Space__Space Gallery, Boulder, Colorado
September 6 - 27, 2025
SHADOWTIDE marks the one-year anniversary of UNDERTOW, Colorado’s first and only arts organization explicitly dedicated to queer visual culture.
In SHADOWTIDE, queer artists turn to printed matter, photography, painting, and installation as sites of invention and resistance—ensuring queer lives are witnessed, recorded, and remembered. Across diverse practices, the artists gathered here work with fragments—archival traces, diaristic notations, erotic reprints, voice recordings, and ephemeral objects. In their hands, queer materials do not remain static; they are reactivated, reframed, and made into vessels for new futures.
In gathering these fragments, SHADOWTIDE does not aim for a fixed or complete narrative. Instead, it dwells in the shadows, tides, and margins—those fleeting gestures that have always carried queer life forward.
Over the past year, UNDERTOW has carved out a space for queer artists working in print, ephemera, and community-based publishing—organizing exhibitions, workshops, and collaborative editions that center queer memory, desire, and resistance. Collaborations have included artists from across the country, with projects supported by UC San Diego, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts INSITE Fund, RedLine Arts Center, Queer|Art, Union Hall Denver, Space__Space Gallery, Los Angeles Printed Matter, Taller California, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Rocky Mountain Equality, Boulder County Arts Commission, Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, and the New York Queer Zine Fair.
This anniversary event is part exhibition, part celebration—a gathering of prints, zines, photographs, archival fragments, music, and community. SHADOWTIDE evokes the pull of the unseen: submerged forces of history, grief, longing, and survival that shape queer artistic production. An undertow is the current that moves beneath the surface, drawing us back into deeper waters. As bell hooks reminds us, queerness is “about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
UNDERTOW Open Call: SHADOWTIDE Happenings
Space__Space Gallery, Boulder, CO | September 27, 2025 | 5–7 PM
UNDERTOW presents SHADOWTIDE Happenings — an evening of screenings, performances, and happenings at Space__Space Gallery. This gathering celebrates queer expression, experimentation, and community, highlighting local queer Colorado artists during the closing week of SHADOWTIDE, UNDERTOW’s one-year anniversary exhibition..