Across research, studio practice, publishing, and curatorial work, Storey approaches queer history as something living rather than fixed: continually gathered, questioned, preserved, and reimagined.
Nathan Storey is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, publisher, educator, and poet whose practice moves between studio, archival research, small-press publishing, and exhibition-making. Born in Texas, Storey has lived and worked across the Southwest in Boulder, Colorado; Taos, New Mexico; and Southern California. Now based in New York, his work traces relationships between printed matter and queer desire, memory, and loss, asking how histories survive through images, fragments, and evidence people leave behind.
Storey’s research centers on the period beginning with the expansion of queer liberation movements after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising through the AIDS crisis and reactionary backlash against queer visibility leading up to 1995—the year of his birth and the deadliest year of the epidemic in the United States. He returns to printed matter from this era as evidence of a historical hinge, when the horizon of liberation collided with catastrophe. Through unearthing, layering, and assemblage, Storey considers how archives remain alive: fragmentary, haunted, and charged with queer history.
His studio work is currently included in Off the Page at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder, a group exhibition exploring how contemporary artists engage language, literature, media, and storytelling. Boulder has also been an important site in the development of Storey’s practice, where research, publishing, exhibition-making, and community-building increasingly began to overlap.
In 2024, Storey founded UNDERTOW, Colorado’s first queer print press. Founded in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and now expanded to Brooklyn, UNDERTOW supports LGBTQ+ artists through zines, editions, ephemera, exhibitions, workshops, and community programming. Working at the intersection of queer culture, print, and advocacy, the press approaches publishing as both a means of circulation and a method for preserving and expanding queer visual culture. UNDERTOW is a recipient of Printed Matter’s Shannon Michael Cane Award and will present new projects this fall at Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and the New York Queer Zine Fair.
These questions also animate Storey’s curatorial project, RUINS: PERFORMING QUEER HISTORY. Presented in its third iteration at East Window in Boulder, RUINS brings together interdisciplinary artists who engage queer histories, archives, and loss through contemporary studio practices. Across its iterations, the exhibition asks how artists unearth LGBTQ+ histories, search for fragmentary evidence, and reimagine relationships connecting queer lives across time.
For the Boulder presentation, Storey brings together artists with ties to Colorado whose works explore queer embodiment, intimacy, public space, and collective memory across drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and painting. Colorado becomes both a geographical point of connection and a site through which questions of migration, rurality, community, belonging, and queer visibility emerge. The first presentation of RUINS opened at Union Hall in Denver in 2025, followed by a second iteration at BEST PRACTICE in San Diego in 2026.
Across research, studio practice, publishing, and curatorial work, Storey approaches queer history as something living rather than fixed: continually gathered, questioned, preserved, and reimagined. His commitment is to queer art and queer evidence—to what remains, what disappears, and what can still be carried forward.
You can encounter Storey’s work in person this fall at the Dairy Arts Center and East Window in Boulder, Colorado. Visit his website to explore additional projects, exhibitions, and ongoing work.
nathanstoreyarchive.com /@___nathans
undertoweditions.com / @undertow_editions
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