Exuberant Possibilities is a vibrant and thorough dive into the images and ideas at the heart of the Queer Ecology Hanky Project, a traveling exhibition and program organized by V Adams and Mary Tremonte. This book celebrates and expands upon this ongoing exhibition of over 100 artist-made bandanas exploring the theme of queer ecology— an area of inquiry that unites the study of biology, environment, and sexuality within the framework of queer theory.
This screen and risograph-printed publication is packed with short essays, artist hanky image reproductions, poems, correspondence, and project documentation that investigates at greater depth some of the most intriguing avenues of queer ecology. There are writings by Adams, Tremonte, and project collaborators Lindsey French & Bekezela Mguni, and correspondence between Hanky Project Artist Corrine Teed and microbiologist Maria Rebolleda-Gomez. There are images of magical networks of slime molds by Devon Cohen and Jaque Groves, hybrid fungal bodies by Molly Costello, and plants with non-binary and transformative genders with Andrea Pérez Bessin. Immerse yourself in plant kinship with Syr Reifsteck and Katie Kaplan, slippery salamanders with Corrine Teed, queer symbiotic relationships with Andrea Narno and Claire Ragland, and so much more.

Hand-printed and bound by V Adams and Mary Tremonte at Eureka! House in Kingston, NY.

More about the project
Emerging in the United States in the early 1970s as a means for gay men to subtly communicate sexual desires, the original hanky code has been revisited and expanded in the past few years by queer artists of many genders and proclivities to include different bodies, identities, and activities. To this exciting place of queer revision and renewal, we bring the Queer Ecology Hanky Project. Bringing together queer printmakers, artists, and nature freaks, this project presents an exuberant vision of divergent possibilities for gender and sexuality and models of resilience and resistance in an increasingly bleak world. This riotous, joyous, and defiant multitude of queer and trans visions, replaces reductionist visions of the ‘natural’ world as heterosexual/binary/reproductive/competitive and celebrates the shifting /queer/nonbinary/collaborative/symbiotic and deeply weird world that we inhabit.