This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.
Andy Bellomo’s glassworks art practice was sparked from a place often filled with turmoil for many in the queer community—the Christian church.
Bellomo’s love of art blossomed while she closely observed stained glass windows in churches she attended with a friend while growing up in Boston. Now, as an educator and artist in Chicago, she focuses much of her creative work on queer people and underrepresented experiences, such as queer parenting.
For her, there was a strong juxtaposition between how she discovered the medium she worked in for much of her career and who she was as a person.
“I was really into this art form, but at the same time, the space that was housing the art form was extremely homophobic, based on my experience in the church,” she said. “I didn’t fully come out until I moved to Chicago, which was in 2008, so I was 28…and then I slowly picked [glass] back up, reconnected to it, rediscovered it in a way.”
Bellomo began taking classes and workshops about stained glass since she loved the “emotional feeling” of the transcending light and color. This wasn’t her first experience with art, however—when she was a child, Bellomo’s mother supported her love of drawing and would buy her supplies and enter her in contests.
She later took up painting and drawing and worked as the director of a Boston art center. Bellomo knew she always wanted a career in art but didn’t know if it was achievable, so she studied education.
However, she found her way back to glass after moving to Chicago to study under a mosaic artist working with tile and ceramic murals.
Now in Chicago for over 15 years, she’s focused her work more deeply on the queer community and the queer experience. One of her projects includes a queer mural series highlighting Chicago activists and artists, which to date has included 10 individuals.
“The idea is to create these larger-than-life portraits,” Bellomo said. “So that the work that these artists are doing gets a voice. It gets heard. It gets a platform.”
The project paused during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which coincidentally was a year before Bellomo became a parent. The shift in her life inspired her to focus her work on the experience of having a queer family.
Activism seeps into Bellomo’s many roles—as educator, parent and volunteer with HP Solidarity Network in Humboldt Park, among others—and she sees herself representing her community in both her activist work and artistic output.
“I’m surrounded by an abundance of extremely talented, hardworking activists who are artists,” she said. “We do community events here at my house, where we get together in community for food, but we also make it a donation—so everyone will bring a coat or stuff that we can donate. Then we’re getting together, obviously, to talk and hang out and socialize and regain that energy from each other.”
Jenn Freeman, a Black queer choreographer in Chicago, was Bellomo’s instructor in a burlesque class. A self-proclaimed introvert, Freeman sees Bellomo as someone who takes them out of their shell.
They’ve now been friends for about 15 years, and Freeman has seen firsthand how being a queer birthing parent has transformed Bellomo’s life. And when Freeman looks at Bellomo’s art, they said they can clearly see how important her community is to her.
“[One of] the things that comes to mind when I think about Andy’s art practice is love, a deep love for not only the art, but the people that she’s uplifting,” Freeman said. “I think especially now that she’s a mom, I think a lot of her work is about understanding herself.”
Right now, one of Bellomo’s main focuses is queer childbirth and family. She’s hosted events where she’s provided free childcare and educated people on the experience of being a queer parent and artist. She’s also putting together a queer parenting coloring book filled with photos of 100 queer families in Chicago.
She is additionally creating a series of textile paintings—with half embroidery, half painting—depicting postpartum and childbirth trauma. Bellomo said she experienced highly homophobic environments while pregnant and giving birth, and the art will provide viewers the opportunity to engage with those experiences. One of the works will be displayed at the Woman Made Gallery group show in January.
“It’s this interesting work to dig deep into and think about the world, the larger world, as well as the community and the people around you and people who are trying to give birth to create this radical new generation,” she said. “But you still have all these systems in place that are holding us down in many different avenues [in] many different ways.”
She regards her art and her queer experience as being inseparable from one another.
Bellomo reflected, “I feel like it’s so innately into me because I’ve been practicing as an activist for so long and an educator, that what I build in an art practice…is about the people around me always—and it’s about my community and it’s about what’s happening in the community.”
