Rochester is home to several quality university art programs. The artists represented in this juried exhibition range from college freshman to students pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts. The works include sculpture, ceramics, photography, drawings, and glass. “Our students are making wonderful art work. We are excited to work with these members of our community and showcase their talent,” said Alice Carver-Kubik the ImageOut Art Committee Co-Chair and Gallery Q Coordinator.
ImageOut presents LGBT arts and cultural experiences showcasing films, other creative works and artists to promote awareness, foster dialogue and build community. Gallery Q provides an opportunity for community members to experience art and for artists to bring their work to the community.
Margot Fass: Things Which Are Not Seen (February 3 to 24)
Mixed media
Opening Reception: February 3, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Featuring an Artist’s Talk at 7pm
This exhibition showcases Fass’ vibrant and enigmatic mixed media and collage work.
Combining painting, photographs, paper, and fabric, Fass depicts that which is ancient, threatened and needs to be protected. Her subject matter includes the five-thousand-year-old Hebrew alphabet and the ancient Grand Canyon. She also explores the holiness of ordinary lives through deeply personal and intimate portraits. The impermanence of some of her materials mirrors the fragility of her subject matter including both natural wonders as well as our own lives.
Fass has been working with mixed media since 2006. She says, “it seems that the most compassionate, loving, and humble thing to do in the face of finite lives is to love, play and preserve. Through overcoming the obstacles to doing these things, I hope to strengthen my faith and commitment to my family, community and world.”
Politits: Art Coalition, We The Tits (March 3 to 31)
Mixed media
Various artists
Opening Reception: March 3, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Gallery Q Presents Politits: Art Coalition, We the Tits
Politits: Art Coalition (PAC) is a small band of women making provocative performative and visual art working together to take over different spaces around the city of Rochester; showing their work as a group.
The PAC, whose mission is to encourage the exhibition of strong local female artists, has made work specifically for Gallery Q. The PAC is meant to offer each member (and aspiring makers) support as well as a place to go for discussion and help. The main drive in starting this coalition was to bring strong female artists of Rochester together, “so that we may make together, talk to each other, and encourage each other to succeed in our pursuit of a career in the arts” stated the PAC.
The Dichotomy of Juxtaposition (April 7 to 28)
Photography by Cory Fitzgerald and Dan Larkin
In partnership with ImageOut
TransAmericans (May 5 to 26)
Photography by Errol Daniels
Opening Reception: April 7, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
ImageOut and Gallery Q present, The Dichotomy of Juxtaposition, photographs by Cory Fitzgerald and Dan Larkin.
This exhibition brings together the landscape work of two photographers that is visually complimentary to one another yet poses a stark juxtaposition conceptually. In Fitzgerald’s series Swarm Trail, he explores what he calls, “the tidal zone of civilization.” He shows the edges to which industry and housing sprawls, and where it also fails and recedes. Fitzgerald says of his work, “it is a space of constant flux, anticipation and devastation, and often unclear whether something is coming or is already gone. It is in traces and trails that our imagination, memory, and conjecture formulate and infer existence, and this imaginative impulse is one of humankind’s most beautiful and generative qualities, as well as one of its most terrifying and destructive. This body of work is a collection of images in visual conversation around creation, belief, primal human desire, and destruction, and its relationship to photography.”
In contrast Larkin’s series, Old Cape Cod, explores the beauty of that location. Larkin says, “I’ve never encountered another locale with a quality of light quite like outer Cape Cod. Stuck out there in the ocean, the peninsula is luminescent. Sunlight radiates from the sky, reflects off the water, and bounces around off the sand revealing everything with an incredible clarity. My interest lies in showing more than how it looks. That, to me, is the difference between taking a picture and making a photograph. I place trust in an ability to suggest how it might have felt.”
TransAmericans (May 5 to 26)
Photography by Errol Daniels
Opening Reception: May 5, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
As a social documentary photographer, Daniels focuses his camera on complex subjects, often covering individuals who are challenged by physical, social, mental, or political disadvantages. In his series, TransAmericans, he creates honest and intimate portraits of transgender individuals during various stages of transition, which are shown along with interviews with the sitters. His hope is to pull the audience into the lives of his sitters–not just to learn about their distinctive experiences, but to also see the human similarities that transcend boundaries.
Daniels states, “For transgender individuals, the time before, during and after physical transformation comes with many challenges. Even after they have made their transition and discovered more comfort in their self- expression and identity, transgender individuals still experience alarmingly high rates of violence, assault, abuse, and discrimination.” Citing the U.S. Office for Victims of Crime statistic that an estimated 50% of transgender individuals are sexually abused or assaulted at some point in their lives, Daniels says, “my goal is to chisel through these statistics and show the humanity behind them.”
Daniels is an accomplished photographer having studied with Amy Arbus and John Goodman. He has exhibited in Spartanburg SC, Colorado Springs CO, Washington DC, Havana Cuba, Buffalo NY, and Athens Greece. His photographs are in the collection of the George Eastman Museum, The Spartanburg County Museum of Art in South Carolina, The Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo NY, as well as in private collections.
So-Called Ladies (June 2 to July 27)
Mixed media
Artists: Beth Bloom and Saundra Ehman
Opening Reception: June 2, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
So Called Ladies includes work by two of Rochester’s creative talents and active members of the Alliance’s Sage program. Each artist uses vibrant color and mixed media to create work that is whimsical as well as introspective.
Beth Bloom’s series, Cowgirls, Vamps and Other So Called Ladies, includes an array of embellished and bedazzled found photographs and found sculptural objects. Bloom’s work combines the traditionally “feminine” domestic chore of sewing with found photographs and sculptures of women to create work that embodies the feminine mystique, exploring their beauty, power, confidence, attraction and majesty. Bloom says, “In a world that is fast paced and stressful, my work is an oasis – whimsical and colorful. In a politically charged atmosphere of polarization and negativity, I gravitate towards all that is beautiful: women, immigrants, religion, gender and sexual diversity, the differences that make us real.”
Saundra Ehman explores her own aging female figure with humor in her larger-than-life soft sculptures. The forms turn the notion of the ideal feminine form on its head by glorifying and beautifying the real feminine form. Her sculptural pieces are complemented by her vibrant pen and ink drawings and weavings. She is prolific in creating meditative drawings that are filled with detail and bright colors. Ehman states, “I get inspiration from people, places, things, situations, conversations…actually anything can get me to take pen or pencil to hand.”
Otherdoms (September 1 to 29)
Mixed media
Artists: Lee Moyer and Liz Pritchard
Curated by Lauren Alberque
Opening Reception: September 1, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Otherdoms takes a unique look at comic-based artists creating work in their own fantastical universes. Organized by guest curator, Lauren Alberque.
Science fiction, fantasy, and animation have always been vessels to expand our terrestrial and metaphysical horizons. While they tap into the fringes of human imagination, there are still limits to the reach and diversity of mainstream comics and sci-fi. Otherdoms presents the work of artists who fill the gaps in the assumed inclusiveness of alternative fiction. Taking the form of fan art and original characters, the works of Lee Moyer and Liz Pritchard take the realm to its brinks and back, offering an authentic reflection of fans and enthusiasts. Where the boundaries of the fantasy kingdoms end, “Otherdoms” begin.
Like Me (October 2 to 26)
Portraits by Cristiano F. Lopes
Opening Reception: October 6, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Cristiano F. Lopes is a Brazilian visual artist living in Buffalo, NY and Sao Paolo, Brazil. As a multicultural artist he is interested in the ways in which the internet breaks down cultural and political borders and barriers particularly through the use of self portraiture, or “selfies,” as a form of communication. “Like the internet, my work has no nationalities and is in constant revolution leading to different connections,” states Lopes. While much of his work deals with gender and sexuality through appropriated imagery, his portraits aim to represent the human condition. Lopes says, “I’m a visual artist interested in people, the complexity of human existence is reflected on the multi-layered aspect of my work.” In his series Like Me he appropriates internet selfies of icons of queer culture, such as drag performers and porn stars. He translates the digital image into a painted portrait transforming something fleeting and ephemeral into something tangible and lasting drawing new connections between viewer and sitter.
Douglas Sergeant Jr.: “…the ‘stuff’ we don’t talk about.”
Opening Reception: November 3, 2017 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Douglas Sergeant Jr. is a local artist and veteran. Describing his work as sometimes controversial, Sergeant says he does not work in any one specific style and loves all schools of art. Most often his work starts with a creative “itch” and once color is applied to paper or canvas the work creates itself. He says he likes to put in his art “the ‘stuff’ we don’t talk about.” When pressed, he describes his work as “surreal realism”.
Sergeant says his work deals with emotions and past experiences. He works in no specific color pallet and uses the colors that “feel right.” Most of his work is acrylic on canvas. Much of his work does have the feel of the surrealist artist, Salvador Dali.
During a challenging childhood Sergeant escaped as often and for as long as he could to his school art room. There he was encouraged by his mother, Debbie Sergeant, and his art teacher, Debbie Schmidt, who remains a great influence in his life. As a student he won his first prize as an artist with a collage showing the moon observing what humans are doing to the earth.
To escape what seemed an untenable situation he joined the U.S. Marine Corps to “see the world” and “become a man.” He was encouraged to do so by his mother, Debbie Sergeant, who is also a veteran as is his father. Sergeant was deployed to Afghanistan. It was in the Marines and Afghanistan that instances of a traumatic nature occurred that have caused Sargent’s PTSD.
Recently his work was shown at Kashong Creek in Geneva, NY. He is currently working on a piece entitled “Orphan of War”
Take The Long Way Home
ImageOut and Gallery Q are joining forces once again. Take the Long Way Home features recent work by Nancy Topolski and Allen C. Topolski. This show marks the first time these two artists, a married couple, have exhibited their work together.
Allen’s works from the “Things I Used to Need” series are attempts to relate imagery and representation to objects and function along a delicate line of comprehension – a line like the remaining one connecting us to what we have almost forgotten. The art that Nancy is exhibiting is resourced from the Visual Studies Workshop’s Soibelman Syndicate New Agency Archive as well as her own collection of materials pulled from old textbooks and vernacular photographs.
Both artists are interested in the ways materials dictate their production. They incorporate found materials and a variety of processes in the reconfiguration of objects and images. These works and their parts and pieces, these images and their sources and ghosts, all attest to the artists’ desires, taste, and place in the world – they are indicators of the personal and the cultural. Because many of their works impel tenuous associations with the familiar, they situate comfortably in a place best accessed through memory and notions of place.
Nancy studied Art at Bucknell University and Education at Saint John Fisher College. She has taught classes and workshops in the Rochester region for over 20 years focusing on collage, felting, cold-glass processes, bookmaking and many alternative practices. She has taught workshops at Suny Brockport University and University of Rochester, as well classes at The Memorial Art Gallery’s Creative Workshop, The Rochester Museum and Science Center and the JCC of Greater Rochester. She was an artist in resident at Rochester’s Makers Space and more recently at the Visual Studies Workshop.
Allen attended Bucknell University and Penn State University. He is Associate Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester. Topolski has exhibited his work at Hallwalls in Buffalo NY, San Jose Museum of Art, CA, Moreau Art Gallery, the Salina Art Center, Colgate University and Islip Art Museum on Long Island.
2016 Shows
Together/Apart (February 1 to March 15)
Photography, Quilts, Mixed media
Artists: Gretchen Arnold, Randall Cook, Meredith Davenport, Dan Larkin, Scott McCarney
Opening Reception: February 5, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Together/Apart is Gallery Q’s first exhibit and our first collaboration with ImageOut. The exhibit highlighted works by five artists: Gretchen Arnold, Randall Cook, Meredith Davenport, Dan Larkin, and Scott McCarney. Each artist addressed themes such as searching for companionship, loss, and being in and out of relationships. Whether friends, family or lovers, our relationships define who we are as individuals as much as our individuality defines the types of relationships we maintain.
From Ancient to Modern: Classic Greek Architecture in Black, White and Blue (April 1 to 29)
Photography by Steven Randell
Randell takes us to beautiful Greece with an exhibit entitled From Ancient to Modern: Classic Greek Architecture in Black, White and Blue.
The artist says, “These images show the interplay of infrared light and how it behaves beyond our normal perception. Infrared Illumination gives center stage to the white monuments and buildings of Athens and Mykonos normally seen against blue sky and blue-green ocean.
“All digital photos were taken with a modified Canon 40D SLR camera, making the sensor particularly sensitive to infrared light. Because this light has a different focusing point the lens has been permanently altered as well. These pictures were taken in Greece and the Island of Mykonos in November of 2015.
“Greece with its ancient and modern white toned monuments and architecture is perfectly suited for IR photography. Its cultural acceptance of homosexuality (although not represented in these photos) was one of many reasons I decided to embark on this journey.”
Nocturnal (May 2 to 27)
Photography by Joe Ziolkowski
Opening Reception: May 6, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Culled from vintage analog photographs, Nocturnal explores the human condition and vulnerability during the early political unrest of the AIDS crisis.
NOTE: This exhibit features nudity.
Enjoy award-winning photographer and educator Joe Ziolkowski’s Nocturnal, a retrospective spanning three decades, capitalizing on the ability of photography to record time, capture space. Culled from thousands of vintage black and white silver gelatin prints, the work focuses on images drawn from exhibitions including The Numbered, Silence, and Pressure.
From Silence emerges a soliloquy on communication. In looking at these photographs, we see our own history, or witness the history of others and consider the ever present emotional response to any given situation. “All judgement is loss, and at a decisive moment, we become vulnerable to all the elements.” When addressing difficult situations wearing blinders and traveling through time and space in silence, through metaphor and image, Ziolkowski asks “What makes an individual?” This question is explored through staged scenes, objects and opportunities
In The Numbered series, over 100 people were photographed in the ‘floating’ state created during the time people, gay and straight, waited for H.I.V. virus test results. At the beginning of the series, in 1988, Illinois mandated all couples to take an H.I.V. test before they could be issued a marriage license. Those tested were given a number to ensure anonymity. Many friends reported experiencing trauma as they awaited results. In ArtForum, James Yood states that Ziolkowski “managed to blur individuality emphasizing instead a kind of psychic abandon.” Yood notes that the photographs show humans “[a]bandoned to an extreme physical state and a personal and self-induced intoxication, these figures convey a heady sensuality that makes distinctions of race, age or even gender secondary.”
Pressure, captures the state of mind and body experienced when forces collide. In looking at the moment of pressure, for some there is pleasure, and others devastation. Ziolkowski says, “The deconstructive nature on the physical and emotional nature of each individual cannot be measured. But we do share a common factor of internalizing those events, and either allow decay, or build on the events to create a more positive attitude.”
Ziolkowski’s study and celebration of the human form details the magnificence, of which Yood says “the dictates of the body even when—especially when—its psyche is absent or confused.” The suspended bodies, arrested in mid-whirl “suggest an unexpected path toward a strange, personal freedom.”
Roadside Attractions (June 1 to 29)
Photography by Manuel Peña
Opening Reception: June 3, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
For several years, Manuel Peña has photographed the annual Out Alliance Ride for Pride, a 50 mile fundraising bicycle ride. In his exhibit, Roadside Attractions, he presents a collection of photographs that captures some of the fun and exciting moments shared by the riders both in and out of the saddle, as well as a series of black and white portraits that present the viewer with an intimate peek into the hearts and passions of some of the riders that drive this event.
Out ‘n Art (July 1 to August 17)
Mixed media
Benefit exhibition, various artists
Opening Reception: July 1, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
The Gay Alliance is bringing visual arts into Pride! Dozens of artists from our community and beyond have donated art work for a special Gallery Q exhibit, Out ‘n Art. All works of art are for sale and proceeds will support the work of the Gay Alliance, including youth and senior programs and the operation of the LGBTQ Resource Center including gallery exhibitions, the library and history archives, the education center and community meeting room. Join us and support our community, the Gay Alliance, and show your Pride!
diptych. two bodies of work. two galleries. (September 1 to October 30)
Photography by Nigel Maister
Photography collection, various artists
Opening Reception: September 2, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Artist and photography collector, Nigel Maister, brings diptych—a two-part exhibition—to Gallery Q, Lumiere Photo Gallery, and the passageway linking them. From his extensive collection of vernacular and fine-art photography, Maister has chosen images dating from 1850’s to the 1980’s that explore and challenge views of same-sex affection, idealized notions of the body, of beauty, and of intimacy.
Maister’s original photographic work forms the second part of the exhibition. Building on his love of snapshots, Maister’s series tight. word. lit. uses appropriated snapshots from the ‘80s and ‘90s to create diptychs where juxtaposed images evoke speculative conjunctions and implied narratives. Startling combinations of photographic artifacts placed in dialogue with each other invite the viewer to forge connections and create visual stories that are compelling, mysterious and durable.
Hunter Gatherer: Regional Artists from the Gerald Mead Collection (November 4 to 23)
Mixed media
Art collection, various artists
Opening Reception: November 4, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
Members of the LGBTQ community have a long and distinguished history of contributions to all disciplines of the creative arts. Their collective talents have been an integral part of the cultural life of society. This exhibition, which focuses on the visual arts, highlights and celebrates that legacy as evidenced by the achievements of artists of this region and reinforces the mission of the Gay Alliance – “a champion for LGBTQ life and culture.”
On view in Gallery Q is a survey exhibition consisting of over 35 artworks in all media by LGBTQ Western New York artists selected from the extensive art collection of Gerald Mead from Buffalo, NY. Historically, the artworks range from an early 20th century hand colored print by Annie Crawford, who exhibited her work in the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, to a drawing that Adam Weekley, an art professor at Villa Maria College in Buffalo, created in 2015.
Other artists in the exhibition include Edward Bisone, Lawrence Brose, Craig Centrie, Amy Greenan, Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, Mickey Harmon, Scott McCarney, Dana McKnight, Frank Moore, Tommy Nguyen, Clara Sipprell, Joe Radoccia, Paul Rybarczyk, Donald Siuta, Dana Tyrrell, Marcus Wise and Joe Ziolkowski among others.
Gerald Mead is an award winning artist, educator, arts writer, and independent curator who is a leading authority on Western New York art and serves on the boards of several arts organizations in Buffalo. Since 1987, he has assembled a collection of over 1,000 artworks by artists associated with this region by birth or residency. Thematic exhibitions from the Gerald Mead Collection have been presented at numerous college galleries and other public venues, most recently at SUNY Fredonia and the Springville Center for the Arts. He has also lent works from his collection for major exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Castellani Art Museum, University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo Arts Studio, CEPA and Hallwalls, and frequently lectures on art and collecting.
AIDS: Don’t Be Afraid. Be Aware. (December 1 to 31)
Poster art by various artists
Opening Reception: December 2, 2016 (First Friday) from 6pm to 9pm
In recognition of World AIDS Month, Gallery Q presents “AIDS: Don’t be Afraid. Be Aware” an exhibit of selected AIDS awareness posters from the University of Rochester’s River Campus Rare Books and Special Collections. Poster art has been one of the tools in the arsenal to promote AIDS awareness and education. The University’s archive of 8,000 AIDS education posters, in over 100 languages and 60 dialects, is considered one of the largest in the world.
The original collection was donated to the University by Dr. Edward C. Atwater, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, in 2007. Dr. Atwater is quoted as saying “My hope is to show the responses from various societies to a deadly disease.” “…the AIDS posters show how social, religious, civic, and public health agencies tailored their message to different groups.” Through the use of color, creativity, wit, and sass many AIDS awareness posters have become iconic works of art, including those of artist Keith Haring.
