Queer|Art Announces Special Summer 2018 Season Of Queer|Art|Film

Queer|Art, NYC's home to creative and professional development for LGBTQ artists, is pleased to announce "BLACK SUMMER NIGHTS 2: SUMMER IN THE CITY," a special season of Queer|Art|Film at IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd St.), May 14-August 20.

Queer|Art|Film charts a uniquely queer cultural lineage through cinema to other artistic disciplines by inviting LGBTQ artists to present and discuss films that have inspired them. In 2015, Queer|Art|Film curators Ira Sachs and Adam Baran tapped film director and producer Stephen Winter and poet and performance artist Pamela Sneed to organize the first edition of "Black Summer Nights," featuring four monthly screenings presented by black LGBTQ artists who were invited to reflect on black queer experience and its representations in cinema.

Now Winter and Sneed are back for a second edition of the beloved special season, this year with a particular focus on stories set in and around New York City. For each event, a different black queer artist has been invited to screen a film that has deeply inspired and influenced them, and then participate in a post-screening discussion that will further explore issues related to black queer life and art. Each screening will be followed by an after party at Julius', New York's oldest gay bar, a site that has its own important place in New York queer history. All screenings begin at 8pm.

The season kicks off on Monday, May 14 with New York Times bestselling author David Barclay Moore as he presents Jay Dockenhorf's NAZ & MALLIK, which was an LGBT festival favorite of 2015. On Monday, June 11, for Pride month, writer and Black Lives Matter activist Erica Cardwell, will present PARIAH, Dee Rees' remarkable film about a black lesbian coming of age in Brooklyn. On Monday, July 23 playwright Robert O'Hara will screen Spike Lee's 1988 musical SCHOOL DAZE. Finally, the season will close on Monday, August 20 with poet JP Howard presenting two short documentaries: STORMÉ: OUR LADY OF THE JEWEL BOX by Michelle Parkerson, about Stormé Delarverie, the sole male impersonator in the legendary Jewel Box Revue, who Parkerson finds years later in Chelsea, working as a bodyguard at a women's bar; and Charles B. Brack's DREAMS DEFERRED: THE SAKIA GUNN FILM PROJECT, which tells the little known story of Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old student who was fatally stabbed in a gay hate crime in Newark in 2003.

Screenings will take place at the IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd St. Adult tickets are $15. IFC Membership packages are available starting at $75.

MONDAY, MAY 14, 8:00PM
David Barclay Moore presents
NAZ & MAALIK
(Jay Dockendorf, 2015)

Set in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NAZ & MAALIK centers around two closeted Muslim teens whose daily mix of family responsibilities, street life, and raging hormones is interrupted by an undercover FBI agent who suspects them as terrorists. For tonight's presenter, New York Times bestselling author David Barclay Moore, the film challenges many clichés of gay coming-of-age storylines associated with its genre. "Black queer people navigate our lives while wearing a multitude of masks, depending upon their circumstances," Moore writes. "The two young actors in this film portray a wide variety of emotion and perspective throughout, helping it feel sympathetic, real, and timely."

MONDAY, JUNE 11, 8:00PM
Erica Cardwell presents
PARIAH
(Dee Rees, 2011)

Groundbreaking for its compelling and unique portrait of a black lesbian coming of age in Brooklyn, PARIAH was the directorial feature debut of Dee Rees (who was recently nominated for an Academy Award for MUDBOUND). The film is not only remarkable for how it addresses topics of identity, freedom, acceptance, and sexuality, but for its depiction of complex relationships within an African-American family structure. For tonight's presenter, writer and Black Lives Matter activist Erica Cardwell, the film "helped to end my dance with shame and really freed something inside of me." Join us for this powerful film with breakout performances by Adepero Oduye and Kim Wayans!

MONDAY, JULY 23, 8:00PM
Robert O'Hara presents
SCHOOL DAZE
(Spike Lee, 1988)

This early 'deep cut' from Spike Lee depicts political and emotional turmoil between radically conscious frat and sorority members of a fictional black college. Tonight's presenter, playwright Robert O'Hara, remarks on the portrayal of "physical intimacy of men all up in each other's faces, violating private space, paddling each other...and being--as my mother would say--'tooted up'." Despite its glittering cast of men, it is the struggles depicted by the women of SCHOOL DAZE that resonate most profoundly as they battle the misogyny and toxic masculinity of the Greek System. A dramedy with song and dance numbers--made with love for the Michelle/Barack generation!

MONDAY, AUGUST 20, 8:00PM
JP Howard presents
STORMÉ: OUR LADY OF THE JEWEL BOX & DREAMS DEFERRED: THE SAKIA GUNN FILM PROJECT
(Michelle Parkerson, 1987; Charles B. Brack, 2008)

Poet, mother, and educator JP Howard presents two rarely screened must-see films that offer contrasting images of black lesbian identity and experience. DREAMS DEFERRED tells the story of Sakia Gunn, a masculine-presenting teen who in 2003 was stabbed to death on the streets of Newark in a brutal act of hate. STORMÉ, meanwhile, offers a portrait of 1950s male impersonator, civil rights pioneer, and emcee of the legendary Jewel Box Revue: Stormé Delavarie. "Gunn's death did not receive the same attention as Matthew Shepard," Howard notes, while finding it "empowering to see Stormé, a biracial, butch-presenting lesbian, talk confidently about her life's path."

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; the long-running Queer|Art|Film series, held monthly at the IFC Center in lower Manhattan; and Queer|Art|Awards, a new program of grants, prizes, and awards that will provide 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 pairs emerging and established artists in a year-long exchange, has propelled the careers of a new generation of creators. Queer|Art|Film, which recently celebrated its 100th screening, 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. Queer|Art|Awards launched in 2017 with the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant and the introduction of the Queer|Art|Prize. 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.

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.

Website: www.queer-art.org
Twitter: @queerartnyc
Instagram: @queerart
Facebook: @queerartnyc

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