The Queer Altars Project by Stephanie Mercedes

October 2023 - September 2024

The Nicholson Project, with support from a Community Grant from the Mayor's Office of LGBTQ Affairs, presents The Queer Altars Project by The Nicholson Project’s Fall 2023 Artist-in-Residence, Stephanie Mercedes. Mercedes’ art practice involves taking weapons from DC streets, melting these decommissioned guns and bullet casings, and transforming them into sculptures and musical instruments. Her goal is to transform the materiality of violence into art, turning a negative into a positive and envisioning the world we want to live in.

The Queer Altars Project seeks to create meaningful spaces of remembrance, healing, and agency for the DC LGBTQIA+ community in response to gun violence and its reverberating impact. Mercedes will create a large altar which will then be on public display this summer, as well as create smaller altars dedicated and gifted to families who lost LGBTQIA+ family members to gun violence. These smaller wall reliefs will be portraits of their loved ones and will be cast in bullet or gun-melting ceremonies. In our city, there are few rituals that make space for mourning loved ones lost to gun violence, especially for the LGBTQIA+ community. Gun violence is deeply traumatic and related to systematic violence beyond individual control. In these ceremonies, participants will be invited to drop a bullet casing or gun parts into the furnace, witnessing the object of violence transform into molten liquid and then recast into a new form of art. This moment aims to be an act of agency for the participants, symbolizing their ability to transform violence into art.

The Queer Altars Project is supported by Mayor Bowser and the Mayor's Office of LGBTQ Affairs Community Grant.

THE QUEER ALTARS PROJECT AIMS TO CREATE SAFE SPACES FOR THE LGBTQIA+ COMMUNITY IN WASHINGTON, DC.

MORE About the process

The Queer Altars Project began with an open studio workshop and gathering hosted at The Nicholson Project, where Mercedes invited members of the LGBTQIA+ community to participate by being photographed and sharing reflections on what a "Queer Altar" meant to them. The workshop provided historical books referencing ideas of reliefs and altars, as well as information on queer saints. Attendees had the option to either recreate poses from existing historical altars or present themselves in a manner that felt like a queer altar to them. This process allowed community members to have agency over their representation and depiction. Participants expressed feelings of visibility and liberation, and fostering a sense of connection within the queer community.

Mercedes will use these photographs to create 3D relief renderings to create molds for metal reliefs, which are then integrated into her final design for a large Queer Altar which will be on display this summer. This altar, crafted from melted weapons, symbolizing solidarity rather than focusing solely on lives lost to gun violence.

About stephanie mercedes

Mercedes is a uncategorized Queer Latinx artist who choreographs large scale performances and installations based in sound. Mercedes transforms weapons into musical installations and works of art. She also excavates missing violent histories. Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art. She has been funded by George Soro's Open Society Foundation, Light Works, NALAC, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, Washington Project for the Arts, The DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, the GLB Memorial Foundation, the Warhol Foundation, and the Clarvit Fellowship. Mercedes has been an artist-in-residence at: VisArts, Halcyon Art Labs, the Bronx Museum, Montgomery College, Christopher Newport University, SOMA, Lugar a Dudas, Largo das Artes and La Ira de Dios. Mercedes is producing an Opera with CulturalDC in 2022-23.