Queer|Art Announces Queer|Art|Film Winter 2022 Season at IFC Center

Queer|Art, New York City's home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, has announced the upcoming Winter season of Queer|Art|Film, returning in person February 14th - May 9th. Queer|Art|Film returns to the IFC Center with a season curated by multidisciplinary filmmakers Angelo Madsen Minax and Mev Luna. For both artists, language and autoethnography play pivotal roles in their respective experimental documentary and visual art practices. As such, Minax and Luna have sought out presenters who are deeply invested in the intersection of the written word and visual culture.

Working across various mediums, presenters include T. Fleischmann, CAConrad, Jeffrey Gibson, Legacy Russell, and Anaïs Duplan. This season considers: Can the narrative fictions that influenced us be an extension of lived experience? From a raunchy nightlife scene in Berlin portrayed in City of Lost Souls, to the outskirts of West Texas in Come back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, to a boozy night spent wandering the streets of downtown LA till dawn in The Exiles, or dreaming of an escape from Queens in Belly, the protagonists in these films are all fleeing to another, different, "better" life elsewhere. Sometimes the longing is for an alternative physical place or state of mind. Other times, this yearning is steeped in fantasy. Together, this collection of films reveals that as much as we aspire and dream otherwise, there are cycles that pull us back.

Tickets here.

Monday, February 14th

CAConrad presents Come back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

(Robert Altman, 1982)

Inside a decrepit Woolworth's five-and-dime store 90 miles outside Marfa, Texas, a group of women, formerly the "Disciples of James Dean" fan club, reunite on the 20th anniversary of the actor's death. Alternating between the present 1975, and intermittent flashbacks to 1955, a dirge of secrets, confessions, and breakdowns unfurl in dazzling, phrenetic, drunken hysteria. Adapted from Ed Graczyk's stage play, the film features a youthful Cher as the town slut, Kathy Bates as a blow-hard bully, and arguably Sandy Dennis' most stunning (ie: unhinged) performance. Karen Black's 'shocking' reveal that she was formerly Joe, now Joanne, adds to the frenzy of dated "welcome to the freak show" vibes. Our presenting artist, poet CAConrad, has seen this film over 110 times.

Tickets here

About CAConrad

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021). Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death and Ecodeviance. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit their website: https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

Monday, March 21st

Jeffrey Gibson presents The Exiles

(Kent Mackenzie, 1961)

Multidisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson presents The Exiles, a 1960s anti-social documentary about a group of young urban native Americans who have left reservation life to live in Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. Shot in black and white, the film fluctuates between social and solitude as we follow the characters in and out of the noisy, bustling city with pit stops to quieter domestic spaces. Vignettes of daily life and nighttime gallivanting are punctured by interior monologues of each character reflecting on their intertwined lives. Using the form of a fiction film, and writing collaboratively with the performers who play themselves on screen, dir. Kent Mackenzie wanted to challenge conventional documentary to capture a more complex depiction.

Tickets here

About Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson's multimedia practice synthesizes the cultural and artistic traditions of his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage with the visual languages of Modernism and themes from contemporary popular and queer culture. His work is a vibrant call for queer and Indigenous empowerment, envisioning a celebration of strength and joy within these communities. Gibson's work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR; among many others. Gibson is a recipient of numerous awards, notably a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2019); Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters and Sculptors Award (2015); and Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2005). You can learn more at Gibson's website.

Monday, April 11th

Legacy Russell and Anaïs Duplan present Belly

(Hype Williams, 1998)

Curator and writer Legacy Russell, with writer and multidisciplinary artist Anaïs Duplan, present the controversial and visually riveting neo-noir, Belly (1998). Childhood friends Sincere (Nas) and Buns (DMX) build an empire of drug trafficking and backstabbing. But Sincere grows weary of their lifestyle, while Buns sinks deeper and deeper into bigger, riskier deals. After an arrest, the cops offer him a deal - assassinate the head of a Muslim group or life in prison. Sincere imagines leaving the drug trade and moving to Africa. Though he's never been, he is motivated by a fantasy of diasporic homecoming; the idea that escape is possible and there is a place to belong. At its release, this now cult classic was banned from being shown in basketball player Magic Johnson's theater chain due to "negative and violent depictions of African Americans."

Tickets here

About Legacy Russell

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell's written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.

About Anaïs Duplan

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.

Monday, May 9th

T. Fleischmann presents City of Lost Souls

(Rosa von Praunheim, 1983)

T Fleischmann, author of the book length essay Time is the Thing the Body Moves Through, presents the film City of Lost Souls (1983) starring Angie Stardust of the famous New York Club 82 who plays house mom to a group of raunchy and wildly eccentric outsiders living in Berlin. Amongst the cast is Glam Rock punk singer Jayne County (of Derek Jarman's Jubilee and the Warhol Factory films), and the late Tara O'Hara. The film funnels through a vortex of sets saturated with americana, devilish hellscapes, underground nightclubs, and a diner that serves up flesh of all varieties. We join the characters in a feverish state as they fuck, wax poetic about racism, transphobia, queerness, and political commentary on the east versus west. For these lurid exhibitionists, even the act of eating becomes a type of orgy, as the characters don't just bite and chew as much as they devour disproportionately large servings of food in erotic, messy sploshing scenes. The film is unabashedly risqué, camp, and queer in a way much like american transplant and trapeze artist Tron summarizes it to the audience, "I am not gay, straight, bi nor trisexual; I'm simply sexual!"

Tickets here

About T. Fleischmann

T Fleischmann is the author of the book-length essays Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Syzygy, Beauty and the pamphlet Gonorrhea, SESTA, Institutions. Among other places, their shorter writing can be found in The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, Music and Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, and a number of anthologies, most recently We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Fleischmann also collaborates on an ongoing body of visual work with the artist Benjy Russell and, when not writing, organizes for trans liberation and prison abolition from their home in rural Pennsylvania.

About the Curators

Mev Luna is a research-based artist whose practice spans performance, installation, video, new media, and text. Their work considers issues of incarceration, institutional access, and how images are circulated and controlled. Luna is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School. Their recent exhibitions include Empathy Fatigue at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and a solo presentation at EXPO Chicago 2019. Mev's time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA, Artists' Television Access, San Francisco, and Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago. They were a 2018 Art Matters Foundation Fellowship recipient, 2018-2019 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition; 2017 SOMA Summer participant in Mexico City and a 2015-2016 Research Fellow at the Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration. Luna received an MFA in Performance from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Textiles and Media Arts from California College of the Arts.

Angelo Madsen Minax works in film and video, sound and music, text, and media installation. His projects draw on auto-ethnography, psychodynamics, and phenomenology. They are mostly about love and death, rendered through personal and collective histories in art, punk, queer, rural, and activist cultures. Madsen's works have shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Leslie Lohman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Tom of Finland Institute, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, KurzFilm Hamburg, the European Media Art Festival, Ann Arbor, Berwick, Alchemy, Outfest, Newfest, Frameline, and others. His new film North by Current was supported by The Sundance Institute and the LEF Foundation and premiered at Berlinale and the Tribeca Film Festival in 2021. Madsen is currently an Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont. You can learn more about Madsen at his website.

Visit: www.queer-art.org

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