Through their masterful landscapes were a refreshing respite from the coastal grasslands on the Cape and Nantucket, with particular histories of settlement and privilege, Rowan Raskin, ‘24 Greater Boston Art and Business Council Walter Feldman Fellow and recent Rhode Island School of Design grad, brings the Southwest to New England.

Having grown up in the unceded Maricopa lands, colonially referred to as Arizona, Raskin experienced the deep reddish caverns, orange-tinted blue skies, desert sand, carnage of animals from that biome by the side of the road and an environment that suppressed them as they transitioned, yet simultaneously held space for them in gay rodeo, ecological kinships formed with roadkill and the many queer-codings of American Westerns.

When I juried the Greater Boston Art and Business Council fellowship, I wrote, “Raskin reflects the interplanetary bond of queer kinship told in the setting of the Southwest — rodeos, roadkill, and dessert bones. They even endow the edge of each painting with fringe, sequins, or an object leaping off the canvas.” Therefore, they connect a distinctive regionalist style with a larger human story of change and belonging.