CO-FOUNDER: Strange Fire Collective

The Strange Fire Collective (2015–2022) was co-founded by Rafael Soldi, Hamidah Glasgow, Jess T. Dugan, and Zora J Murff as a platform that critically questions the dominant social hierarchy, increasing the visibility of meaningful work and creating dialogue and community through its programs. Strange Fire's core activity consisted of publishing weekly original, in-depth interviews, having produced over 200 conversations with women, people of color, and queer and trans artists, writers, and curators over the course of 7 years. This archive serves as an expansive repository of content that better represents the diversity in the world around us and an effective teaching tool for educators and the community at large. During its run, Strange Fire also produced 10 exhibitions, 3 publications, and 9 community events and public forums. Additionally, the collective published thoughtful, in-depth, critical reviews of 38 books. More notably, in the last two years Strange Fire invested significant resources to create an archive of teaching tools aimed at assisting instructors in diversifying their curriculums and teaching practices. These teaching resources span issues of race, gender, disability, sexuality, and native perspectives, and are free and available to the public.

Soldi curated the exhibitions Momentous Gesture, Signal Boost, and Stacks: In this body of mine, and contributed various texts, including reflections about books by Sunil Gupta, Nona Faustine, and Alessandra Sanguinetti, among others.
EXHIBITIONS

Rafael Soldi's contributions to the collective included conversations with artists such as Bethany Collins, Tarrah Krajnak, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira, Cara Levine, Anthony Cudahy, Shikeith, Danny Giles, Seba Calfuqueo, Kyle Dunn, and Didier William; and curators/thinkers such as Elizabeth Ferrer (BRIC), Roxana Marcoci (MoMA), Joseph Pierce, Aldeide Delgado (WOPHA), and Ksenia Nouril (The Print Center).

EXHIBITION: Momentous Gesture



Curated by Rafael Soldi
Presented by Strange Fire
January 6–29, 2022
SOIL Gallery, Seattle
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Meghann Riepenhoff, Mary Ann Peters, Sebastián Calfuqueo, Dani Tirrell, and Serrah Russell
Momentous Gesture—curated by Rafael Soldi—presented a diverse group of artists from the Strange Fire archive whose work embraces predominantly gestural qualities while musing on critical intersectional socio-political issues—global conflict, environmental collapse, gender and racial oppression—reminding us that beauty can be found in a rigorous social conceptual framework. Spanning video, collage, painting, performance, and photochemistry, these artists weaponize gesture to bring focus to important questions about the world around us.

Meghann Riepenhoff addresses climate change by making work in collaboration with endangered bodies of water. Mary Ann Peters’ paintings respond to contemporary events in the Arab world as they relate to her identity as an Arab-American living in the U.S, often touching on topics like shelter and global migration. Serrah Russell’s gestural collages become a visceral dictionary for decoding the isolation caused by repeating smoke events caused by forest fires. dani tirrell is a queer, black, trans spectrum movement artist. The Bluest Feelings is an installation using movement, photography and words to address dani's views on how the femme centered body is gestured to be oppressed, harmed and controlled. Hailing from Chile, indigenous Mapuche non-binary artist Sebastián Calfuqueo’s work appeals to their cultural inheritance in order to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural and political status of the Mapuche subject in the contemporary Chilean society and Latin America.

This exhibition is made possible by a smART Ventures grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. 

EXHIBITION: In This Body of Mine

Strange Fire Collective at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design



October 18–December 7, 2019
Reception and Keynote Lecture by Strange Fire Collective: October 25, 2019
Frederick Layton Gallery at
Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
273 E. Erie Street | Milwaukee, WI 53202
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Nydia Blas, Andre Bradley, Ria Brodell, Widline Cadet, Kei Ito, Rachel Jessen, Tarrah Krajnak,  Natalie Krick, Birthe Piontek, Kalen Na’il Roach, Gabriel García Roman, Leonard Suryajaya, Paula Wilson, and American snapshots from the collection of Robert E. Jackson.
Since its inception in 2015, the Strange Fire Collective has centered on providing accessible and socially relevant content that engages with current social and political forces. Through weekly interviews, publications, book reviews, exhibitions, and public programs, Strange Fire champions women, people of color, and queer and trans artists, writers, and curators. Each week, Strange Fire releases an original in-depth interview, which collectively form a growing archive of over 200 conversations that critically question the dominant social hierarchy and tell the story of our time.

In this body of mine,  an exhibition at the Frederick Layton Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), featured 14 artists from the Strange Fire archive. The exhibition was organized in conjunction with the Society for Photographic Education’s Midwest Chapter Conference. As part of MIAD’s Creativity Series, the founding members of Strange Fire gave a keynote lecture on Friday, October 25, 2019, focusing on the core issues addressed through the work of the collective. They also engaged directly with students through class and studio visits as part of a short residency on the MIAD campus.

CO-CURATOR: The High Wall

Alice Gosti, Where is home 
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
D.K. Pan, C. Davida Ingram, Tracy Rector, Satpreet Kahlon, Klara Glasova, Che Sehyun, Dan Hawkins, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Tatiana Garmendia, Amir Sheikh, Julie Lee, Kei Ito, Brandon Tho Harris, Natasha Marin, Nadia Ahmed, Alice Gosti, and Gazelle Samizay & Labkhand Olfatmanesh, and Nathaniel White-Steele.
The High Wall is an outdoor video projection project at the Inscape Arts Building in Seattle, WA, curated by Britta Johnson (founder) and Rafael Soldi. Responding to the building’s complicated history as an immigration detention center, the High Wall invites artists who are immigrants or working with themes of immigration, borderlands, and diaspora to intervene on its facade through night-time video projections visible from multiple public spaces.
INSTALLATION VIEWS

EXHIBITION: Signal Boost



Curated by Jordan Rockford & Rafael Soldi
Dates: March 2-25, 2018
Opening: Friday, March 2, 6-10pm | Curators walkthrough 8pm
NAPOLEON
319 N. 11th St 2L
Philadelphia, PA 19107
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Lorenzo Triburgo, Zora J Murff, and Juan C. Giraldo
In the last decade, social media platforms have quickly become engines for amplification, allowing organizing and sharing of messages on a global scale. This new tool, signal-boosting, has proven to be both conducive of change, and catastrophic to our democracy. Strange Fire Collective has used its platform and reach to signal-boost relevant work made by women, people of color, and queer and trans artists, writers, and curators who reflect our time. For Signal Boost, curators Jordan Rockford and Rafael Soldi have selected three photographers to amplify from the Strange Fire roster, whose work speaks to the Society for Photographic Education's 2018 National Conference theme, Uncertain Times: Borders, Refuge, Community, Nationhood. Artists Lorenzo Triburgo, Zora J Murff, and Juan C. Giraldo explore questions of migration, identity, borders, and how we occupy space as fellow citizens in this country.

With support from NAPOLEON, The University of the Arts, and The Society for Photographic Education

EXHIBITION: Just Visiting



Curated by Rafael Soldi & Serrah Russell
Dates: November 3 – 26, 2016
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Clayton Cotterell, Holly Andres, Evan Baden, Julia Bradshaw, Natalie Krick, Zack Bent, Eirik Johnson, Megumi Shauna Arai, Max Cleary, Josh Poehlein, Ashley Armitage, Birthe Piontek, Patryk Stasieczek, Elizabeth Zvonar
Just Visiting presents photographic works by 14 artists residing in three Northwest cultural centers—Seattle, Oregon, and B.C.—paired together into seven collaborative couples. Curators Serrah Russell and Rafael Soldi created a framework for visual conversation and conceptual exploration as artists discover each other's cities to create new works for the exhibition in conversation or collaboration. Each artist traveled by train, sponsored by Amtrak Cascades.

EXHIBITION: Here & Now

New Geographies in Queer Photography


Curated by Rafael Soldi
Dates: May 15–July 19, 2014
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Molly Landreth, Zackary Drucker, Elle Perez, Michael Max McLeod, Richard Renaldi, We Are The Youth, and # 1 must have
Here and Now: New Geographies in Queer Photography presented the work of artists embarking on physical and emotional journeys to define and discover queerness across the American landscape. In this exhibition images became the spaces where new maps are imagined and created, they help us map our own place within a larger territory as we define what it means to be queer today. These artists’ instinctive search for context stems out of a desire for human connection and extended placeness fueled by a history of otherness in the world. 

Presented through a video projection, Zachary Drucker’s Lost Lake posits beauty and fear as inextricable from the psyche of the American landscape. Contemplative moments and stunning vistas are jarringly punctuated with the vocabularies of witch-hunts, hate crimes, and psychological violence.

Artists Molly Landreth and Michael Max McLeod both take the road to document queer spaces and communities that delineate the margins of American cities. Landreth’s Embodiment project is an archive and a journey through a rapidly changing community and the lives of people who offer brave new visions of what it means to be queer in America today. McLeod, on the other hand, points his lens at the architecture of voyeurism. McLeod’s images reveal circumstantial worlds that exist entirely in the dark, proving why adult video arcades still exist in the Internet era. His photographs of adult video theaters serves as a meditation on the physical structures that facilitate, limit, and/or control the queer spectatorship.

Elle Perez and Richard Renaldi too cover ground, revealing intimacy as integral to the fabric of the American landscape. The first significant presentation of Renaldi’s Hotel Room Portraits, these photographs offer a glimpse into the artist’s life on the road. The self-portraits, which often feature his partner, Seth, elevate mundane moments to emotional documents of queer intimacy in transit. Elle Perez takes on a countrywide journey to document queer diasporas punctuated by intimate moments of connection and interior landscapes that begin to form a language for the often-unspoken and undocumented space between genders.

Lastly, artist-teams We Are the Youth (Laurel Golio & Diana Scholl) and #1 Must Have (Adrien Leavitt & A. Slaven) each bring visbility to specific communities within the larger queer diaspora. We Are the Youth is an ongoing photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth in the United States. Through photographic portraits and “as told to” interviews in the participants’ own voices, We Are the Youth addresses the lack of visibility of LGBTQ young people across the United States.

#1 Must Have reframes the queer experience outside of the victim paradigm often seen in popular culture and presents their subject through contemporary vernacular such as zines, Tumblr sites, community exhibitions, and queer dance parties.

CURATORIAL TEAM: Photographic Center Northwest


As part of the curatorial team at the Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW), 2010–2015, I collaborated in developing important projects and exhibitions of contemporary photography of educational and cultural significance. The gallery at the Center is platform for internationally renowned artists and has been paving the way for the photographic arts in Seattle for over 20 years.

Projects highlighted here: Social Order: Women Photographers from Iran, India and Afghanistan, Author and Subject: Contemporary Queer Photography, Photolust: Annual Benefit Auction (2011& 2012), Benefit Limited Edition Prints Program.

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

EXHIBITION: Select Gender



Curated by Rafael Soldi, Elle Perez, and Paolo Morales
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Daniel Aguirre, Carl Bower, Caleb Cole, Nicolas Djandji, Jason Hanasik, Jamil Hellu, Monique Bergen Henegouwen, Kate Hutchinson, Katie Koti, Diane Russo, J. Aiden Simon, Sarah Sudhoff, Molly Landreth, Amelia Tovey
An exhibition curated by Rafael Soldi, Elle Perez and Paolo Morales at Farmani Gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Select Gender presents a selection of photographic works revolving around the themes of gender identity, self-awareness and gender-specific culture. Whether they are discussing their own identity or that of others, this diverse group of emerging photographers shows us different aspects gender roles in mainstream America.

Select Gender seeks to give these artists a chance to question, address or embrace contemporary ideals of gender, sexuality and self-image.

CURATORIAL TEAM: Laure Drogoul Retrospective



Dates: January 30-March 15, 2009
Participated in the planning and execution of Laure Drogoul’s 25-year retrospective exhibition titled Follies, Predicaments, and Other Conundrums: The Works of Laure Drogoul, at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As part of the exhibition design team, I helped define the visual identity for the exhibition graphics and web and printed materials. As part of MICA’s Exhibition Development Seminar, I collaborated with other Exhibition Development teams to curate, produce, promote, and install the exhibition, which included the construction of a new site-specfic, multi-media folly titled She Pod of Rotten Enchantment.

This exhibition invited visitors to immerse themselves in a paradoxical, absurdist world of darkness, wonder, and beauty. Drogoul’s sculptural follies, roving performances, and interactive works draw upon B-movie imagery, science fiction, psychoanalytic theory, and pop culture—particularly roadside Americana. Along the way she explores and exploits the symbiotic relationships and tensions between humanity and nature, creating works that have a uniquely accessible Baltimore aesthetic.