Urgent Care Art’s pop-ups in quotidian Tucson spaces juxtapose the healing and fear inherent to queer visibility.
Tucson, Arizona | @urgent_care_art
Lex Gjurasic and Eli Burke go way back, with each other and Tucson. The friends and fellow interdisciplinary artists have lived here for decades, and they’re also highly active members of the larger metro area’s tight-knit queer scene, which recently led them to an existential art-world question.
“We’re out here, we’re making work,” says Gjurasic. “But is the work out of the closet?” The LGBTQ+ community’s insularity is a protective measure, and from the inside, it can be hard to tell if your work resonates beyond your hyperlocal chosen family.
The duo cooked up Urgent Care Art, a mercurial project that drops local queer artists into unexpected corners of Tucson’s community. Its smiley face logo is political critique, dominated by an “institutional teal” evoking “hospital sickness,” according to Gjurasic. Funding from MOCA Tucson and the Andy Warhol Foundation clicked into place, and they sought out a venue for their inaugural event in January 2025—far from the polished museum spaces of downtown Tucson.
Still OK was a one-night happening at the shuttered grocery store OK Market in east Tucson, which is now owned by someone from out of state. Local artists had previously wheat-pasted the building’s exterior with historical photographs from the neighborhood. Burke and Gjurasic enlisted Casney Tadeo to illustrate domestic scenes for a projection inside the structure, while Ondrea Bell Levey crafted Tucson-themed piñatas that hung outside. Participants could only view the building’s momentarily reactivated interior through a peephole in the façade.
“It’s a space in transition… that’s being co-opted by the community,” says Burke. “We’re using this ghostly medium to kind of intervene in the space.” He adds, “You can look in but you can’t enter—you don’t have permission,” relating his experience of fielding intrusive questions as a trans man and witnessing the queer community’s defiant recovery from the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.
The tension and intrigue of Urgent Care reside in its half-open posture, although Burke and Gjurasic are planning to unveil their own artwork and stories during future pop-up events. “The community urgently needs care, urgently needs art,” says Gjurasic. “We’re bringing [queer art] to them.”
