Kenney Mencher

 

Click here to view in your browser Troy Montes-Michie, America Is Woven of Many Threads #1, 2019 (From the exhibition "Rock of Eye" at California African American Museum) QUEER|ART EVENTS: FEBRUARY 2022 February of 2022 in New York City brings the return of some age-old experiences and the introduction some new ones. Trying to squeeze in 5 minutes of Vitamin D from a rare direct hit of sunlight is classic. Under new, I might file delicately maneuvering mask straps beneath a beanie with gloves on, while putting away a metrocard. There's some familiar and new experiences in the Queer|Art realm this month too (smooth transition)! Queer|Art|Film returns to IFC Center, but with a special duo of curators to ring in the winter season: multidisciplinary filmmakers Angelo Madsen Minax and Mev Luna. Presenters this season will include CA Conrad (presenting on February 14th!), Jeffrey Gibson, Legacy Russell & AnaÏs Duplan, and T. Fleischmann. And on the non-frozen west coast, don't miss the first museum solo exhibition of 2013-2014 QAM Fellow Troy Montes-Michie, opening on February 16th at CAAM in Los Angeles. The show features work familiar to those who have tracked the artist's work in recent years, while the collection also unfurls into exciting new territories.  —Evan Scott, Newsletter Editor P.S. Check out more highlights for February: BESPOKE reading series, co-organized by C. Quintana (CQ) (Feb 2) virgil b/g taylor: Minor Publics at Artists Space (Opens Feb 4)  First Mondays, organized by Sarah Schulman, at Performance Space (Feb 7) Carlos Motta and Tiamat Legion Medusa at OCDChinatown (Feb 11 - April 10) Thomas Allen Harris' Through a Lens Darkly screening/in conversation (Feb 10/25/28) Harrison David Rivers' This Bitter Earth at InterAct (Through Feb 20) Toni Morrison's Black Book, curated by Hilton Als, at David Zwirner (Through Feb 26) Nicole Eisenman at Aargauer Kunsthaus (Through April 24) Guadalupe Rosales at the Dallas Museum of Art (Through June 11) Articles by Hilton Als, Jess Barbagallo, and Darren Jones More info on the above and much more below! Can't see everything? Click here to view in your browser. RESOURCES FOR RACIAL JUSTICE & UPCOMING DEADLINES Looking through our Resources for Black Liberation page, a pick for February: Guide to Allyship -  An open source starter guide to help one become a more thoughtful and effective ally. Here are a few upcoming deadlines for artists from our Winter List: MacDowell Residency - MacDowell is accepting applications for its September 2022-February 2023 residencies. Fellowships in New Hampshire consists of exclusive use of a private studio, accommodations, and three prepared meals a day for two to six weeks. Deadline: February 10 The Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship - The Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship Program awards four early-career playwrights with nine months of resources, workshops and feedback designed to help them reach their professional and artistic goals. Deadline: February 13 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program - The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program awards rent-free non-living studio space to 17 visual artists for year-long residencies in DUMBO. Deadline: February 15 For more, check out our Community Resources, including COVID-19 Artist Resources.   THIS MONTH'S EVENTS AND ACCESSIBLE  ARTWORKS BY QUEER|ART ARTISTS C. Quintana (CQ) February 2nd, 7pm ET: BESPOKE NEXT GEN Online Event: The inaugural BESPOKE NEXT GEN, co-organized by 2016-2017 QAM Fellow C. Quintana (CQ), will feature readings by four fabulous writers: Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Nawaaz Ahmed, Emma Horwitz, and Beth Hightower, plus a Q&A. The free reading, hosted virtually by the Bureau of General Services–Queer Division, will serve as a fundraiser for NYC Lunar New Year for All, a community organization devoted to the safety and wellness of the queer AAPI population in celebration of the lunar new year. More here. virgil b/g taylor Opens February 4th: Minor Publics Exhibition (NYC): virgil b/g taylor: Minor Publics is a large-scale installation at Artists Space exploring the boundaries between art and memorial through research and poetic encounters with Sol LeWitt’s Black Form–Dedicated to the Missing Jews, an atypically political work which LeWitt donated to the city of Hamburg in 1989.  2016-2017 QAM fellow virgil b/g taylor’s compositions unfurl as a series of language-based graphic interventions and study environments that develop an intimate vocabulary around LeWitt’s work while also foregrounding cultures of public memory. More here. Sarah Schulman February 7th, 7pm ET: First Mondays  Performance (NYC): First Mondays: Readings of New Works in Progress, organized by Sarah Schulman for Performance Space, returns for the Winter/Spring season. The program shares accomplished writers’ processes as they are happening, providing an intimate insight into their new work in-progress, long before publication or performances. For February, I HATE MEMORY: An anti-musical in progress, written by Eszter Balint, with songs by Eszter Balint and Stew, directed by Lucy Sexton. More here. Carlos Motta February 11th - April 10th: When I Leave This World Exhibition (NYC): OCDChinatown’s current exhibition, When I Leave This World, premieres a two-channel video installation that centers the life and work of performance and body-modification artist Tiamat Legion Medusa, with QAM Mentor Carlos Motta as collaborator and interlocutor. Adopting the names of mythological monsters and the pronouns it/its, Medusa simultaneously transitioned from male to female and from human to reptile. The videos present Medusa’s inner and outer worlds, combining to form a double portrait. More here. Thomas Allen Harris February 10th: Through a Lens Darkly screening/Q&A  February 25th: In conversation February 28th: Through a Lens Darkly discussion Online Events: Multi-year QAM Mentor Thomas Allen Harris  will appear in three virtual programs in February. On February 10th and 28th, Harris' 2014 film, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People will screen for Yale School of Medicine’s first ever Black History Month Film Series (more here) and discussed for Prince George’s County Memorial Library (more here), respectively. On February 25th: Yale Center for British Art’s event, “At Home: Artists in Conversation,” with artist and filmmaker Billy Gerard Frank. More here. Utē Petit / Sasha Wortzel Ongoing, through February 11th: The Symbiotic Shore Exhibition (FL): The work of current QAM Fellow Utē Petit and 2012-2013 QAM Fellow Sasha Wortzel's work can be seen in The Symbiotic Shore, curated by the Institute of Queer Ecology for the Bas Fisher Invitational in Miami. The show proposes evolving Miami into a “Symbiotic City:” a civic strategy for environmental harm reduction and climate adaptation. The ongoing project of saving this world requires constantly remaking it, re-grounding the work in mutualistic symbioses rather than individualistic competition. More here.  Carrie Moyer Ongoing, through February 13th: Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times Exhibition (NYC): Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times, which originated at the Portland Museum of Art, will be presented at the Museum of Arts and Design. The show explores 2014-2015 QAM Mentor Carrie Moyer and sculptor Sheila Pepe's individual and collaborative works, rich with color and materiality, with themes of craft, feminism, and queer activism. The couple, who have been together for 25 years, have also created a site-specific work for the exhibition, Parlor for the People, that reimagines the religious tradition of the tabernacle as a communal space open to all for the discussion of justice, equality, knowledge, and these “trying times.” More here.  QUEER | ART | FILM February 14th, 8pm ET: CA Conrad presents Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean Queer|Art|Film returns this winter at the IFC Center with a special season curated by multidisciplinary filmmakers (and QAM Mentor/Fellow duo!) Angelo Madsen Minax and Mev Luna. For both artists, language and autoethnography play pivotal roles in their respective experimental documentary and visual art practices. As such, Minax and Luna have sought out presenters who are deeply invested in the intersection of the written word and visual culture.  Check out the full season lineup here. For February's program, CA Conrad Presents Robert Altman's 1982 film, Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, adapted from Ed Graczyk's stage play. The film takes place inside a decrepit Woolworth’s five-and-dime store 90 miles outside Marfa, Texas, where a group of women, formerly the “Disciples of James Dean” fan club, reunite on the 20th anniversary of the actor’s death. Conrad has seen the film over 110 times. More info and buy tickets here! Troy Montes-Michie February 16th - September 4th: Rock of Eye February 16th, 10pm ET: In conversation w/Tina Campt Publication/Exhibition (Los Angeles): Rock of Eye, the first museum solo exhibition of 2013-2014 QAM Fellow Troy Montes-Michie, is presented at the California African American Museum. To tailor a garment by “rock of eye” is to rely on the drape in the fitting process—that is, to rely on experience over mathematical measurement. This exhibition brings together Montes-Michie's collages, drawings, sculptures, and installations that draw the contours of body and place.  It begins with, and departs from, the artist's past assemblages and collages that center magazine images of the Black male body and trace the social history and form of the zoot suit, a garment at the center of the 1943 attacks primarily on Mexican American, African American, and Filipino American youth in Los Angeles known as the Zoot Suit Riots.  An artist's book accompanies the exhibition. More here.  Rick Herron February 16th - 20th: The Messenger: Works by John Burton Harter and R E Roberts Exhibition (Los Angeles): 2013-2014 QAM Fellow Rick Herron has curated a selection for Spring Break Los Angeles, The Messenger: Works by John Burton Harter and R E Roberts. Pervert hate with innocence. Flash the inquisition a smile. Take the devil on a date. The Messenger is a fantasy in the face of calamity. John Burton Harter and R E Roberts, two gay men born in the 1940s, create worlds where imagination thrives and homosexual desire flourishes. In the words of Bjork, "Imagine a future and be in it." More here. Chitra Ganesh February 18th - July 25th: Dreaming in Multiverse Exhibition (MO): The Kemper Art Museum presents Chitra Ganesh: Dreaming in Multiverse, an exhibition of a series of recent prints by 2014-2015 QAM Mentor Chitra Ganesh as well as several video animations. Ganesh draws on Buddhist and Hindu iconography, science fiction, queer theory, comics, Surrealism, Bollywood posters, and video games, combining them with her own visual imagery and drawings to present speculative visions of society in the past, present, and future. More here. Harrison David Rivers Through February 20th: This Bitter Earth Performance (PA): Philadelphia's InterAct Theatre Presents 2011-2012 QAM Fellow Harrison David Rivers' play, This Bitter Earth, directed by Tyrone L. Robinson. The story follows Jesse and Neil. A protest brought Jesse, an introspective Black playwright, together with his white boyfriend Neil, a Black Lives Matter activist. But as Neil immerses himself deeper in the movement, Jesse finds his choices challenged and their love on the line. More here. Hilton Als Through February 26th: Toni Morrison's Black Book Exhibition (NYC): Hilton Als has curated Toni Morrison’s Black Book, an exhibition presented at David Zwirner which takes as its starting point Morrison's 1974 book. Als writes, "Today, nearly fifty years after it made its auspicious debut, the National Book Award–nominated, seminal volume continues to exercise a great influence on contemporary artists, just as Morrison’s writing has had a great effect on readers worldwide. Indeed, one could view the writer’s fictional oeuvre as a kind of corollary to The Black Book. In her “scrapbook” and in her novels, Morrison built a grand and spacious architecture to house the visual, linguistic, and political reality of Blackness, and the sustenance, complications, and joy to be found there, too." More here. Louise Fishman Ongoing, through February 26th: 1960s: Darkness and Light Exhibition (NYC): Karma presents 1960s: Darkness and Light, a solo exhibition of nine never-before-seen historical paintings by 2011-2012 QAM Mentor Louise Fishman (1939-2021). Widely known for her gestural markmaking and atmospheric spaces, Fishman’s paintings from 1962 and 1963 showcase some of the artist’s earliest forays into abstraction. Fishman “felt that Abstract Expressionist work was an appropriate  language for me as a queer. It was a hidden language, on the radical fringe, a language appropriate to being separate.” More here. Louise Fishman Ongoing, through February 26th: A Question of Emphasis Exhibition (Champaign): The Krannert Art Museum presents A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing, the first career spanning exhibition and publication of 2011-2012 QAM Mentor