Seth Ter Haar

Seth Ter Haar
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

STATEMENT

Within queer culture, spirituality is often the least engaged form of connection, shaped by long histories of exclusion and harm. My work explores the intersection of queer sexuality, spirituality, and craft through woodworking and curation, using cruising—the ways gay and questioning men establish intimacy in public spaces such as parks, bathhouses, and bars—as both subject and framework. Cruising offers a way to understand how belief, trust, and connection are formed outside institutional structures. In this context, enlightenment is not a relationship between the individual and God, but between self and community, embodied knowledge, and shared liberation.

Rather than rejecting religion outright, my work borrows its visual language, rituals, and structures of “enlightenment,” reimagining them through queer experience, gender, sexuality, and personal anecdotes or “parables.” I extend this queering of religion through the use of digital fabrication techniques such as CNC routing and laser cutting. Modernism and the ways sacred forms emerged in an industrialized, fast-paced world through new technologies and materials interest me aesthetically and reinforce my design ideology. Works such as Tabernacle and Ark for Queer Spirituality embody this intersection, blending phallic marquetry and modernist form into an object that is both protective and flamboyant, a site for queer exploration and gathering.

Ultimately, my practice treats craft as a devotional act and queer intimacy as a form of knowledge-making. Through wood, technology, and ritualized form, I construct spaces where desire becomes sacred, vulnerability becomes strength, and community itself functions as the site of belief, care, and collective transcendence.

BIO

Seth Ter Haar is an artist, woodworker, curator, and self-proclaimed “fisher of men,” whose work explores the intersection of spirituality and contemporary gay culture. A 2024–2026 Fellow of Docomomo Wisconsin, Ter Haar studied modern art and architecture with particular attention to the queer femme–founded Layton School of Art and twentieth-century religious spaces across Wisconsin. His programming and research examined the ideologies behind making the sacred through postwar material experimentation and technical innovation, earning him the first-ever Student Documentation Award at Docomomo US’s Modernism in America Awards (2025).

In his artistic practice, Ter Haar extends these inquiries by employing emerging technologies, including laser cutting and CNC machining, to reinterpret historical woodworking traditions through religious iconography, translating familiar faith-based imagery into queer frameworks of spiritual enlightenment. His work has been recognized through awards and fellowships, including the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2023), participation in the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix grant program (2023), and finalist status for Milwaukee’s Nohl Fellowship (2025).

Ter Haar’s exploration of spirituality within queer culture also informs his curatorial work, which spans exhibition-making, event organizing, and collaborative programming. This community-driven practice is grounded in care for artists and the health of queer communities across the United States. He has served as Gallery Director at the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network, curated exhibitions for multiple organizations, including his alma mater the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and is currently serving as the Managing Director of the Kolaj Institute in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ARTIST CONTACT

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