The Mermaids Found The Sequins
Feather Chiaverini at 2nd Story
Drag Queen Mermaids on a float at the KET Sybarite Ball, 1985, Collection of Faulkner Morgan Archive
A patriotic mermaid, leather daddy Santa, and a drag queen easter egg all walk into an art gallery. The result? An overwhelming immersion into the world of Kentucky’s LGBTQ history, seen through the eyes of queer artist Feather Chiaverini.
Growing up around his father’s costume shop in Fort Lauderdale, Chiaverini always had an affinity for performance. Though what draws him in is not for the spotlight itself but the chaos behind the curtain. The driving force behind his practice and craft is finding that unique, costume shop, DIY vibe. It’s the feeling of a drag queen gluing sequins onto a gown at 2am or the frantic pinning of a garment seconds before going on stage. These moments are where Chiaverini, and this exhibit, exist and shine in.
Birds of a Feather, 2025, Feather Chiaverini
All of the artworks in Birds of a Feather were created by Feather Chiaverini as direct references to imagery and artifacts of Kentucky’s LGBTQ history from Lexington’s Faulkner Morgan Archive (FMA). The archival images and inspiration from FMA are on display alongside Chiaverini’s artworks in 2nd Story Gallery. When gallery director Leah Kolb introduced me to Chiaverini, there was an immediate connection. Over multiple zoom calls and email threads, we kept geeking out about the extraordinary imagery found in the archive. The incredible joy and ridiculousness found through various moments of craft, performance, and queerness provided a childlike wonder that Chiaverini said he felt needed to be explored. As he put it, it sometimes felt like fishing; getting to explore a large compilation of images of queer people and see yourself reflected in them.
Speaking of aquatic connections, Chiaverini’s first inspiration, and the titular work in the show, Birds of a Feather (2025) consists of nearly 30 green mermaid tails hanging on the walls of the gallery. This piece reimagines the moment of excitement of getting into drag as a mermaid on a float for a 4th of July parade. He understands that the backstage moments he loves so much aren’t something that everyone gets to experience. So, he works to make that sensation readily available to the public. Chiaverini not only allows visitors to take the handmade mermaid tails off the wall and wear them for a photo on the boulder-shaped floor pillow, but actually highly encourages them. To Chiaverini, these moments should be held and seen as just as important as what happens on stage. With the rise of automated processes, artificial intelligence, and an infinite number of Spirit Halloween stores, these moments feel “life or death” with the loss of so much DIY culture.
The archival material that stuck with Chiaverini the most was from a Drag Queen Easter Egg Hunt at Mount Horeb Earthworks Complex in the 1980s. From the extravagant use of eyeliner and glitter to someone putting a cigarette out on an easter egg and that being the final product, the goofiness in the images immediately drew him in. Titled, Protein Ladies (2025), Chiaverini’s watercolors build on that history and explore the ideas of all the wild and wacky ways one can egg in drag. This work also provided an incredible point of connection between the eggs, drag, and his background in costumes. When one graduates clown school it is standard practice that you trademark your signature clown makeup onto an egg. Thus, these eggs become emblems for memorializing makeup that is often simply ephemeral.
Protein Ladies, 2025, Feather Chiaverini
A small, but different, artwork on display, Santa’s Lap (2025), combines imagery from a 1980s leather bar with the tension of touch between Adam and God in the Sistine chapel. This piece continues Chiaverini’s exploration of the joy and childlike wonder that is at the center of the exhibition, but in a much more unique way. For this drawing, the artist utilized a stack of four white towels as the canvas to illustrate a scene of two Santas and a man in leather. Towels, as a material, are charged with an innate queerness from the homoerotic environment of locker rooms, saunas, and gay bathhouses. Rather than draw the image on a single towel, though, Chiaverini embraced the idea of multiplicity by using the edges of multiple towels to display the image. This sense of being on the edges and existing in the peripheral is one that many queer people can relate to.
Chiaverini wasn’t just inspired by FMA’s archival imagery, but also of the organization itself and co-founder/artist Robert Morgan’s story. Some of the materials from the archive showcase Morgan performing in drag at The Crane’s Nest, a gay bar in West Palm Beach, in the 1980s. This connection between Florida and Kentucky allowed Chiaverini to connect his own childhood and upbringing in Fort. Lauderdale with the experiences of a queer Kentuckian existing in the same kind of space decades earlier. Chiaverini described his connection with Morgan as ships passing in the night, but actively screaming at each other to get each other’s attention the whole time.
To honor Morgan and that connection, Chiaverini created Owner of the Archive (Stand-in Board) (2025), a life-size carnival cutout of Morgan performing in drag at a Halloween show at The Crane’s Nest. As the co-founder of FMA, Morgan has always been one to see the importance of collecting and memorializing those around him, especially in queer spaces. Chiaverini created this work to celebrate Morgan and showcase the idea of Morgan’s collecting as a sensibility, similarly to Susan Sontag’s notion of camp as a sensibility. Following the trend of other pieces in the show, this cutout allows visitors to physically step into Morgan’s image and imagine what it would be like to embody his being and his sensibility of collecting, preservation, and storytelling. Morgan's face, that was cut out of the image, is hung on the wall across the room. Inspired by Jose Munoz’s theory of queer horizons and aspiration, Morgan becomes the sun; something to look towards—a dream.
While there is immense joy in the archival images, and the exhibition itself, Chiaverini was intentional to not ignore the hardships that being queer can entail. In Bikini Kills, he explores the horrors of being queer and marginalized. The piece evokes the sensation of searching for joy on an island with a pina colada, but yet there are sharks in the water. There is a constant threat, but there is also still joy despite it. He also looks internally at his own experiences. In Hollywood Tail (2025), Chiaverini is seen mid-transformation, asking what it is like for him to directly be a part of that parade. From the joys and horrors of living life as a queer person in the world, to the vibrantly colored feathers and blue eyeshadow, to the fossilized shark teeth and in-between state, Chiaverini highlights both the blessing and the burden of having a body. Chiaverini’s queer self is full of constant contradictions of beauty and ugliness, feeling lost and feeling joy, being perceived and being scared.
Santa’s Lap, 2025, Feather Chiaverini
For the artist, craft is joy. At the end of the day, he wants visitors to experience the excitement of what it's like to be backstage in a world of drag queen easter egg mermaids. In this world that he has created, we can all take part in embracing the joy and helping to sweep up the glitter at the end of the show.
Feather Chiaverini’s exhibition Birds of a Feather is on display at 2nd Story in Lexington, KY through December 5, 2025. Read more about the exhibit at https://www.2ndstory.art/current/birds-of-a-feather
