Clyde Petersen is a musician, filmmaker, animator, and visual artist.Courtesy of Clyde Petersen
Good morning.
It's Thursday, April 23, and today's message comes from the artist Clyde Petersen, who makes so many kinds of art it's hard to categorize him.
"I'm going to play you a song this morning," Clyde says in his message. "The song I'm going to play is called 'Our Forbidden Country.' I wrote it with my band Your Heart Breaks last year. It's based on the writings of Joan Nestle, who was a lesbian activist and a rad Jewish woman who wrote a lot about being queer in New York in the '50s till the '80s, and documenting what it was like to be part of a group of people without rights."
Clyde adds that it was a "group of people dreaming about what their world was going to look like when they got rights. So it seemed like an appropriate song as you dream about what your world is going to look like real soon."
Clyde was nominated for a Stranger Genius Award in 2015, for his animated films that explode with wit and emotion. As The Stranger said then, Clyde could have been nominated in several categories, given that music, art, and performance are also part of his expressive arsenal.
"The best analogy for Petersen's aesthetic is the sound and spirit of Northwest punk rock—specifically the pro-queer, pro-feminist, anti-corporate DIY strain exemplified by Olympia labels K and Kill Rock Stars—which has always favored rawness over proficiency," Sean Nelson wrote.
Clyde's cardboard sculptures were on exhibit at Bellevue Arts Museum in November 2018, a show called Merch & Destroy.COURTESY OF BELLEVUE ARTS MUSUEM