Event Details
Spend an hour in the galleries with Brandeis Professor Brian Horton for a close look at intimacy, play, and desire in Jenna Gribbon: Entwined.
Focusing on works including Night swimming wrestlers (2018) and 3AM Haircut (2018), Horton will consider the thin line between homosocial play and eroticism in Gribbon’s paintings, and the ways friendship, attraction, performance, and spectatorship overlap within a single image. Through an informal, discussion-based session in the exhibition space, participants will explore how Gribbon invites viewers into scenes that feel at once private and shared, and how those shifting boundaries shape the experience of looking.
Brian Horton is assistant professor of anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. He earned his PhD and MA from Brown University and his BA from Texas Tech University. A cultural anthropologist, Horton works at the intersections of queer studies, critical theory, popular culture, digital anthropology, and South Asian studies. His research examines sexual, gender, and racial minority communities and the social worlds they create amid structures of recognition and discrimination. His writing has appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Sexualities, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, as well as the edited volume Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021).
This program was organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Jenna Gribbon: Entwined, August 19, 2026–January 3, 2027, and is co-sponsored by the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University.