Queer|Art Announces Mentors for 2017-18 Program Cycle

By: May. 16, 2017
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Queer|Art has announced the new Mentors for the 2017-2018 program cycle of Queer|Art|Mentorship. Applications open June 1st.

Queer|Art|Mentorship was founded in 2011 to develop an intergenerational and interdisciplinary network of support and shared knowledge for LGBTQ artists. Now in its seventh year, the program brings together early-career and advanced-career artists for a year-long exchange in five different fields: Film, Literature, Performance, Visual Art, and Curatorial Practice.

The Mentors selected for the 2017-2018 program cycle represent a diverse and vibrant group of esteemed artists and curators whose work has made a tremendous impact across multiple sectors of the art world. Collectively, these individuals showcase a professional and cutting edge approach to queer art production in New York City and beyond. The 2017-2018 Mentors are:

FILM
Kimberly Reed (Director Prodigal Sons; Producer The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson), Frédéric Tcheng (Writer and director of Dior and I; Co-director of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel), and Rose Troche (Director Go Fish, Bedrooms and Hallways and The Safety of Objects; Producer Concussion)

VISUAL ART
Liz Collins (Artist and designer; United States Artist Target Fellowship recipient) and Neil Goldberg (Guggenheim Fellow, Faculty at Yale School of Art and Parsons)

LITERATURE
Che Gossett (Scholar and Critic; Winner of the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, and the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York) and Naomi Jackson (Author of The Star Side of Bird Hill; Honored book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards)

PERFORMANCE
Moe Angelos (Writer of six plays with her collaborative theatre company The Five Lesbian Brothers; Performer with The Builders Association since 1999) and David Thomson (Performer and Choreographer; Bessie Award-winning dancer for Sustained Achievement and as part of the creative team for Bebe Miller's Landing/Place)

CURATORIAL PRACTICE
Margaret Ewing (Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art) and C. Finley (Curator, Whitney Houston Biennial; Member of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?).

Each of these arts professionals will work with Queer|Art staff to select a Fellow within their respective field through a two-month application and review process that annually produces over 200 applications. The consistent volume of applicants received during the first six years of the program speaks to the important role Queer|Art|Mentorship performs within the arts community, as well as to the need of such programs in face of the continued lack of traditional institutional and economic support for the creation of LGBTQ work.

Fellows apply with a specific project they would like to work on during the program and, once accepted, meet with their Mentors monthly to discuss their progress. Fellows also meet each month as a group. In this way, the program nurtures exchange between artists at all levels of their careers and works against a natural segregation between generations and disciplines. At the culmination of the program, each fellow participates in a special exhibition, known as the QAM Annual, that showcases the progress of their project. The program begins in October and ends in November of the following year.

The 2017-2018 Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentors follow the successful participants of previous years, whose projects have been lauded and presented at venues such as The Whitney Biennial, MoMA, MoMA PS1, Art Basel Miami, Sundance Film Festival, Yaddo, White Columns, Abrons Art Center, Monya Rowe Gallery, The New Museum, The Kitchen, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Studio Museum, BAMcinématek, Berlin Film Festival, Hammer Museum, Hessel Museum of Art, among many others.

The timeline for the program is as follows:

Applications open: June 1, 2017

Intent to Apply Deadline: June 30, 2017

Application Deadline: July 31, 2017

Program Begins: October 2017

Program Ends: November 2018 (following the QAM Annual exhibition)

Prospective Fellows who are interested to apply should visit www.queer-art.org/mentorship for more information about the program, Mentors, and application instructions. Full bios for each Mentor are included below.

About the Queer|Art|Mentorship 2017-2018 Mentors:

Kimberly Reed is a documentary filmmaker, who produced and directed the landmark Prodigal Sons. The film garnered 14 Audience and Jury awards and landed on numerous "Best of the Year" lists after a successful theatrical run. A co-production with BBC Storyville and Sundance Channel, it is considered one of the most influential films to tell a story of transgender evolution and acceptance. Reed was recognized as The Advocate's "Five to Watch," and OUT Magazine's "Out 100." She was also the producer/editor/writer for the documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life, released theatrically by Zeitgeist Films, and a producer of The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. Filmmaker Magazine named her one of "25 New Faces of Independent Film." Reed is also a well-regarded writer.

Frédéric Tcheng is a civil engineer turned filmmaker. Originally from France, he holds a MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University. He co-produced and co-edited Valentino: The Last Emperor, the 2009 hit shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. He is the co-director of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, a Samuel Goldwyn release. Dior and I, his directorial debut, was released internationally in 2015 to critical and public acclaim. Frederic is also a cinematographer and an editor on several projects. He is currently developing fiction projects and directing documentaries.

Rose Troche is a writer/director/producer of film, television and new media. Her career began with her debut feature, Go Fish which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. She has continued to work in film, television and most recently Virtual Reality with three back to back debuts at Sundance (2015-17).

Liz Collins is an artist and designer who explores the boundaries between painting, fiber arts and installation, and enjoys pushing the limits and doing the unexpected across the spectrum of textile media. She uses geometric abstraction, principles of duality, i.e., chaos/order; tension/release; pain/pleasure; and optic pattern as a way to talk about energy and sensation. She frequently engages with and is inspired by architecture, seeing built space as a body to occupy. The cacophonic play of optics, texture, color and scale recreates her wavering experience of the world as a place of stupendous wonder and cosmic energy.

Neil Goldberg makes video, photo, mixed media, and performance work that focuses on embodiment, sensing, mortality and the everyday. This work has been exhibited at venues including The Museum of Modern Art (Permanent Collection), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of the City of New York, The Kitchen, and The Hammer Museum. Neil has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Parsons, was resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has served as a visiting artist at Cooper Union, SVA, NYU, RISD, the MIT Media Lab, UCLA, and elsewhere.

Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a PhD candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers. They are the recipient of the 2014 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award from the American Studies Association, a Radcliffe research grant from Harvard University and the 2014 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York, and the 2014 Martin Duberman Research Scholar Award from the New York Public Library. They are working on a book project titled Blackness, the Beast and the Non Sovereign and have been selected as a 2017 Palestine American Research Center fellow for their project titled "Non-Sovereignties: Personhood and Interspecies Politics of Palestinian Struggle".

Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill. Star Side was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, and named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jackson studied fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Moe Angelos is one of The Five Lesbian Brothers, who have written, performed and published six plays and other things that the internet can tell you all about. Moe has collaborated with the Builders Association as a performer and writer since 2000 and is now touring with The Builders' show, Elements of Oz. She has been involved with the WOW Café forever and has appeared in the work of many downtown luminaries including Carmelita Tropicana, Anne Bogart, Holly Hughes, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Brooke O'Harra, Half Straddle and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. To hear more, visit The Made Here Project and browse the artists.

David Thomson, a native New Yorker, has primarily worked as a collaborative performer/creator in the fields of music, dance, theater and performance with such artists as Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown ('87-'93), Susan Rethorst, Remy Charlip, Ralph Lemon ('99-'10), Sekou Sundiata, Tracie Morris, Meg Stuart, Dean Moss/Layla Ali, Alain Buffard, Marina Abramovíc, Yvonne Rainer and Maria Hassabi among many others. His work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project at St Mark's Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Gibney Dance Center, LMCC and The Invisible Dog. Thomson is a Bessie award-winning artist for Sustained Achievement (2001), a 2012 USArtist Ford Fellow, a 2013 NYFA Fellow in Choreography, a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow. He holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from SUNY Purchase.

Margaret Ewing is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, where she recently co-organized Kai Althoff: and then leave me to the common swifts. Past exhibitions include Pierre Huyghe: Untilled, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, and Carol Bove: The Equinox. Prior to joining MoMA, she contributed to the 2013 Triennial at the International Center of Photography and spent two years working in Berlin as a research fellow and critic, writing for Artforum, among other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois, where she completed her dissertation on Hans Haacke's work on postwar German politics and identity.

C. Finley is a New York and Rome based artist known for her elaborate geometric paintings, skillful use of color and her activism through street art. Previous projects include the 2014 Whitney Houston Biennial: I'm Every Woman, and Wallpapered Dumpsters which has been featured in the New York Times, La Repubblica, the Huffington Post, NYLON Magazine, Dazed, and Women's Wear Daily. Finley has shown internationally with exhibitions at Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna; Superchief Gallery Los Angeles; Jenn Singer Gallery New York; Context/Art Miami; Scope Miami and New York; FDA Projects, Rome; High Energy Constructs and Salon Oblique, Los Angeles; and the Dumba Collective, New York. As a member of the artist collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican?, she participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Finley received her BFA from the Pratt Institute, New York and her MFA from California State University, Long Beach.

Queer|Art|Film "Summer of Resistance" Continues through August:

Queer|Art continues its "Summer of Resistance," a special season of films selected by activists and politically engaged collectives, presented as part of the long-running Queer|Art|Film series taking place at IFC Center through August 14. In a time of political upheaval, guests are individuals who refuse to be silent and complacent, and instead are committed to organizing and creating change for the communities they serve. Cinema will be used as a jumping off point for lively, challenging post-screening discussions that give depth to resistance and encourage audiences to act. A full itinerary follows; June 26's Pride screening of Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four marks the series' 100th film. All screenings begin at 8pm.

Monday, June 26
F2L presents SOUTHWEST OF SALEM: THE STORY OF THE SAN ANTONIO FOUR
(Deborah Esquenazi, 2016)

Deborah Esquenazi's riveting documentary explores the imprisonment of four Latina lesbians who were wrongly convicted of child molestation in 1994, thanks to a potent combination of homophobia, misogyny and racism. In her quest for exoneration, Esquenazi unearths surprising details during interviews with the women and their accusers. Our guest presenters tonight are F2L, community activists who fight for queer and trans New Yorkers of color being targeted by the criminal justice system. For F2L, SOS sharply captures how "the media works alongside a racist colonial court system that aims to incarcerate criminalized queer and trans people of color." Join us for an important conversation.

Monday, July 24
Bianey Garcia presents THE SALT MINES & THE TRANSFORMATION
(Susana Aikin, Carlos Aparicio, 1990/1995)

These astonishing depictions of trans life on the margins in 1990s NYC follow three homeless Latinx trans women living on the West Side Piers who must engage in sex work to support their drug addictions. But things get much darker when a Christian preacher forces one of the women to renounce her trans identity in exchange for treatment for HIV. The films are a favorite of our guest presenter Bianey Garcia, a prominent trans Latinx activist with Make The Road NY. Bianey writes, "When I saw these documentaries, it broke my heart to see how my trans sisters lived during that time. Nowadays, there are people like me who fight for a better life for our future generations!!"

Monday, August 14
Tarab NYC presents A GLASS AND A CIGARETTE
(Niazi Mostafa, 1955)

We wrap up our Summer season with a captivating classic from the Golden Age of Egyptian Cinema. Tonight's presenter Tarab NYC is the only not-for-profit of its kind, whose mission is to foster an inclusive and safe community for queer Arab, Middle Eastern, and/or North African people in the greater New York City area. A Glass and a Cigarette features several of the era's brightest stars, including Samia Gamal who plays a woman transitioning from bellydance stardom to domestic bliss. For Tarab NYC this film is a perfect fit for QAF, as it takes "careful consideration of gender in relation to class, career, and performativities of sexual availability."

Tickets to all screenings can be purchased here.

Queer|Art launched in 2009 to support a generation of LGBTQ artists that lost mentors to the AIDS Crisis of the 1980s. By fostering the confident expression of LGBTQ artists' perspectives, stories, and identities, Queer|Art gives voice to a population that has been historically suppressed, disenfranchised, and often overlooked by traditional institutional and economic support systems. The current programs of Queer|Art include the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship program, and the long-running Queer|Art|Film series, held monthly at the IFC Center in lower Manhattan.

The Queer|Art|Mentorship program, launched in 2010, produces an evolving intergenerational dialogue within the LGBTQ arts community that has a direct impact on the landscape of contemporary art and culture as a whole. The program, which pairs emerging and established artists in a year-long exchange, has propelled the careers of a new generation of creators. Queer|Art|Film, now in its eighth year, provides a space for invited artists to honor those who came before them and whose work continues to inspire them, further charting a uniquely queer cultural lineage through cinema to other artistic disciplines.

A list of the intergenerational community of artists supported and brought together by Queer|Art includes: Silas Howard, Jennie Livingston, Matt Wolf, Hilton Als, Sarah Schulman, Pamela Sneed, Justin VivIan Bond, Jibz Cameron, Trajal Harrell, John Kelly, Caden Manson, Everett Quinton, Geo Wyeth, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Pati Hertling, Jonathan Katz, Reina Gossett, Sasha Wortzel, Jess Barbagallo, Morgan Bassichis, Monstah Black, Yve Laris Cohen, iele paloumpis, Rebecca Patek, Justin Sayre, Colin Self, Justine Williams, Michael De Angelis, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rick Herron, and Hugh Ryan, among many others. Visit www.queer-art.org or follow on Twitter: @queerartnyc, Instagram: @queerart and Facebook: @queerartnyc.



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