riel Sturchio
Signal
Sep 3 - 26 , 2026
I believe metaphysical and personal rituals can acknowledge grief and cultivate hope by providing refuge in the body. My project, Signal, explores how spiritual practices and rituals offer sanctuary and resistance for LGBTQ+ people and women facing systemic oppression. Through photography, I delve into the practices of LGBTQ+ and women psychics, witches, seers, and believers as acts of belonging. Personal rituals rupture unjust hegemonic systems, and I use photography to reveal these practices' liberating and connective power.
In 2023, as I sifted through my late grandmother’s belongings, I discovered quiet traces of mysticism: the wishbones, crystals tucked away in the bedroom, a single, gray, dusty four-leaf clover resting on the windowsill. The memory of her morning ritual echoed back to me, her voice carrying through the porch door, “Good morning, Mother Nature!” This illuminated my intergenerational search for belonging and safety through practice and belief. Now that both of my grandparents have died, my quest for belonging carries their legacy into a community of metaphysical LGBTQ+ and women practitioners.
Believers are everywhere: our teachers, our baristas, our health care specialists–and in my case, my family, chosen and by blood. I’ve learned that practitioners use their rituals multidimensionally–to stay sober, honor gender expression, commune with the dead, as paid entertainers, sustain ancestral legacy, and deliver messages from spirits. I’ve photographed over forty practitioners across the US and Mexico in the last four years. These diverse practices coalesce to heal wounds often inflicted by anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies that undermine people’s bodily rights and personal safety.
My material process is integral to this work. I make photographs in backyards, domestic spaces, and semi-private environments, create digital negatives, and return to the darkroom to print 16” x 20” silver gelatin contact prints, honoring one of photography’s earliest forms.
Sat, Sep 5, 2026
In-Person Artist Talk at 2 PM
riel Sturchio (American, b. 1990, they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose photography-based practice operates at the intersection of queer phenomenology, disability justice, and the haptic archive. Working with constructed photographs and large-format silver gelatin printing, Sturchio engages with photography's historical legacy as a tool of surveillance and categorization by reframing the camera as an instrument for active and participatory witnessing. Their work investigates the disoriented body as a primary source of generative knowledge that disrupts socially idealized fantasies of beauty, ability and gender.
Sturchio’s practice emphasizes the materiality of the analog process, utilizing silver gelatin prints to explore the politics of touch. In an era of digital ephemerality, they return to the chemistry of the darkroom to honor the slow, ritualized labor of making a body visible. The act of touch on photographic surface serves as a methodology for grief and documenting survival as a form of radical resistance.
The investigation of relationality extends into their social practice as co-founder of Begin Collective, which they run with their twin sister, Bianca Sturchio (LCSW, MSW) where community-as-medium serves as a framework for collective world-building for LGBTQ+, nonbinary, and disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent people.
Through over 15 years of collaborative inquiry, Sturchio seeks to expand photography's record, utilizing the historical weight of the photographic archive to honor sovereign embodiment and the rituals of those navigating normative margins.
riel has taught photography at The University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX), Texas State University (San Marcos, TX), Wheaton College (Norton, MA), and St. Edward's University (Austin, TX). riel was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the University of Iowa's photography area (2022-2025) where they currently work as a Specialized Assistant Professor of Instruction in Photography (2025-current).
Recent achievements include: Guggenheim Fellowship (2026), AHI Award (2025), Big Field Fund Project Grant (2025), Ellis Beauregard Foundation Project Grant (2025), Robert Giard Grant (2024), Daylight Photos Jurors Pick (2024), Light Work Artist-in-Residence (2024), Film Photo Award (2023), Artist Catalyst Grant through Iowa Arts Council (2022), Interchange Artist Grant and Fellow, Mid-America Arts Alliance (2022), Robert Giard Grant X Queer|ART (2021), and New Orleans Photo Alliance, Michael P. Smith Award (2020).