Conversation with Artist Elle Pérez and Associate Curator Ashton Cooper

Event Details

The Des Moines Art Center invites visitors to join artist Elle Pérez in conversation with Associate Curator Ashton Cooper. The two will discuss and dive into the body of photographs presented in the exhibition “Elle Pérez: La Despedida,” on view in the A. H. Blank Gallery through November 29, 2026.

Pérez constructs lush and tactile photographs born from careful attention to the objects, settings, and individuals in their everyday life. A hallmark of their practice is arranging pictures in poignant vignettes that allow them to communicate poetic resonances between works. These “configurations,” as the artist calls them, also emphasize the porousness between traditional genre distinctions such as portrait, landscape, and still life.

Pérez’s works represent both the intimacies of queer life and the sensuality of still life. In their own description, Pérez is after, “The desire for something to be felt viscerally — to feel like you’re able to hit a certain note that has to do with a fact of living previously undescribed and, in my case, achieving a photographic description of the ephemeral condition of living… what is being communicated often isn’t discursive but is somatic.”

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Free; registration required.
Image: Elle Pérez, courtesy of the artist