Waters of Body Exhibition

Waters of Body

September 4 - October 26, 2025

LOCATION: Cauduro Gallery - PNCA - 511 NW Broadway

PUBLIC RECEPTION: Thursday, September 4th, 5-8pm

GALLERY HOURS: Monday - Saturday, 10am-4pm

Waters of Body is a multimedia exhibition exploring trans bodies, trans care and trans myth. We offer it as a place of damp stillness or memory. The show primarily features Portland artists Yana Sternberger-Moyé, Molly Alloy and Michael Espinoza alongside the Transmissions Quilts Project. Transmissions is led by artist Cordy Joan and makes quilts for trans and gender-queer people around the country. Waters of Body features quilts made by and for trans Portlanders, led by artist M. Morrissey.

Other Public Programming

Thursday, 9/4, 5-8pm Opening reception at First Thursday

Thursday, 10/2, 5-8pm TransStichin’ Community Activation at First Thursday

TransStitchin’ is a regular sewing event for Trans folx to gather, relax, sew, build community, and indulge in Queer Joy. Bring your own needlecraft project (loosely defined) and sew with us! Or if you’re not working on something, we’ll have free materials for mending and crafting however you want. There is no objective other than to gather and sew. Participants will be given the opportunity to have a tour of the associated exhibitions Warp Speed and Waters of Body from exhibiting artists. TransStitchin’ is an ongoing project of Needle in a GayStack, Alloy and Espinoza’s community-based collaborative effort to bring Trans and Queer artists together. All levels of experience are welcomed to attend. Please note that this is a space for Trans people, however we welcome enthusiastic allies.

Yana Sternberger-Moyé is a Black, German-American and Queer artist, curator, and florist. They were born and raised in Los Angeles, California and currently reside in Portland, Oregon. In 2020, they received their Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland, California. Sternberger-Moyé’s vibrant and colorful paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos depict the beauty and resilience of their intersectional identities. Through their work, they strive to dismantle societal stigmas associated with race, trauma, disability, and displacement. They simultaneously explore pleasure and play as revolution. Sternberger-Moyé’s work serves as a platform for fostering conversations, raising questions, expressing grief, facilitating healing, and celebrating the self and identity.

Michael Espinoza (they/them) is a non-binary, multi-racial, multi-disciplinary artist whose work embodies & embraces the undone artistic practices of Queer Ancestors lost to persecution, disease, fatal sadness, & closets. They are a member of the gallery co-op Carnation Contemporary in Portland, Oregon. Currently, their practice borrows strategies from embroidery, quilting, digital media, sculpture & photography to explore sex & sexuality, intersectional identities, intimacy, the body, & contact with the dead. They have previously exhibited live performance, site-specific installation, & video; their work can be found in public art collections, digital spaces, domestic & international group shows, & the many spaces intended for queer joy.

Cordy Joan is the lead artist of the Transmissions Quilts Project. They are based in Oakland, CA and have been making quilts and textiles for seven years. Outside of the quilts, they work with trans teens and queer families in various caretaking roles. They started Transmissions Quilts as a way of making affirming gift objects for friends and lovers. It has since grown to be an international quilt-making and oral-histories project with a goal of making 50 gift quilts for individually nominated trans and genderqueer people.

Molly Alloy (they/them) is an artist, accomplice, and animist. Alloy lives in alignment with the core values of body, land, truth, justice, and community, and makes sculptures that claim driftwood and leather as conduits of ancestral presence, shaped into assertions of collective queer immortality. Alloy has been a founding member of the queer curatorial collective First Brick (2017-2019), Codirector of Five Oaks Museum, a radical queer anti-colonial reimagining of a county historical society (2018-2025), and Needle In A Gay Stack artist collaboration (est. 2021). They are a certified guide of Lama Rod Owens’ Seven Homecomings meditation, a student collaborator of Whale Whisperer, Michaela Harrison, and a beginning practitioner of their ancestral Celtic animist traditions. They are parent to a powerful young one, and they operate The Drift, an informal trans+ community space, in their home.

Accessibility: West entrance (main) has 7 steps and wheelchair ramp. The exhibition is on the main floor. Service animals are permitted. PNCA has gender neutral bathrooms. The building is ADA compliant.

Host or Publisher Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at PNCA