Micheal Swank • The Queer Alchemist

03/08/2026

The Manager of the Household is now on Substack.

Cielo ran this house for years before I understood she had also been holding it together with love.

She was the manager: the one who decided when work stopped and the walk began, who inspected every visitor to the gallery, who claimed her authority without ever performing for approval. CuCu worked a room. Cielo ran one.

Then CuCu died, and in the eight weeks after, I watched her grieve him beside me. She changed the bed. She changed the food rituals. She changed the way she let herself be held. The boss became tender. Or maybe she had always been tender, and I was only just learning how to read it.

Cielo died after eating poisoned bait left on the street. She died the night ESCÁNDALO opened at El Armadillo, after I left the gallery for the vet. She was supposed to come home the next day. She did not.

This essay is not a neat goodbye. I don’t have one. It is about a dog, a house, a show, a city, a schedule, and the brutal fact that grief is not measured by species. It is measured by how much daily life you shared.

Cielo was inside every hour of mine.

Read The Manager of the Household on Substack.

thebureauofq***rart.substack.com

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18/06/2026

Mexico City is not a reset button.

For q***r artists, the decision to move here is rarely only about rent, weather, or the promise of a larger studio with better light. It is about the life the work requires—and whether that life can still be made.

Some arrive young, moving quickly through openings, parties, studio visits, and the charged social gravity of a city where possibility seems to be happening on every block. Others arrive after careers stall, bodies change, rents become impossible to afford, relationships end, or the places they came from make it difficult to imagine continuing as they are.

Neither journey is more real. But they are not the same journey.

Our new editorial, *Mexico City Is Not a Reset Button*, considers what q***r artists of different generations bring with them to CDMX: desire, history, debt, momentum, grief, hunger, experience, and the difficult hope of building a life that does not require our disappearance.

It is also a reminder that this city is not a blank, inexpensive stage for someone else’s reinvention. It is already alive with artists, workers, families, communities, and forms of survival that deserve more than admiration from a distance.

Read the full editorial via The Bureau of Q***r Art - Substack. Link in first comment of the post.

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16/05/2025

After years of pouring my energy into The Bureau of Q***r Art, I’ve made the decision to re-invest in my own studio practice with the same intensity. The truth is, I’ve always felt a bit outside the mainstream art world—as a curator, but especially as an artist. I’ve never fit the mold, and I’ve never wanted to. My studio has always been a place of quiet clarity, a space untouched by the ego and performance that often dominates the gallery scene.

I’m continuing the body of work you see here—photo-based collage, pastel, monoprint—but I’m also opening up to something new. I’ll begin accepting portrait commissions rooted in my intuitive, layered style. I’m also experimenting with more commercial forms: sewn portraits, stitched photo interventions—pieces that carry both personal resonance and visual intimacy.

I want to price these works in a way that honors the labor, skill, and materials that go into them—while still keeping them accessible. Custom pieces will start around $500 USD.

I work small out of necessity—this is the scale my body and eyes can sustain. But within that constraint is intimacy. The viewer must lean in. There’s no digital trickery, no shortcut around labor. Every torn edge, every moment of translucency or grit, is analog and intentional.

I don’t offer this as a narrative of resilience or a tidy arc of recovery. My practice isn’t about overcoming; it’s about occupying. Each piece is a record of becoming—vulnerable, unresolved, and fiercely autobiographical. This work does not seek perfection. It seeks presence, however fragmented, however dimly lit.

This isn’t about stepping away from community—it’s about stepping back into myself.

Happy 55th to me. Yesterday was a day of 5's. May is the fifth month. 15. 55 years. 2025. Five 5's. Symbol of transformation. I've not titled this series yet. Four of 10 completed.

15/12/2024

My work is inseparable from Mexico City, a place where centuries of history layer visibly on its streets, forming a living palimpsest. The city’s textured walls, bustling avenues, and relentless energy have shaped my creative process and recovery as I’ve faced health challenges and personal transformation. It is a city of dualities, where beauty and struggle coexist—a reflection of Eden and Purgatory, bound together and inseparable.

Mexico City has been both muse and adversary, its streets offering materials that became a lifeline during my early recovery. Living through the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, I found solace in the city’s chaos. The tactile experience of creating helped release my anxious energy, grounding me through paper, surfaces, and movement. Its frenetic layering mirrored my need to rebuild, and creativity became an act of survival, transforming my experience into something whole.

After a series of strokes reshaped my body and vision, my creative process evolved. Cuernavaca, the “City of Eternal Spring,” became a counterpoint to Mexico City’s urgency. In its quieter rhythm, I developed a more deliberate relationship with my work, rooted in slowness and intention. My process grew tactile and cerebral, almost spiritual, as I adapted to new boundaries. Creativity became less about urgency and more about honoring the intentional act of making.

This shift is reflected in “La Vista al Edén.” The image shows a young man with desire in his eyes, surrounded by what appears to be a garden. On closer inspection, fragments of Mexico City’s streets merge with the calm of my Cuernavaca studio. The intentional blur reflects how my visual disability has reshaped perception, inviting viewers to slow down and find meaning in texture and imperfection.

Each place offers its own Eden and Purgatory. Mexico City’s vitality lies in chaos, where beauty is born of struggle, while Cuernavaca offers stillness tempered by reflection. Eden is not perfection but friction, where creation arises from tension. From this, I continue to shape my art, identity, and recovery, one deliberate gesture at a time.

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15/11/2024

At first, I was overwhelmed by frustration, especially with my inability to focus on larger compositions. But then, I found a way forward. I decided to approach the problem quite literally—by cutting larger pieces into smaller ones, turning them into a kind of puzzle. This allowed me to focus on smaller, manageable sections while using the white spaces between them to view shapes from a broader perspective.

This discovery has been profoundly exciting. It’s given me a way to visualize how my brain and vision now function, while also guiding me toward a new creative process. My past approach to art relied on long, grueling hours and a high tolerance for anxiety. But now, I’ve replaced those 8-12 hour days in the studio with shorter, focused sessions of 2-4 hours.

Stepping away from my work more often has been transformative. It’s given me the space to thoughtfully consider my next steps and approach my art with a calmness I’ve never known. I no longer feel the relentless drive to immediately dive into the next piece. Instead, I’ve found a rhythm that allows my creativity to unfold naturally, to breathe.

For the first time, I feel balanced. I’m discovering a peace in my practice that feels like a blessing.

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06/11/2024

Q***r and Allied artists bring essential voices to the forefront, especially in times when history feels at risk of repeating. Q***r activism has reshaped the world—from the loud protests to the subtle acts of defiance.

Take ACT UP, for example; the work done by this movement in the fight against HIV/AIDS radically influenced how quickly we saw COVID testing and vaccines roll out. Yet, this legacy and the profound losses within the Q***r community are often missing from history books. We owe it to those before us to keep these stories alive and pushing forward.

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05/11/2024

Today marks the second anniversary of my stroke(s)—a quiet yet profound milestone that deserves more than a passing glance. In my studio in Cuernavaca, surrounded by the evidence of change, I pause to reflect on what these past two years have meant. This journey has been one of recalibration, transforming challenges into something more profound: a movement toward peace, openness, and fulfillment I once found elusive.

The path to that health crisis was woven with stories of strain and misalignment, but I won’t linger there today. What I feel called to share is the outcome—a renewed sense of purpose, a more vital community project, a thriving, sustaining studio, and an inner calm that might have only been possible on the other side of the crisis.

This isn’t a victory speech or an arrival at some idyllic peak. Instead, it’s an acknowledgment—a testament to resilience that grows quietly in the face of hardship. So, thank you. Thank you for being part of this day, this path, and the unknown road ahead. Here’s to more shared moments, more creation, and the deep connection that makes it all worth it.

I believe the best way to demonstrate this is to show a view of this piece in progress in my studio today.

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30/10/2024

Yeah! Confirmation my vote has been counted. In 2020 I delivered it to the US Embassy and it was received in December and not counted. Thanks to Jennifer Nerio in the artist residency for taking the ballot to mail from the USA for me. I didn't want to risk my vote not being counted again.

24/10/2024

In July, I brought back a piece from over seven years ago, a relic of an earlier vision. Seeing it now, next to my newer work, unsettled me. It felt like standing at the edge of my own evolution, comparing the past's once-bold strokes to the present's more tempered gestures. I hung it on the studio wall, a quiet observer of its journey, waiting for it to speak—telling me where we go from here.

But weeks passed, and nothing came. The more I stared, the less I saw. The answers weren’t in their original form. I realized the time had come for something radical, something irreversible. With a sharp knife in hand, I approached the wall.

I won’t show you everything—not yet. This piece is still becoming. But I will share fragments, glimpses of what’s emerging. I’m learning to let go of what it was, freeing it from its past and allowing space for new possibilities to unfold, to play.

I’ve been immersed in this process for the past few weeks, spending a few hours each day carving out a new path. There’s something deeply satisfying in watching patterns emerge, especially now, after nearly two years of recovery from the stroke. As my body healed, I noticed how my literal and creative vision had shifted. The tunnel vision narrowed, but instead of feeling constrained, I focused on the small spaces, then stepped back, gazing down the length of that tunnel. What once felt like a limitation now offers clarity.

This relaxed, almost meditative approach contrasts sharply with the frenzy of my past work. What was once an anxious energy, feverishly spilling onto the surface, has now softened into something more deliberate. The piece, like me, is learning to breathe again.

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04/09/2024

Very excited to annouce we have confirmed at least one location for the summer pride show with the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington DC for end of May-June 2025!

The Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington, D.C. is committed to enriching the relationship between Mexico and the United States by sharing Mexico’s vibrant cultural past and present with the local community. Since its establishment in 1990, the Institute has succeeded in presenting diverse, ong...