Queer|Art Announces 2022 Queer|Art|Prize and Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award Winners

Queer|Art, New York City's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, has announced the winners of two of its biggest annual awards. Writer, educator, and activist Alexis De Veaux is the winner of the 2022 Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers. And orator and community leader Wendi Moore-O'Neal is the winner of the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement. Both artists are based in New Orleans - a significant regional first for both awards. Four additional artists-stefa marin alarcon, Marie Amegah, Uhuru Moor, and Grace Rosario Perkins-have also been named as the finalists of the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize for Recent Work. Winners for all three awards will receive a $10,000 cash prize; and new this year, each Finalist for the Queer|Art|Prize for recent work will also receive $5,000. All three awards are made possible with support from HBO Max.

De Veaux, Moore-O'Neal, and the four Recent Work Prize finalists will be honored in a public ceremony-The 2022 Queer|Art Annual Party, Queer|Art's biggest event of the year-on November 10th, 7pm streaming Live from The Whitney Museum of American Art. The ceremony will be hosted by activist/drag artist Junior Mintt, and also occasions the reveal of the winner for the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize in the category of Recent Work, as well as the graduation of the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows. An After Party emceed by Cecilia Gentili with DJ sets by Body Hack artists Cisne and NYMPH will immediately follow, beginning at 8:45pm.

The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers was founded in 2021 to acknowledge Black Mentors and Fellows from the Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) community who uplift critical histories of Black queer mentorship and exemplify steadfast commitment to values shared by the QAM community. This year, judges included celebrated writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Justin Allen, Pamela Sneed, and Stephen Winter. The award is accompanied by a $10,000 cash prize, and the winner will be honored during the Queer|Art Annual Party, in conjunction with the Queer|Art Prize ceremony.

This year, Allen, Sneed, and Winter recognize multihyphenate writer, educator, and activist, New Orleans-based author and 2021 Queer|Art Mentor Alexis De Veaux (Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, 2004; Yabo, 2014) as a "pioneering force" within the queer community:

"Alexis De Veaux is a pioneering force within the LGBTQIA community. Her expansive practice is wide-ranging: from poetry and journalism to children's literature. Alexis has made invaluable contributions to the queer community across mediums. As a writer, educator, and public speaker, Alexis's longstanding dedication to mentorship is clear across fields and generations. To be in the presence of her generous wisdom and infectious spirit is to be inspired."

2022 QUEER|ART|PRIZE FOR SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT

In the area of Sustained Achievement, the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize has been awarded to Wendi Moore-O'Neal, who also is based in New Orleans, where she is a recognized community leader. The 2022 Sustained Achievement panel of judges-Barbara Browning, Lia Gangitano, and Alicia Grullon-remarked on Moore-O'Neal's commitment to organizing and storytelling within Black queer communities in the South:

"In the words of the nominator, "Wendi Moore-O'Neal [is] a Black Feminist butch dyke from New Orleans, Louisiana. She uses story circles, theater, performance, and song sharing... as tools for growing inspiration and building democratic processes... Wendi has made profound positive impacts on southern queer community..." Our choice for awarding Wendi comes from prioritizing a different kind of art making rooted in the traditions found in the Queer community which push up against hetero-normative partiarchial capitalist structures." -Browning, Grullon, and Gangitano

QUEER|ART|PRIZE RECENT WORK

Finalists for the Recent Work award, which honors specific projects completed between 2021 and 2022, include artists working in a number of different mediums. Each artist will receive a $5,000 award, and the winner, to be revealed at the Queer|Art Annual Party, will receive an additional $5,000. The Finalists for Recent Work are:

stefa marin alarcon for Born with an extra rib (2021), Born With An Extra Rib is a transdisciplinary opera featuring multimedia artist and composer stefa marin alarcon. Descended from the Emberá-Chamí people, stefa is a Colombian-American musician, born and raised in Queens, New York. Emerging from the questions behind their upcoming record Born With An Extra Rib, this experimental opera creates a structure for stefa to reclaim and return to their body. They used video collage, live music, and ritual performance to ask their most pressing, embodied questions. Through the production, stefa invited the cast, creative team, and audience to engage in an emergent process of collective liberation.

Through live performance, STEFA* continues to explore their relationships to Mother/Earth as a queer trans being. In living, fighting, and surviving the fascist, yt-cis-heteropatriarchical neo-colonial powers, STEFA* reveals the beauty and contradictions that emerge in the face of destruction and pain. With lush harmonics, spiraling loops, ancient ululations, somatic jazz, and rage-pop, they channel their ancestors and guides in their complex compositions towards revolution.

Marie Amegah for All of our Soft Parts (2022) With a focus on time spent together, this series of mixed media paintings explore the way we anchor each other through touch. Saturated with a black lesbian perspective, the gaze in the work sets the stage for a conversation between the figures and the viewer. The women portrayed in these life-sized paintings are depicted in moments of rest and togetherness. Who are we in the presence of women we love? Where do we lay our arms? How do we rest our head? What does our caress look like? This body of work is made in an effort to set the stage for black queer femmes to see themselves and their romances mirrored back at them.

Uhuru Moor for The Uhuru Dreamhouse (ongoing), The Uhuru Dream House is a communal project to create a safe art house for disabled QTBIPOC. It will be a sacred space to create. It will also be an artist residency program & transitional living space: owned, operated and maintained by disabled Black trans people, for Black trans people. The residency program will exist on the property of Moor's home, where disabled Black trans & intersex artists are welcome to visit New Orleans for one month to work on a project of their choice. Moor, who uses a wheelchair, intends for the home to be completely wheelchair accessible.

And Grace Rosario Perkins for The Relevance of Your Data (2022), The Relevance of Your Data is an exhibition centered on a suite of new large-scale paintings by Grace Rosario Perkins commissioned by MOCA in conversation with objects by Lonnie Holley and Olen Perkins, video by Fox Maxy, and soft sculpture by Eric-Paul Riege. Bound by an intuitive approach to their chosen materials, an investment in process, and friendship, Perkins and her collaborators reflect on land, community, and home. The artists often incorporate found materials with an intent to release them of the intended utility and histories they hold, and use abstraction and an abundance of webs to serve as strategies for expansiveness and protection. Together, the group approaches artmaking as a means for building solidarity and collective healing.