• Jess Dugan is a queer non-binary artist who discovered a passion for photography while studying at Mass College of Art with Abelardo Morell, Laura McPhee, Barbara Bosworth, Nick Nixon, and Shellburne Thurber. From the start, Dugan set out to make sensitive likenesses of friends and strangers in the LGBTQ community and, in so doing, express their own artistic path to self-discovery, as well as challenge viewers’ stereotypes and easy assumptions. While searching for role models within the transgender community the artist’s focus has been on individuals that embody the kind of “gentle masculinity” that Jess aspires to as well. Dugan subsequently pursued graduate study under Dawoud Bey at Columbia College in Chicago and has since produced two major publications and the accompanying exhibitions—Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015) and To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag 2018). Dugan recently received a Pollock-Krasner grant; was named a White House Champion of Change; and is about to have a major showing of a series of their family portraits at the St. Louis Art Museum in the fall of 2021.

The twenty unique Polaroid portraits that comprise the Coupled series were taken in Boston between 2006 and 2008 at the height of the debate around same-sex marriage in the U.S. Very different from the artist’s later environmental portraits, that often feature domestic settings and the use of natural light, these large-format Polaroids were shot against a deep red backdrop with strong studio lighting, and necessitated prolonged setups and lengthy exposures. The enforced stillness that the process required seems to allow viewers to slow down as well: to see beyond each person’s exterior attributes and center one’s attention instead on the loving relationships these couples share.

• These twenty 20x24 Polaroid prints will join three other later photographs by Dugan already in the MFA’s collection and will greatly enhance our holdings of work by LGBTQ artists. They have not been publicly exhibited since their original one-person presentation at Gallery Kayafas in 2010. Two of the images in the series feature self-portraits of the artist, another focuses on Jess’ mother and her wife, and two other pairs include past MFA employees (Karen Gausch and Tomomi Itakura with each of their partners). Dugan’s process of intentionally frustrating the viewer’s expectations by removing the safety net of clearly defined gender identity in works like these is at once thought-provoking and compelling. As such, it will create a fascinating conversation with photographs already in the collection by Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, Mikki Ferrill, Paz Errazuriz, and Lyle Ashton Harris, among others.

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