Return »

Click on images or links for high-resolution files. 

The following images may be used for editorial purposes in magazines, newspapers, and online.
Credit should be given to Petra Lommen unless otherwise indicated.

Quotes

Quotes by Peter/Petra were drawn from a recent oral history about their life.

Identity in the Work: Hiding, Honesty, and Being Trans

Trans identity as artistic content

"I recognized how important [being transgender] was for my art… in order to expand my view of reality, you know, that I was actually experiencing something that was really unique, and that artists had these unique experiences that they express… it’s content, you know, it’s subject matter. And I recognized that.”

Abstraction, hiding, and later understanding

"I love abstraction, I think abstraction is really cool, but I’m also hiding behind that when I do that."

"Now I look back and I go, 'Oh, I know why I did that. I know what was happening.' Some things I'll never talk about, because I don’t want the work to get pinned by that; I want it to be more open… I’ve always kind of tried to feel like I was keeping the artwork open for ideas for other people to plug things into, not just me."

Honesty, identity, and advice to younger artists

"If you’re going to be an artist, you have to face up to what you do, and you’re going to have to face up to the fact that you’re this LGBTQ person… it’s going to be in your work whether you consciously put it in there or unconsciously put it in there."

Dinosaurs, paleontology and metaphor 

First encounters and a backyard museum

“Mendota grade school is really cool. Yeah, that was one of my funnest times… And that’s, you know, where I got turned on to dinosaurs.”

“In my backyard, a stream bed, you know? I was digging up fossils, stuff like that. I made my own museum when I was about six or seven, yeah, showing fossils and my dinosaur collection.”

The Wonderful Egg and Archaeopteryx

“It was this book that was read in kindergarten… [The Wonderful Egg, by Dahlov Ipcar]… At the end of the book, the egg hatches and out comes Archaeopteryx, the first bird… That just totally turned me on to dinosaurs. I became a dinosaur fanatic after that.”

“I think that there’s a weird metaphor there about how Archaeopteryx, when you talk about the LGBTQ people… Archaeopteryx kind of represents this sort of huge difference, you know, in the world of the reptiles. All of a sudden this creature shows up that’s got feathers and it’s really colorful… Even as a kindergartener, I probably saw that metaphor there.”

The Life magazine mural: “The Age of Reptiles”

“My older cousin pulled out a Life magazine with Rudolph Zallinger’s mural from the Yale Peabody Museum. The Age of Reptiles  just knocked me out—I could sit for hours staring at it, totally sucked in.”

“Everybody of a certain age in art or science was shaped by that Zallinger mural. Ask paleontologists what inspired them and they’ll say the Life magazine article with that mural.”

Stars, Dresses, and Infinite Space

The starry night sky and early wonder

[When four or five years old of age] “I saw, like, in the attic… an antique vintage dress… black with all these beads, and it was like the starry night sky, and the stars and the sky… to me, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought, Man, this is me.”

Cosmos in abstraction and art

“Start seeing it in the stars, yeah… cosmology was representational. But yet as a abstraction, it was, like, super abstract… this super idea of infinite space along with this idea of just abstraction and arrangement… best of both worlds.”

*George Morrison (1919 - 2000) - Art Professor at the University of Minnesota 

**Victor Caglioti (1935 - 2025) - Art Professor at the University of Minnesota

†Tom Cowette (1938 - 2015) - Art Professor at the University of Minnesota

††Katherine Nash Gallery - art gallery located at the University of Minnesota Department of Art

The Age of Reptiles - 1947 fresco mural by Rudolph Zallinger

The Wonderful Egg - 1958 children's book by American artist and author, Dahlov Ipcar.