From the artist:

For an entire lifetime I have been searching for a family. Adopted at birth, i have always felt  displaced. Desperate attempts for belonging resulted in decades of addiction and living on the  street. Like far too many queer souls, self destruction and internalized homophobia are  devastating companions. This chapter resulted in too many heart breaks and crushing isolation.  Creativity and unconditional love from unexpected places/people have afforded me a family of  my own making and consequently a queer beautiful life. 

The work created for Family Room is a physical portrait of the family we have created at the  Sanitary Tortilla Factory. A beautiful, imperfect family is a necessity for the survival of our  wounded creative hearts. I am often both comforted and disheartened by how long the battle  of equity has been waged.  

The prescient works of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and James Baldwin were fundamental in  reconstructing myself and understanding the complicated landscapes that we inhabit. The title  of the physical portrait of the STF family is stolen from the title of an Anthology of works by  Adrienne Rich. 

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon 
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall, 
dissected, their bird-wings severed 
like trophies. No one lives in this room 
without living through some kind of crisis. 
No one lives in this room 
without confronting the whiteness of the wall 
behind the poems, planks of books, 
photographs of dead heroines. 
Without contemplating last and late 
the true nature of poetry. The drive 
to connect. The dream of a common language.