Queer Sculpture
Course Description
“Outlaw sensibilities, self-made kinships, chosen lineages, utopic futurity, exilic commitment, and rage at institutions that police the borders of the normal—these are among the attitudes that make up ‘queer’ in its contemporary usage.”—David J. Getsy
This studio-based course investigates queer as both a mode of resistance and a method of art-making. Rooted in practices of defiance, queer sculpture challenges the norms of identity, form, and expression. It is not a call for inclusion within the dominant framework, but a refusal of the systems of exclusion, erasure, and compulsory sameness that define the so-called “normal.”
Students will explore how queer artists strategically subvert and reimagine conventional sculptural practices—transforming materials, shifting narratives, and disrupting audience expectations. We will examine queer aesthetics and politics through themes such as anti-assimilation, utopic futurity, failure, abstraction, camp, drag, the archive, and alternative kinship structures.
Classes will combine critical readings, group discussions, material experimentation, and studio production. Students will create original artworks in response to weekly prompts and participate in peer critiques. The course includes guest lectures and field trips to local LGBTQ archives, offering direct engagement with queer histories and living lineages.
As Jean Cocteau once wrote, “I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love of love and liberty.” This course embraces that spirit of creative refusal and joyful resistance.arlon Riggs, Every Ocean Hughes, Nayland Blake, and David Wojnarowicz, as well as theorists Sara Ahmed and José Esteban Muñoz.
Meet the Instructor: Terry Berlier
"This class combines my two favorite subjects: queerness and making sculpture. I am an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with the natural world, queerness, and ecologies. This results in sculptures that are kinetic and sound-based, and multi-media installations. I emphasize the essential roles played by history, cultural memories, and environmental conditions in the creation of our identities. Using humor, I provide tools for recovering and reanimating our faltering connections with self, queerness, nature, and society. Interweaving movement, sound, and interaction as a metaphor for both harmonious and dissonant interactions, I act as an archaeologist excavating material objects to challenge our understanding of progress and reveal how history is constructed within a cultural landscape."
Berlier has exhibited in solo and group shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia including the Marc Chagall National Museum in France, Museum of Old and New Art in Australia, Contemporary Art + Spirits in Osaka, Japan, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Creative Work Fund Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation, and the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in the Art in America, BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, is published in the book Seeing Gertrude Stein by Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer through University of California Press, and Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and The Artworks it Inspired by Francesca Wilmott. She received a MFA in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a BFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Berlier is a Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
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FEMGEN 150N