Every Ocean Hughes’s text-based work Uncounted (2017) lands on a pivotal question in queer practice: “How can we build a structure to be alive inside—towards a building of space and commons that privileges movement and margins?” In the first comprehensive publication on Hughes’s work, authors in the field of queer spatial practice turn to this question through the lens of her work of the past fifteen years. In 2009, amidst rapid gentrification, Hughes photographed the New York piers, as unmarked memorials to the marginalized communities that once gathered there. These photographs were presented in the artist’s 2023 survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art: cut and collaged images on Hughes’s signature color walls. The act of taking these photographs and presenting them bookends this publication and the works that Hughes created between then and now, which explore queer spaces as structures of death and life, disappearance, and re/materialization.

Every Ocean Hughes (formerly known as Emily Roysdon) is a transdisciplinary artist and writer. Solo shows include Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); Studio Voltaire, London (2022); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Secession, Vienna (2015); and PARTICIPANT INC., New York (2015). She has received commissions for new work from Tate Modern, London (2012, 2017); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014); and The Kitchen, New York (2010). Group exhibitions include The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023, 2014); Future Generation Art Prize (2013); and the Whitney Biennial (2010). Collaboration has been a central part of her practice including as editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal LTTR. Between 2019–20 Hughes was a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2013–21 she was professor of fine art at Konstfack University in Stockholm and from 2021–23 she was the Sachs Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.