INTRODUCING THE 2019-2020 QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP FELLOWS
Queer|Art, New York City’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce the ten Fellows accepted for the 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship program cycle, and the Mentors with whom they will be working:
Maia Chao with Mentor, Yve Laris Cohen (Visual Art)
Brian Gonzalez with Mentor, Rodrigo Bellott (Film)
Raja Feather Kelly with Mentor, Kate Bornstein (Literature)
Patrick G. Lee with Mentor, Hao Wu (Film)
María José Maldonado with Mentor, Charles Rice-Gonzalez (Literature)
Felicita “Felli” Maynard with Mentor, Lola Flash (Visual Art)
Olaiya Olayemi with Mentor, Maria Bauman-Morales (Performance)
Anthony Rosado with Mentor, Thomas Lax (Curatorial Practice)
Sarah Sanders with Mentor, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen (Performance)
Sarah Zapata with Mentor, Gayatri Gopinath (Literature)
Now in its ninth year, Queer|Art|Mentorship has nurtured the creative and professional development of over 140 artists and propelled the careers of a new generation of creators.
The program supports a year-long exchange between emerging and established LGBTQ+ artists across five distinct fields—Film, Literature, Performance, Visual Art, and Curatorial Practice—and culminates with a public exhibition (known as the Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual) that presents work produced by Fellows during their Mentorship. Fellows apply with a specific project they would like to work on during the program and meet each month with their Mentors to discuss their progress in the lead-up to this event. Fellows also meet each month as a group to learn from and provide support for one another throughout the year.
The 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual exhibition, featuring new work by the outgoing class of Fellows, will open on November 1 in conjunction with the 2019 Queer|Art|Prize, which will honor legendary SF-based drag queen and political activist Joan Jett Blakk for Sustained Achievement, and continues through January 9, 2020 at the Bureau of General Services–Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center in the West Village (both located 208 W 13th St.). The exhibition is organized by Queer|Art and curated this year under the title “How do we know what we need you to know: Intimate access and collective care” by outgoing Fellow Jeanne Vaccaro, with new works of film, literature, performance, and visual art by J. Bouey, Candystore, Daniel Chew, Xandra Clark, Sarah Creagen, Cristóbal Guerra, Russell Perkins, Ripley Soprano, and Natalie Tsui.
The 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual kicks off with The Queer|Art Annual Party on Friday, November 1 from 7-10pm at The Center, hosted by theater artists Mashuq Mushtaq Deen (Draw the Circle) and Xandra Clark (Polylogues), who have worked closely together throughout the past year as Mentor and Fellow. The evening will continue with the awards announcements for the 2019 Queer|Art|Prize and will conclude with a dance party as DJ SANDY brings the epic night of queer revelry and celebration to a close. RSVP is required, visit queer-art.org for details.
ABOUT THE 2019-2020 QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP FELLOWS AND THEIR PROJECTS
Maia Chao (Visual Art) is an interdisciplinary artist who is committed to socially engaged art that models counter-institutions, alternative spaces, and redistribution. Chao will be working with Mentor, Yve Laris Cohen on a research-driven multimedia body of work that examine the constructs of winning and losing in this historical moment, at collective and individual scales. What does personal success look like in a time of political failure?
Brian Gonzalez (Film) is a filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and educator working in a variety of mediums including video art, immersive installation, virtual reality, and performance, all under the artistic pseudonym Taxiplasm. Gonzalez will be working with Mentor, Rodrigo Bellott on "Those Who Didn’t Run" a short supernatural dramatic film set in 1940s rural America about a young boy who has a numinous encounter with a mysteriously brute healer. In a world where religion, family histories, and superstition take on their own shape, no miracle comes without the cost of hellfire.
Raja Feather Kelly (Literature) is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory and New Brooklyn Theatre. Feather Kelly will be working with Mentor, Kate Bornstein to transform aspects of the film Dog Day Afternoon into a queer-trans fantasia: Wednesday is a cabaret club where film noir meets psychological thriller meets pop soap opera.
Patrick G. Lee (Film) is a queer Korean American documentary filmmaker, writer, and community organizer who is interested in building collaborative, community-based models of filmmaking that reject traditional hierarchies of authority and that equip queer and trans people of color with media-making skills. Lee will be work with Mentor, Hao Wu on a documentary feature that follows the long-distance friendship between two trans women of Korean descent, as a way to explore the possibilities for queer solidarity across the Korean diaspora – and the nation-state violence and cultural misperceptions that necessitate it.
María José Maldonado (Literature) is a Salvadoran-Ecuadorian queer writer, creator, performer and comedian exploring queerness, resistance and anger through speculative fiction, poetry and comedic performance. Maldonado will being working with Mentor, Charles Rice-González, to write a novella entitled “The Last Men On Earth,” which will explore the deconstruction and implosion of gender and identity in a future where cisgender boys and men have begun to menstruate due to the dwindling human population caused by climate change.
Felicita “Felli” Maynard (Visual Art) is a first generation Afrolatinx genderqueer interdisciplinary artist using analog and wet plate photography to explore their identity as a descendant of the African diaspora. Maynard will being working with Mentor, Lola Flash, on "Ole Dandy, the Tribute,” a multidisciplinary project that looks into the imagined lives of queer male impersonators and drag kings Jean Loren Feliz and Angelo Lwazi Owenzayo during the 1900s in Brooklyn, NYC.
Interdisciplinary artist Olaiya Olayemi (Performance) describes her practice as an exploration of “blk diasporic queer feminist aesthetics and theories...infused with a blk feminist politic of pleasure and [an] ethic of joy.” Olayemi will being working with Mentor, Maria Bauman-Morales, on "ado (a remix of my name),” an erotically and spiritually charged one-womyn performance piece that tells the story of a blktransfeministwomynartist coming to terms with self through words, music, movement, and visual art.
Anthony Rosado (Curatorial Practice) is an artist spurring community-led story-collecting, -telling and -archiving. Rosado will being working with Mentor, Thomas Lax, to develop an exhibit that will share cultural conservation methods preserved by Afro-diasporic revolutionaries. Rosado will also curate the 2019-2020 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual next fall.
Sarah Sanders (Performance) is a performer, writer, musician, and emergent strategy advocate who believes in art as a space to hold and dig into multiple truths. Sanders will be working with Mentor, Mushuq Mushtaq Deen to develop a performance piece using personal narrative, interviews, original music, ritual, and emails to the press secretary to grapple with the ways that whiteness and American Jewish identity intersect.
Sarah Zapata (Literature) makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Zapata will be working with Mentor, Gayatri Gopinath, on the creation of dynamic sculptural environments that examine the transformative power of textiles produced by women for male-dominated, ritual spaces and use.