one person. one room in Chicago. objects, prints, and paraphernalia made from the inside.
I trained as a designer. For years I made things for other people — clean, professional, anonymous work that could have come from anyone. Good work. Not mine.
Somewhere in there I noticed the objects I actually wanted to exist… didn't. Queer culture has its own language — slang, gestures, in-jokes, decades of history — and almost none of it gets made into real, well-designed things. What we get instead is rainbow merch that shows up every June and disappears by July, designed by people translating us from the outside.
So in 2024 I stopped waiting and started Q.M.M. — Queer Mixed Media — in one room in Chicago. 3D printed objects, original paintings, street art, merch. The first piece was Grippy, a premium poppers case, because if a thing is going to live in our pockets it deserves to be designed like it matters.
Every piece takes something that's ours — slang, gestures, in-jokes, history — and turns it into a thing you can hold, wear, hang, or smoke. Reclamation as a design practice.
No focus groups. No brand team. No translation for outsiders. One queer person making things for queer people. If you got it, you got it.
Q.M.M. is a studio, not a store. Objects come out when they're ready, in numbered editions — because they had to exist, not because the calendar said so.
Sketches on whatever's nearest. Reference walls. Cut-and-paste collage to find the form. If a piece doesn't earn a reaction at this step, it doesn't make it past it.
Print, paint, paste, cast. Every piece touches multiple stations on the floor — print bay, paint wall, finishing station. Mistakes get kept if they're better than the plan.
Sand, seal, sign, number. Documented and editioned in the same week. Boxed by hand and out the door.
commissions, collabs, and good ideas all welcome.
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