Queer|Art Announces Fall Season Of Queer|Art|Film At IFC Center

Queer|Art, the New York City-based non-profit supporting the creative and professional development of LGBTQ artists, is pleased to announce the Fall 2018 season of Queer|Art|Film at IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd St.), September 17-December 3. Curated by filmmakers Ira Sachs, Adam Baran, and Vanessa Haroutunian, the season brings together an eclectic mix of independent, experimental, and Hollywood cinema, presented by a multigenerational lineup of queer visual artists, poets, composers, and cinema legends. A highlight of the season is a special experimental shorts program on the evening of December 3 (organized with legendary experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer), which coincides with the announcement of the winner of the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant. A full itinerary follows. All screenings begin at 8pm.

Monday, September 17
Jon Wang presents Sliver
(Philip Noyce, 1993)

"The view from the outside is nothing compared to the view from the inside," teased the trailer for this 1993 erotic thriller starring it-girl Sharon Stone as Carly. Following a recent divorce, Carly moves into the elite Sliver building and becomes entangled in an intrigue involving a pair of suitors, a suspicious suicide, and a stranger who spies on her via hidden cameras. For artist Jon Wang, a secret VHS viewing of the film provided his first erotic cinematic memory: "Since I was homeschooled and raised in a cultish conservative Chinese immigrant family...it was moments like this, alone in other people's homes, where I caught glimpses of the outside world."

Monday, October 15
Michael R. Jackson presents Valley of the Dolls
(Mark Robson, 1967)

Fame, booze, pills, and men consume the lives of three fierce young Hollywood hopefuls (Patty Duke, Barbara Parkins, and Sharon Tate!) in this iconic film adaption of Jacqueline Susann's best-selling novel of the same title. For tonight's presenter-composer and lyricist Michael R. Jackson-the film enchanted him with its multi-layered depiction of women in the entertainment industry: "The range and expression of their emotional vulnerability and violence in a patriarchal, cisgender, heterosexual white male system...has long been a useful analog to understanding my own queer black experience and, as such, is a duality that I explore in nearly all of my work."

Monday, November 5
Kay Gabriel presents The Tempest
(Derek Jarman, 1979)

The Tempest (Derek Jarman, 1979)

"Derek Jarman's THE TEMPEST rips the stuffing out of Shakespeare's play and puts it back in all wrong," writes this month's presenter, author and poet Kay Gabriel. Jarman's ecstatically queer third feature stars new wave singer Toyah Willcox as Miranda, poet Heathcote Williams as Prospero, flamboyant mime Jack Birkett as Caliban, and Elisabeth Welch singing 'Stormy Weather' while decked in gold lamé for a crew of giddy sailors. "I came to this film young and didn't get it," Gabriel continues. "Then I figured out I liked gay derangements of the canon, then I started writing them myself. As perverse adaptations go, I'm all in." So are we.

Monday, December 3
Barbara Hammer presents "The Hammer Mix: Generations"
(Various Artists)

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Lynne Sachs, 2018)

Tonight we celebrate the announcement of the winner of the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant with a selection of short films made by women who have been inspired by Hammer's career, including Peggy Ahwesh, Lynne Sachs, and Cauleen Smith, among others. Hammer writes, "I am honored to have inspired these genius filmmakers. When you are young and working hard you just think about getting the work out. Then to find years later that your films meant a whole lot to certain artists, it just takes your breath away."

"The Hammer Mix: Generations" coincides with the announcement of the winner of the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant, who will be recognized at the screening. The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. The $5,000 grant 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. Applications for the first year of the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant opened August 1, and will close October 1, 2018. This year's judges include moving image archivist and curator Carmel Curtis, video artist Cecilia Dougherty, and video artist Ayanna U'Dongo.

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 empowers 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; the long-running Queer|Art|Film series, held monthly at the IFC Center in lower Manhattan; and Queer|Art|Awards, a new initiative of grants, prizes, and awards that provides various kinds of direct support-monetary and otherwise-to LGBTQ artists.

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 supports a year-long exchange between emerging and established artists, has propelled the careers of a new generation of creators. Queer|Art|Film, which has presented more than 100 screenings since 2009, provides a space for invited artists to present films that have inspired them, charting a uniquely queer cultural lineage through cinema to other artistic disciplines. Queer|Art|Awards was initiated last year with the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant and the introduction of the Queer|Art|Prize (for Sustained Achievement and Recent Work). Both awards are entering their second year; more to be announced soon.

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, Geoffrey Chadsey, Everett Quinton, Geo Wyeth, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Pati Hertling, Jonathan Katz, Tourmaline & Sasha Wortzel, Jess Barbagallo, Morgan Bassichis, Monstah Black, Yve Laris Cohen, Troy Michie, Tommy Pico, Justin Sayre, Colin Self, Jacolby Satterwhite, Rick Herron, and Hugh Ryan, among many others.