Conversation with Artist Elle Pérez and Associate Curator Ashton Cooper

The Des Moines Art Center invites visitors to join artist Elle Pérez in conversation with Associate Curator Ashton Cooper. The two will discuss and dive into the body of photographs presented in the exhibition “Elle Pérez: La Despedida,” on view in the A. H. Blank Gallery through November 29, 2026. Elle Pérez is an artist working across photography, collage, and moving image. Their work depicts intimate moments, emotional exchanges, and visceral details within the love and violence of everyday life. Pérez’s photographs balance casual observation with conceptual and formalist considerations: intentionally sequenced installations, collages that act as mind maps, and structuralist films that highlight the tension between image and text, description and embodiment. Their work celebrates the ambiguity inherent to photography and queerness — a photograph is not an illustration, it can both resist discursive limitations and hold meaning beyond language. Pérez made their first photographs as a teenager while attending punk shows in the Bronx. They have continued making artwork made for the audience it grows out of, rather than simply being about them. The artist’s 2025 series “La Despedida (the world is always ending, the world is always again beginning)” encompasses photographs taken in the gardens of two very different sites: Pérez’s grandfather’s backyard in Puerto Real, Puerto Rico, and Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France. In the eleven photographs on view, Pérez deploys close cropping, zooming in on expanses of blooming flowers, lace curtains, and breaking waves. REGISTER Free; registration required. Image: Artist Elle Pérez. Photo: KL Mays.