Join us on Saturday, September 20 from 10-11AM for a conversation with 2025 Artist Fellow I.F. Gonzales (they/them) and Williams Institute HIV/AIDS Criminalization specialist Nathan Cisneros (he/him).
In this conversation, Gonzales will share about their Fellowship work (on view at Welcome Gallery now) and, with Cisneros, offer broader historical, political and social context around the proliferation of corporate and nationalist concepts of Pride. Gonzales and Cisneros will also highlight the importance of new, different, radical forms of organizing, activism, and community-building under our current crisis moment.
This is a hybrid in-person and virtual event. In-person attendees can join us at Welcome Gallery (114 3rd St. NE). The virtual event will be held on Zoom. Register here.
I.F Gonzales (they/them) is a nonbinary diasporic Filipinx (Kapampangan and Visayan) artist, academic, and archive-maker from the semi-rural exurbs of Southern Illinois. Their visual and written work explores themes of sexuality, gender, race, empire, body, and place through a critical engagement with the shared tropes, themes, and archetypes, and schemas that make up our shared cultural landscapes. Through a multidisciplinary practice including printmaking, collage, fabrication, illustration, poetry, and nonfiction writing, I.F. Gonzales takes the (sometimes literal) detritus of the present and transforms it into critical assemblages, visual reflections on the histories, forms of oppression, modes of resistance, and potential futures embodied in such objects. These works highlight the discarded, the underlooked, the suppressed, the oppressed, and the under-acknowledged, all to imagine alternative ways of being in the world, and the illuminatory potential for radically different futures.
Nathan Cisneros is the HIV Criminalization Project Director at the Williams Institute. He was previously in the political science program at UC Irvine, and before that worked as a case writer at Harvard Law School studying the legal profession. At the Williams Institute, Nathan is applying his training in quantitative social science to the impact of HIV criminalization laws on people living with HIV. His other research interests include comparative public policy and the regulation of labor and employment. He is an alumnus of the IIE-Fulbright program in Japan. Nathan received an M.S. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Japanese, Economics, and Political Science from UC Berkeley.