Please note that this virtual exhibition is best experienced in Google Chrome on a laptop or desktop.

Bent & Borrowed, an online-only exhibition, explores the nuanced practice of appropriating artworks, images, and ideas within contemporary artistic expression. The exhibition considers the interconnectedness of historical artifacts, popular culture, and media through new perspectives of appropriation and ownership. Bent & Borrowed is juried by Conor Moynihan, the Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the RISD Museum.

In Stillness of Haji Ismael-1, Azadeh Tajpour reverses the colonial lens through digitally re-imagined portraits. Matthew Leifheit’s piece presents a video still of activist Pedro Zamora giving an address about AIDS education from a VHS tape in the collection of GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. Zamora was on The Real World: San Francisco the same year, becoming one of the first openly gay men with AIDS on national TV and dying the day after its final episode aired. Artists Jason Fiering, Megan Bent, Triston Wu, and Caleb Cole draw inspiration from the work of other artists, including Josef Albers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Monet, and John O’Reilly. In Becoming a Goose: Dialogue with AI, Schuyler Dragoo utilizes AI to contemplate how we can collaborate with the nonhuman, both in terms of animals and AI.

Printmaking, video, mixed media, photography, collage, painting, and more are displayed in this exhibition in a 3D replica of Gallery 263’s space. In Bent & Borrowed, the 21 features artists employ appropriation to explore a wide range of themes, such as queerness, culture, immigration, assimilation, colonization, mental illness, violence, addiction recovery, spirituality, gender, relationships, and technology.

About the juror

Conor Moynihan is the Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the RISD Museum. at the RISD Museum. He focuses on the modern and contemporary collection, with a particular research interest in identity-based practices. His recent exhibitions at the RISD Museum include Perception and Presence in Contemporary Drawing, Variance: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Disability, and The Performative Self-Portrait. His current exhibition Listen!, with Christina Alderman, involved working with the young artists and art enthusiasts of RISD Art Circle to curate an exhibition from a teen perspective, on view from July 6, 2024, to January 5, 2025.

Thank you to rtangent

This experience was made possible thanks to Rtangent, a Massachusetts-based company. Rtangent’s interactive platform allows interpreters to virtually lead a group of people through a guided experience of a physical or virtual space. When a narrator is not present, users are able to explore the space on their own. Please send Rtangent a message if you have any feedback about their platform or if you would like to hire them to create a virtual experience.