react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

I never intended to devote my doctoral studies toward the environment. When I began my Ph.D. in California in 2015, my research interests pertained to questions of materiality, queerness, sexual futures, and craft. For me, the process of a dissertation continues to be an endless lesson in the art of letting go and allowing for change and the unexpected. During the summer of 2018, I embarked on a three-week research trip across the southwestern United States. At the Ceramic Research Center (CRC) on the campus of Arizona State University and the archives of the New Mexico Museum of Art, I hoped to find a few gems that would bolster my project on queer craftspeople in the American West, AIDS, and the potentiality of tactility and the surface of an object as a site for sexual expression. I found nothing. During the 937-mile drive through deserts and red rock mountains from Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, I agonized over what to tell my advisor.