Drawing from the aesthetics of queer domesticity and the idiosyncrasies of personal identity, this art exhibition welcomes viewers to inhabit small intimate moments from the Small Format team’s home collections and creations. Welcoming you “Home” not simply as a physical shelter, but as a dynamic archive of desire, resistance, and self-making. Each artist’s work becomes a room of its own—curated with care, cluttered with memory, and charged with the politics of visibility.

As the writer and theorist Audre Lorde once said: “Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever, only, nothing is eternal.” In queer life, home is often ephemeral—built in moments of connection, within chosen families, or in the comfort of objects that speak to survival and selfhood. This sense of impermanence makes the act of collecting—memories, artifacts, aesthetics—a powerful method of grounding and affirming one's place in the world.

The notion of the personal collection—be it objects, images, or stories—serves as both metaphor and method. In queer life, to collect is often to reclaim: to gather fragments of histories omitted or erased, and to piece together one’s narrative from the margins. This exhibition centers that practice, celebrating the small, the nostalgic, and the defiant as central to queer expressions of home.

This showcase was curated to ask: What does it look like to belong? How do our personal collections become shelters of identity, archives of joy, or acts of quiet rebellion? And how can the sharing of personal collections expand our understanding of queerness, art, and home?

• Curated by Tameka Eastman-Coburn with works by Agonza, Jennifer Jean Okimura, Lindsey Langenburg, Sylvie Crandall, Elijah Ace Kauffman, Kristin Reeder and more