Zeph Fishlyn (they/them) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and activist dedicated to personal and collective storytelling as nonlinear tools for reinventing our world. Zeph’s public projects, drawings, objects and installations nurture alternative narratives by questioning, dreaming, distorting, celebrating and demanding. Their most recent work explores sources of collective and personal resilience as foundations for action in the face of overwhelming circumstances.

Zeph is a serial collaborator with social and environmental justice groups inventing creative responses to economic crisis and climate change — including Greenpeace, the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the PDX Trans Housing Coalition, and the Center for Artistic Activism. Zeph also worked as a researcher, illustrator and storyteller with the Beehive Design Collective’s True Cost of Coal graphics campaign, an intricate portable mural and workshop developed in collaboration with Appalachian grassroots organizations that has traveled to hundreds of cities in the US and internationally.

Zeph is an MFA Candidate in Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice program, where they are projected to graduate in September of 2020. For Gender Euphoria, Zeph will create a participatory iteration of their ongoing project Sum of its Parts.

“Anthropomopolyology is a wearable, custom screen-printed hanky and accompanying mini user manual. The project draws on the queer cruising “hanky code,” a custom of wearing different colored bandanas to make specific sexual offers and requests. The original art for the hanky depicts a celebratory international gathering of thirteen anthropomorphized species whose scientifically-observed romantic and sexual lives are queer as fuck (chosen from 450 species detailed in Bruce Begamihl’s 1999 book, Biological Exuberance.) The hanky is being distributed nationally and is anchoring a short video project to be completed when we can touch each other again. The project highlights the wide variety of ways both humans and animals can express relationships, throwing up a fabulously queer rebuttal to heteronormative ideas of what is ‘natural.’ ”

— Zeph Fishlyn