In Fire Island Pines, Creighton Baxter's Performance Art Piece for BOFFO's Residency

As the sun set over Fire Island Pines on May 31st, transdisciplinary artist Creighton Baxter stepped onto the suspended interior bridge of an architecturally significant home named for its address, 547 Beachcomber Walk, though nicknamed the “Boys in the Sand” house after the gay adult film shot inside circa 1972. The walls of the home had been accented with Baxter’s drawings. The ground floor began to swell with attendees. When capacity was reached, a hush settled over the crowd—broken by a beguiling performance that represented the culmination of Baxter’s time at the BOFFO artist residency.

BOFFO is a nonprofit arts community in Fire Island Pines, a haven (and celebratory destination) for queer people on a sandy barrier island along the southern coast of Long Island. Founded in 2009 by Faris Saad Al-Shathir, the nonprofit hosts the hamlet’s performance festival and orchestrates artist residencies, installations, artistic interventions, and cultural programming. BOFFO also asks previous residents to propose studio visits with new artists to consider. This was what brought Baxter to the organization’s attention.

“I came into the residency to settle into a different creative flow,” Baxter, who performed at MoMA as part of Angelito Collective’s Vital Signs Artist Night, shares with Surface, “so that I could experiment. But also, some of it was a point of rest for me in the beginning.” This began with visits to the beach every day, which led to line drawings in the sand that the artist would watch disappear. “I had completed a 12-year-long series of gestures where I was consuming drawings. Being at the ocean’s edge and making these line drawings in the sand was a way to watch an image dissolve differently. It was a place of reflection.”

Baxter, who draws every day, began to produce diaristic, iterative works on paper. By the end of the residency, she had nearly 70, 50 of which she installed in 547 Beachcomber Walk. Architecture wasn’t merely the vessel for the performance, it inspired it. “Soon after getting to the island, I began to notice how architecture functions in the Pines,” she says. “There are these perceptual portals of desire between spaces, but also these sight lines and proximities between windows. They’re about desire, but they’re also about class and about inclusion or exclusion.”

“That influenced the way I installed drawings in my final presentation,” she says. “I was thinking about where drawings would go inside of the house, to have people cruising the drawings for these moments of encounter, where you turn a corner at a staircase and you see a small image, maybe close to the floor, and then you look up and there’s one above a bridge. I think the architecture and my time looking through these houses is what influenced those gestures.”

The BOFFO team and Baxter spent days trying to secure a meaningful home for the installation and performance—something that would influence installation and enrich the dialogue. “BOFFO is such an interesting time warp,” she says, “because it’s three weeks, which is not very long, but you’re kind of on island time. There is this simultaneity of swiftness and an immense slowness.”

When they were able to guarantee “The Boys in the Sand” house, Baxter spent two hours exploring the interiors to align her thoughts. “I wanted to make sure that there were drawings located across the house that would incentivize a curious viewer to traverse the whole home,” she says. “When I saw these wooden sliding doors that divided off the kitchen, I knew that was going to be the site of performance. With this architectural detail I could create a boxed-in frame of myself to perform inside of.” Baxter installed her two largest drawings—figures facing each other—on that wall so that attendees would collect themselves closer to it. She then created an orbit of artwork around it all.

“I, for a long time, have made performances in relation to drawing,” she continues. “I’ve also made performances in relation to drawing as the action; that is a core part of my practice, and that was certainly true before I came to BOFFO. I knew going into the residency that I would be drawing, and I knew that I wanted to develop and extend some performance gestures I’ve been trying over the last few months.”

During the performance, through the power of repetition, Baxter gathered up everyone’s attention and encouraged continued engagement. “I aim to hit different effective registers with the same words over a specific duration,” she says. “What I hope to conjure up when I’m developing those is, ‘how do I hit a register that’s startling, seductive, awkward, funny, antagonistic, connective.” Through it all, delivery is casual—as if it’s just sort of unfolding.

Baxter reacts to the audience throughout her performances, often in subtle ways. “It is really about assessing what’s happening energetically, for lack of a better word, with the audience. Who’s there? How are they there? Is it a rowdy crowd? Is it a quiet crowd? 12 people or 300? Those things dictate how I get from point A to point B.” For the BOFFO residency, the audience was entirely queer, trans, or a community ally. Their enthusiasm offered a safe space for Baxter to proceed with full support.

“BOFFO as an organization, but also as a residency program, is an incredibly singular and unique experience for an artist in general, and especially right now in 2025,” she says. “Part of it is that it’s a queer-focused residency. But it is also about Faris and his team, and the way that they foster spaces of experimentation, and the support that was given. A residency that’s specifically geared for queer and trans artists is extremely vital.”

Baxter calls attention to the additional work that must be done around the dynamics between queer people—along lines of race, class, and access to Fire Island Pines. Still, she notes, art provides agency. “What radicalized me around art was understanding that when I look at a work of art, I bring meaning to it,” Baxter says. “I can have agency in what an artwork means or does. For anyone who loves art, I hope they remember that. Art can remind us that we do have power.”

“My work comes out of my material condition,” she concludes. “It comes out of the reality that I live in and that we all live in. I’m a trans woman living with HIV who has witnessed and been in a world in which people like me, as well as my neighbors, are degraded and dehumanized constantly. I hope that anyone who loves art or makes art can remember that we need to push back against all of this.”