Queer|Art Announces Barbara Hammer Grant

Queer|Art, the New York City-based non-profit, is pleased to announce the judges for the second annual Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant: archivist and curator Carmel Curtis, and video artists Cecilia Dougherty and Ayanna U'Dongo.

The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. The grant, which is named in honor of legendary lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, is supported directly by funds provided by Hammer's estate and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. The grant is $5,000.

"It has been the goal of my life to put a lesbian lifestyle on the screen," Hammer says, "Why? Because when I started I couldn't find any! ...I picked up a camera in the 60s, late 60s, made Super 8, 8mm, finally went to school and got a 16mm camera. Made 13 films in two and a half years. All experimental. Because I think that as a lesbian at that time I was living an experimental lifestyle. Well let's just say, I was experimenting. And I still am. And I think that lesbian film really calls out for experimental work. ...Working as a lesbian filmmaker in the 70s wasn't easy in the social structure - the educational institution that I was in. It was difficult. And I want this grant to make it easier for lesbians of today. So you can make work that you want to make."

The grant is application-based and will be awarded to benefit specific projects. Funds can be requested to support work at any stage in development or production, from concept to exhibition. Qualifying work may be experimental animation, experimental documentary, experimental narrative, cross-genre, or solely experimental. Prospective applicants should review application requirements and apply directly through the Queer|Art website.

Applications for the second year of the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant will be open August 1st - October 1st, 2018. The 2018 awardee will be announced on Monday, December 3rd, 2018 at the IFC during a special edition of Queer|Art|Film, which will feature an evening of short experimental films and conversation to honor Hammer and the women filmmakers who have been inspired by her career. Vanessa Haroutunian, who has been the Grant Manager for the Hammer grant since its initiation, will curate the screening.

The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is part of the organization's Queer|Art|Awards initiative, which includes grants, prizes, and awards that provide various kinds of direct support-monetary and otherwise-to LGBTQ artists. Over time, Queer|Art|Awards seeks to include a spectrum of support that will benefit artists working in a variety of fields and mediums, as well as broader categories of support that will survey LGBTQ culture as a whole.

View a short video of Barbara Hammer discussing the grant here.

About Barbara Hammer

Barbara Hammer is a visual artist primarily working in film and video. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. She has been honored with six retrospectives: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival, Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway and The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.

She is most well-known for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000). She is represented by galleries KOW in Berlin and Company in NYC. She lives and works in New York City and Kerhonkson, New York.

Photo of Barbara Hammer by Susan Wides.

About the 2018 Judges

Carmel Curtis is a moving image archivist and curator. Over the past decade, she has been committed to increasing access to film and video by supporting viewing of diverse media to diverse audiences. Carmel currently works in the Moving Image Archive of Indiana University; is a board member of the non-profit Screen Slate, a daily resource for independent, repertory, and gallery screenings in New York City; and is a is a proud member of XFR Collective (pronounced transfer collective), a volunteer run group that works to increase community access to at-risk audiovisual media.

Cecilia Dougherty is a video artist, photographer, and writer. She has screened and exhibited her work in numerous film festivals, galleries and museums internationally for over twenty-five years. Her videos are included in many university and private film collections and are archived at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. In addition to explorations in electronic media itself, her themes range from lesbian and female sexual identity to family psychologies and the outsider experience of popular culture. She has contributed articles, interviews, and other writing to a wide range of publications from chapbooks to contemporary art periodicals. Much of her writing is about film, video, and the contemporary cultural moment. She has published poetry and short stories as well. Her first book, The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change, was published in 2013. She is currently writing a feature film script based on the award-winning novel Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks. She holds a PhD in Media Philosophy and teaches filmmaking at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and media theory at the New School University.

Ayanna U'Dongo has utilized video to explore desire, self-pleasuring, sexual independence, sexuality, and gender diversity in post-slavery America since 1992. Edges; MoonSong of the Nubiánts; Passion/Fruits & Whisperings; Lypsus Rising and Aborigitron: Affairs of the Hybrid Heart were her earlier video works. Her photography has been published in Instinct and Out magazines. Last April, Dirty Looks published her essay entitled, "MorphallaxUS: Nubiánt Power and Sexual Healings." Nubiánt Lounge is an African/American erotic arts magazine currently in development for public access television. She occupies a newly established digital arts studio, ABORIGIX MEDIARTS LAB in Hunters Point, San Francisco. The Lab is designed to elevate, explore, and celebrate the beauty, power, and potential of the African/American sexuality and gender experience.

About Queer|Art

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.