Episode 62 - Bex McCharena

Today’s guest is Bex McCharen, who uses they/them pronouns—an interdisciplinary artist, fashion designer, filmmaker, and founder of the inclusive fashion label Chromat.

 

Across fashion, textiles, painting, photography, social practice, and film, Bex explores one of the most personal and politically charged questions of our time: Who has the right to define who we are?

 

For Bex, identity is not necessarily a fixed destination. It can be fluid, expansive, and evolving. We should have the freedom to decide how we see ourselves, how we present ourselves to the world, and how that identity may change throughout our lives. 

 

We can embrace masculinity, femininity, both, neither, or move between them. The freedom lies in the ability to define ourselves rather than allowing society, tradition, or politics to do it for us.

 

Water becomes the perfect language for these ideas.

 

The ocean does not ask who you are before allowing you to enter. It does not recognize gender, status, wealth, sexuality, or social expectation. In the water, the body becomes lighter, boundaries seem less rigid, and transformation feels possible.

 

That sense of freedom runs throughout Bex’s work.

 

Bex studied at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and is now based in Miami. Their artistic practice moves through quilting, printmaking, photography, watercolor, film, and social engagement, but at its center is what Bex describes as a process of water worship and ancestral connection.

 

Their latest series of quilts serves as a visual archive of Miami’s queer and trans communities finding solace, comfort, acceptance, and refuge in local bodies of water. The textiles offer a powerful counter-narrative to conventional representations of queer and trans life in Florida.

 

Rather than defining these communities only through political conflict, Bex documents intimacy, friendship, joy, vulnerability, belonging, and freedom.

 

Bex’s career has crossed the worlds of art, fashion, technology, and culture.

 

They have received the Smithsonian National Design Award and have been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 and the OUT100 as one of the LGBTQ+ community’s influential voices. 

 

Their work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, and their collaborations have included Beyoncé, Intel, Disney, and Reebok.

 

Bex has delivered a TED Talk on inclusive design and has spoken at SXSW, Harvard, Parsons, MIT, and Tulane. They curated “Queer Joy” at MoMA PS1, and their work is represented in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Here in Miami, Bex’s work extends far beyond the walls of galleries and museums. They have facilitated workshops at Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Miami Cancer Institute, Lotus House Women’s Shelter, the Miami Workers Center, and the Alliance for LGBTQ Youth. They are currently an artist in residence at Oolite Arts.

 

At the center of all this work is a compelling idea: that human beings, like water, cannot always be contained within boundaries created for them by others.

 

As Bex writes in their poetic work - Water moves. Water changes form. Water crosses borders. And yet, through every transformation, it remains water.

Perhaps that is why the ocean occupies such a powerful place in Bex McCharen’s art. It is a place where identity can expand rather than contract; where a person can enter the water carrying one understanding of themselves and emerge with another.

 

To read the entire Bex poem, click here - www.DigiDame.com.