Join us for a free, public talk with Violet Institute critic-in-residence, Dylan Volk.About this Event
The evening will begin with a talk by Dylan Volk on Remsen Wolff. Wolff's Special Girls series (1990–1995) comprises thousands of photographs of trans women—many of them models, club kids, and ball artists—in New York and Amsterdam. Following a brief intermission, Volk will join Violet curator Aubrey Calaway in conversation.
Dylan Volk is a historian of contemporary art and visual culture. They are a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where they're completing the dissertation "Lesbian Aesthetics and the Body Impolitic, 1990–1999." Dylan's writing appears (or will be appearing) in caa.reviews, History of Photography, and Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia and North Africa.
Aubrey Calaway is a curator and documentarian with an interest in how sex, reality, and the self are controlled in contemporary American culture. He founded the Violet Institute in 2026.
Remsen Wolff aka Vivienne Blum (1940–1998) was a self-taught New York artist and poet whose archive includes over 100,000 images of transgender people, cross-dressers, drag queens and female impersonators. Wolff is documented referring to himself as a "phony transsexual" and went by the name Viv Blum in the years before his death.
The Violet Institute collects and interprets contemporary trans culture, for everyone. Based in Portland, Maine, our programming is open to all. We invite anyone with an interest in photography, art history, and visual culture to this event.
The Violet Criticism Residency 2026 is funded by the Rabkin Foundation and the Maine Humanities Council. Find out more at theviolet.org.
Tickets are free but limited in quantity.
Event venue
The Bakery Photographic Collective, 630 Forest Avenue, Portland, United States
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