Hung Out to Dry: Troy Montes-Michie

Through assemblage and juxtaposition, Troy Montes-Michie (b. 1985) engages black consciousness, Latinx experience, immigration, and queerness. Utilizing textiles, garments and archival paper, from newsprint to pornography, Montes-Michie subverts dominant narratives by placing past and present in confrontation. Referencing a rule of camouflage known as “disruptive patterning” which works by breaking up the outlines of an object with a strongly contrasting pattern, he investigates the ways in which bodies of marginalized communities are frequently erased and fetishized. His work has recently been exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art (Richmond), The MAC (Belfast), and many other institutions. Montes-Michie is a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University.

Writer and curator Andrea Andersson serves as Founding Director and Chief Curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, a non-profit institute for research, publishing, and exhibitions, committing to art informed by diasporic experience. She has organized exhibitions with artists including Troy Montes-Michie, Yto Barrada, Sanford Biggers, Cecilia Vicuña, Zarouhie Abdalian, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, and Adam Pendleton, among others; she co-edits a series of artists’ books with Siglio Press including Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible, Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension and most recently, Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye. She also recently co-edited Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (Yale UP).

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She received her BA in Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is currently working on her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University. Her writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Cultured and Hyperallergic.