Anaïs Duplan Wins Queer|Art|Prize in Recent Work; Pamela Sneed & Lola Flash Also Honored

On December 14, a radiant crowd of 100 LGBTQ+ artists and allies convened in-person at The Whitney Museum while many more joined online for Queer|Art's biggest event of the year: The Queer|Art Annual Party. The 2021 Queer|Art Annual Party took the form of a hybrid event this year hosted by poet/performer Candystore and activist/drag artist Junior Mintt. The hosts guided us through an expansive award program followed by a slate of electrifying cabaret performances to celebrate the graduating Fellows of the 2020-2021 Queer|Art|Mentorship program cycle, the 2021 Queer|Art|Prize awardees, and the winner of the inaugural Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists & Organizers (made possible with generous support from HBO).

In its first year, the Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award, which offers a $10,000 prize to a Black Mentor or Fellow from the Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) community for uplifting foundational histories of Black queer mentorship, was awarded to artist and multi-year QAM Mentor Pamela Sneed. Sneed was selected by celebrated artists Maria Bauman, Saeed Jones, and Felli Maynard. In honor of the award's first recipient, the grant will henceforth be named The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists & Organizers.

The 2021 Queer|Art|Prize honored the legendary photographer and activist, Lola Flash, along with writer and arts worker, Anaïs Duplan with $10,000 prizes, each recognizing their significant contributions to queer culture and community. Lola Flash was acknowledged in the category of Sustained Achievement, a category that serves to highlight art practices that have significantly impacted queer community and contributed to its endurance and expansion. Anaïs Duplan received the award for Recent Work, a category that recognizes an outstanding work created by a US-based LGBTQ+ artist between Pride of 2020 and Pride of 2021, for his publication, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture.

PAMELA SNEED

For the Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artist & Organizer Award

The Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers was founded by Queer|Art's Black LGBTQ+ Artists Group to acknowledge Black QAM Mentors and Fellows who uplift critical histories of Black queer mentorship and exemplify steadfast commitment to values shared by the QAM community. The judges selected Pamela Sneed as the award's inaugural recipient for her rich creative practice and dedication to the art of mentorship itself.

Judges remarked, "as a jury and as members of a richly Black artistic community, we have been and continue to be deeply moved by Pamela Sneed's gift for moving all of us forward. In recognition of the fact that mentorship itself is as beautiful, gorgeous, and vital as any other artistic discipline, we are pleased to award Sneed the inaugural Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award as a recognition of not only her brilliance and accomplishments in the field of literary arts but also for her longstanding commitment to nurturing younger Black queer voices, both through Queer|Art|Mentorship and outside of QAM."

"It is a great honor to receive this award for my artistry, mentorship, and leadership and to be recognized by my peers of BlaQ, dedicated to supporting Black queer artists within Queer|Art. This is an inaugural award, and fittingly, I was an inaugural Mentor for Queer|Art when it started in 2011," Sneed recounted during her acceptance remarks. "I'm proud of the way that the organization has grown and expanded so many lives of queer, LGBTQIA people, who have been saved and recognized in their artistry, recognized across generations. I consider teaching, mentorship in art to be spiritual work and I try to do so with love, honesty in the hopes to make a positive difference in people's lives and on the planet. I would like to thank the BlaQ nomination committee: Saeed Jones, Maria Bauman, Felli Maynard. Thank you for seeing me and for the courage in everything that all of you do."

LOLA FLASH

For the Queer|Art|Prize in Sustained Achievement

In the area of Sustained Achievement, the award was granted to Lola Flash. Judges in this category remarked on Flash's lifelong commitment as a photographer to their underrecognized work as an educator and an activist centering exuberant life and community that precedes a politics of resistance. Repeatedly, Lola Flash changes narratives by documenting and celebrating the rich diversity of our community: trans people, elders, youth, people of color-history this time is rewritten and inclusive.

"I really want to thank the Queer|Art staff, specifically Nile Harris, Rio Sofia, KT Pe Benito, greer x, Matice Moore, Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Dani Brito, Travis Chamberlain in no particular order," remarked Flash while accepting the award. "You all are such a small crew of people-like are you guys having fun yet? Like a tiny amount of people have organized this and I really appreciate what you've done.

I'm also "Board Member Flash", I'm really thankful for all the board members who are here and the guidance that I've been given, this is the first time I've been a board member. I'd also like to thank my fiance Marcia, she's in London, so "hello" if you're looking! I'll say my friend Aldo Hernandez, who a lot of you know. He's always been there for me. And Julie Tolentino who won this award last year, so I'm really happily following in her footsteps. And of course, my family here, Charlene and Andrea, my cousins, Afua, Jim, and Remy back there, my crew. And really, everyone in this room.

This has been an amazing year for me with acquisitions at the MoMA you can go see now, it's hanging in the MoMA. Everytime I go see it, I get more and more enamored, I'm lost for certain adjectives. I really don't know what that feeling is, but it's pretty amazing to one minute to be looking at Gordon Parks' work and then go downstairs to see my work. To be part of the canon, a lot of that has to do with the support I receive from the queer community. All of you who are out there, I'm saying that to you. Nancy Rodrigo, I want to thank you and Ryan Inouye & Jonathan González, the judges who awarded me, I really appreciate it."

ANAÏS DUPLAN, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2020)

For the Queer|Art|Prize in Recent Work

In the area of Recent Work, the award was granted to Anaïs Duplan for Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry; arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering the personal, the social, and the existential.

Judges in this category remarked that they all felt strongly about the quality and politics of Duplan's writing and the intention behind it; that his voice is one that is rising now, and his voice is one that we'll be listening to for a long time to come.

Duplan was present at The Whitney Museum to receive the award. "Thank you so much to y'all and to everyone here tonight and Pamela Sneed and Lola Flash for being iconic. Blackspace for me is about celebrating y'all and everyone else who is a part of the QTPOC arts community. It's not just about conversations that we're having together in our community but also the young people who stay alive because of the work that we do... So I want to thank a bunch of people: I'm gonna start with Nikki Gamboa, my work partner, and I could do nothing without you. I appreciate you and thank you for holding me up. Thank you to Queer|Art, thank you to all of the artists & writers who I wrote about in Blackspace, many of whom are friends. I've been talking with students a lot about this quote from Glissant, a fragment, "consent to not be a single being". I love that tenderness, you know, that we might think about ourselves as, not individuals in a vacuum, right? Sort of toss out this individual genius model and think more about the beauty that we embody together. Thank you to Fred Moten for spearheading that thinking and for keeping Glissant alive in different ways."

About the Program

Following the award ceremony, the Annual Party also recognized the 2020-2021 QAM Fellows, a fiercely tight-knit group of creatives who forged incredible bonds this year with one another in spite of the fellowship's virtual nature. Via remote teleconference from Toronto, Literature Fellow Erica Cardwell took a moment to recognize the lasting presence and impact of April Freely (1982-2021), a Literature Fellow from this cohort and a brilliant writer in our community who passed away this past summer. After additional remarks from QAM Program Manager Matice Moore and Junior Mintt, the Fellows were celebrated with a triumphant graduation ceremony.

To conclude the evening, co-hosts Candystore and Junior Mintt presented a dazzling cabaret curated around the theme of "Performance as Resilience." The illustrious slate of performers included Dev Doee, Filthy June, Juniper Juicy, and Cecilia Gentili, who put on a raucous show that blended drag, politics, dancing, lip-syncing, and storytelling.

About the Winners

Pamela Sneed (Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artist & Organizer Award)
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. In 2021, She published a chapbook If The Capitol Rioters Had Been Black with F magazine and Motherbox Gallery. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is online faculty in SAIC's low res MFA teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the program for 5 consecutive years. In 2020, she was the Commencement Speaker for the low-res MFA program at SAIC. She also teaches new genres in Columbia Universities' School of the Arts. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum, MOMA, Broad Museum and the Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for Artist, Designers, Citizens Conference/a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni's "The 100 Best African American Poems." In 2018, she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in poetry. She is widely published in journals such as The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum Magazine, The Paris Review., and Frieze Magazine. She recently published an article for Harpers Bazaar U.S. and has upcoming work in The New York Times. She is the author of a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020 featured in The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award. Additionally in 2021, She was a finalist for New York Theater Workshops Golden Harris Award and received a monetary award. In 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery's More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School and NYU's Center For Humanities. She currently has work on view at Leslie Lohman. She is a multi/year Queer|Art Mentor.

Lola Flash (Queer|Art|Prize, Sustained Achievement)
Working at the forefront of genderqueer visual politics for more than three decades, photographer Lola Flash's work challenges stereotypes and gender, sexual, and racial preconceptions. An active member of ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 "Kissing Doesn't Kill" poster. Their art and activism are profoundly connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color worldwide. Flash has work included in important collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and National African American Museum of History & Culture. They are currently a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective.

Flash works primarily in portraiture, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. Their practice is firmly rooted in social justice and cultural difference.

Anaïs Duplan (Queer|Art|Prize, Recent Work)
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of forthcoming book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at Bennington College, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City's artist-run organization Public Space One.

Photo credit: Summer Surgent-Gough