An upcoming art exhibition uses a Jazz Age parlor game turned art-school staple to turn a fresh lens on queer culture. Exquisite Corpse opens Friday, Sept. 29 at the Everett and Treadwell Building at 33 Canfield St. in Kingston.

Exquisite Corpse is a game popularized in 1920s Paris where players take turns creating words or images on a sheet of paper folded so that participants can’t see each other’s work, creating a single piece of blind collaboration. The show is the brainchild of Abraham Cruz, a graduate of Cooper Union who moved to Kingston in 2021 and began re-immersing himself in the art world after a career in fashion.

“Two years ago, when I moved up here full-time I was feeling the desire not only to create but to collaborate with some of these new friends of mine because they have studios in the Fuller Building and it just gets the juices going,” said Cruz. “Then [participating artist Jason O’Malley] mentioned Exquisite Corpse and I looked into it and I was like, ‘OK, how do we make it ours?’”

Eventually Cruz would recruit six fellow New York artists for the project — O’Malley, Anita Ragusa, Raul Castro-Cerrato, Segay Vershin and Nicole Becher. The group included both old art school friends based in New York City and local artists in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills.

The game calls for a unifying theme to guide the players’ creations. In Cruz’s case, the theme was based on his participants’ queer identities.

“Because we’re all queer and all of our art has, I would say a queer base to it, or because we’re queer it always has subconsciously a queer tag to it, I thought maybe this is the theme,” said Cruz. “And then past, present and future as a form of the three sections or it could just start a conversation or inspire what their subject would be.”

Over the next year Cruz, played the role of coordinator. The job involved not only assigning themes and grouping the artists but shuttling or mailing the artworks between locations in New York and as far away as Martha’s Vineyard. Cruz said he tried to keep the mix fresh with new groupings for each piece and each artist rotating between top, middle and bottom sections and past, present and future. Working on one section of a 26-by-40 canvas, the collaborators used a variety of techniques including painting, drawing and mixed media. Each work is paired with another by a single artist after viewing the final results of their collaboration allowing them to react, reinvent or repurpose.

The resulting 24 works are a kaleidoscopic swirl of color, media and technique ranging from watercolors to gold leaf and abstract to pop-art realism. Classical Greek sculpture combines with more starkly erotic themes. Each artist’s distinct style blends together forming something new and unique. The show is Cruz’s first as a curator but, he said, maybe not his last. Cruz said he hopes to turn the Exquisite Corpse theme into an ongoing collaborative effort based in Kingston.

Cruz said he envisions the show evolving into an annual festival where artists from around the Hudson Valley could be connected with peers to combine visions and mix and match talents and create shared masterpieces.

“It was really a labor of love for me,” said Cruz. “And also it’s really given some of my artists a real new fire, I’ve had a few of them tell me, ‘I’m so glad you pushed us to do this because we feel so much more creative and inspired to make more art.’”