Love Letters

Love Letters

Rowan Renee (Art & Design)

Collaborators: Julie Herrada, Chief Curator of the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection; Professor Ruth Behar, School of Literature, Science and the Arts, Anthropology Department, Areas of Specialty: Ethnographic Memoir, Feminist Ethnography, Diaspora/Displacement, Visual Anthropology; Professor David Halperin, School of Literature, Science and the Arts, English Department, Areas of Specialty: History of Sexuality, Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies; Professor Endi Poskovic, Stamps School of Art and Design, Art Department, Areas of Specialty: Printmaking, East European and Eurasian Studies; Nicholas Dowgwillo, Stamps School of Art and Design, Printmedia Coordinator

“Love Letters” is an exhibition of text-based art works that explore intersections of gender, sexuality and misogyny in three archives of correspondence with incarcerated individuals: Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Russell Smith (a prison reform activist against the sexual assault of gay inmates), and my father’s letters to me. Through the triangulation of these writings, I will illuminate new ways of understanding the complex interrelationships between gendered power dynamics and gender-based violence within the patriarchal legal system.