B. Jean Larson (b. 1993, Southeast Iowa) is an emerging artist and researcher who focuses on the intersections of utilitarian textile craft, queer theory, and posthumanism. By reappropriating and reclaiming traditional textiles, they question ideas of uselessness and usefulness in systems that consume objects, people, and land. As their most important metaphor, B. Jean thinks with and through bogs as queer spaces that fluctuate between the binaries of land and water. Despite their importance to human and non-human communities, a bog’s slippage between binaries makes them difficult to protect, as water is a public resource and land is a private good. B. Jean acknowledges the global cost of the textile industry on ecosystems and seeks to have a sustainable art practice, utilizing secondhand textiles that are unwanted by their previous owners. These discarded textiles are then hand-braided and sewn together to create modular soft sculptures that are fluid and site specific, fluctuating between the binaries of painting and sculpture, art and craft. By using queer theory to reappropriate and reclaim utilitarian textile craft to make non-utilitarian objects, B. Jean questions why something must be useful in order to exist and why existence is dependent on being visible.
B. Jean received their Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University in 2024. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum (Mesa, Arizona, 2024), the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland, 2023), and the Wakkanai Public Library (Wakkanai, Japan, 2019.)