ANNOUNCING NEW MENTORS FOR
THE 2020-2021 QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP PROGRAM CYCLE
Queer|Art is pleased to announce the new Mentors for the 2020-2021 Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) program cycle, marking ten years of queer mentorship for the organization’s celebrated year-long creative and professional development program. The new cohort of Mentors is comprised entirely of past Mentors and Alumni from Queer|Art|Mentorship and—in direct response to the continuing impact of COVID-19—prioritizes artists with deeply rooted commitments to community organizing and care.
Queer|Art|Mentorship was established to address the loss of creative mentors for younger generation LGBTQ+ artists, due to the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. The inaugural 2011-2012 cohort of Mentors included Hilton Als, Justin Vivian Bond, Sarah Schulman, Barbara Hammer, and Nicole Eisenman; artists who understood firsthand crucial matters of resilience and survival during a time of great need and loss within queer community. The Fellows that year included Saeed Jones, Yve Laris Cohen, Tommy Pico, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Guadalupe Rosales. From this auspicious grouping, a diverse and vibrant intergenerational community of over 160 LGBTQ+ filmmakers, writers, performers, visual artists, and curators has emerged, and a legacy of creative resilience has been carried forward.
A decade later, while living in the midst of another pandemic, queer artists once again find ourselves reimagining our creative futures, providing care for each other, and rallying together in a time of great need and loss. COVID-19 is continuing to reshape our lives, our creative practices, and the ways we are able to be in community with each other. Queer|Art has been swift to adapt our programming and develop new ways to share space and stay connected, and we are actively engaged with our community to understand how we can best support our collective recovery. We are thrilled, with the announcement of our 2020-2021 Mentorship cohort, to foreground artists whose extensive engagement with community organizing and collective care heralds a number of creative possibilities for how we may move forward together.
2020-2021 QAM Mentors
Morgan Bassichis (Performance)
Maria Bauman-Morales (Performance)
Rodrigo Bellott (Film)
Saeed Jones (Literature)
Jaime Manrique (Literature)
Angelo Madsen Minax (Film)
Carlos Motta (Visual Art)
Maia Cruz Palileo (Visual Art)
Pamela Sneed (Literature)
Tourmaline (Film)
Meet The Mentors Event at The Rubin Museum, 2018
MEET THE MENTORS
Thursday, June 11th – 6pm-7:30pm EST
Organized as part of our Queer|Art|Pride festivities (June 1-30), “Meet the Mentors” is a QAM info session for artists who are interested to apply to the program and an opportunity to introduce our new cohort of Mentors. During the event, Mentors of the upcoming 2020-2021 program cycle will be invited to share about their work, their interests in mentorship, and some of the ways they feel they are best suited to mentor another artist. It's also a moment for you to meet some of the other Mentors and Fellows in our community and hear from them about their experiences in the program.
Prospective applicants are encouraged to RSVP for this Q&A Session with Queer|Art Staff, Mentors, and Fellows, taking place over Zoom on Thursday, June 11th at 6pm-7:30pm. RSVP is required, click below for details.
TIMELINE
Applications open—June 1, 2020
Meet The Mentors Info Session—June 11, 2020
Application Deadline—August 1, 2020 (11:59 pm EST)
Program Begins—October 2020
Program Ends—October 2021
QAM Annual exhibition on view—November-December 2021
MENTOR BIOS
Image by Paula Court
Morgan Bassichis is a comedian and musician who makes solo and collaborative performances that draw on historical archives, collective singing, and something like self-help. Recent shows include Nibbling the Hand that Feeds Me (Whitney Museum, NYC, 2019), Klezmer for Beginners (co-created with Ethan Philbrick, Abrons Arts Center, NYC, 2019), Damned If You Duet (featuring Malik Gaines, Helen Messineo-Pandjiris, Ethan Philbrick, and Mariana Valencia, The Kitchen, NYC, 2018), and The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical (co-created with TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, Michi Ilona Osato, & Una Aya Osato, New Museum, NYC, 2017). Their year-long musical improvisation with Ethan Philbrick, March is For Marches, is available from Triple Canopy, and their live recording of More Protest Songs! at St. Mark's Church (featuring Kyle Combs, Elizabeth LoPiccolo, Sam Greenleaf Miller, and Rhys Ziemba) is available online.
Image by Thomas Dunn
Maria Bauman-Morales is a “Bessie” award winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Gibney Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. In 2009 she founded MBDance which recently premiered (re)Source to sold-out audiences, co-commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater and BAAD!. She creates bold and intimate artworks for MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Bauman-Morales is a Core Trainer with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, helping arts organizations and university dance programs understand and undo racism. In 2014, she co-founded a grassroots organization, Artists Co-creating Real Equity, which won the 2018 BAX Arts and Artists in Progress Award for working to undo racism in our daily lives. Organizing to undo racism informs her artistic work and the two areas are each ropes in a double-dutch that is her holistic practice.
Image by Alejandro Loayza
Rodrigo Bellott is a Bolivian filmmaker, playwright, and producer. Bellott’s Who Killed the White Llama? was the most successful box-office hit in Bolivia’s history, leading to Variety magazine naming him one of the Top Ten Latin American talents to watch in 2007. After receiving two masters degrees in screenwriting and directing at Binger Film Lab in Amsterdam in 2011, Bellott founded Bolivian BOLD Inc., a production company in New York City. At Queer|Art|Mentorship, Bellott worked with Mentor, filmmaker Silas Howard on the film adaptation of his play Tu Me Manques. Tu Me Manques, starring Oscar Martiniz and Rossy De Palma, premiered at Los Angeles’ Outfest in summer 2019 and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Original Screenplay. The film was also chosen by The Bolivian Filmmakers Association as the country's submission for the 2020 Oscars Best International Feature category.
Image by Rozette Rago
Saeed Jones is a writer whose latest memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives, charts a course across the American landscape, drawing readers into the author’s boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each vignette builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. How We Fight for Our Lives won the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award. Jones also wrote the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio and tweets @TheFerocity.
Image courtesy of the artist
Angelo Madsen Minax works in documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance, text, and media installation. Madsen's projects pull from autoethnography and a DIY ethos to think through chosen and biological kinships, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena, and his favorite triple goddess: love, sex, and death. His works have screened and/or exhibited at spaces including the European Media Art Festival, Issue Project Room, Kurzfilm Hamburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, REDCAT, and film festivals around the world. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Berlinale Doc Station, and others. Madsen is a recipient of the Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artists, the Tribeca Film Institute's All-Access Fellowship, the Sundance Film Institute's Documentary Production Fund, and the Bay Area Video Coalition’s Media-maker Fellowship. He is also an Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.
Image by Isais Fanlo
Jaime Manrique is a bilingual Colombian-born novelist, essayist, translator, and poet. His first volume of poems received Colombia’s National Poetry Award. He’s also published the volumes of poetry My Night with Federico García Lorca and Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus, and his Poemas selectos: El libro de los muertos (2017). He’s the author of the memoir Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. His novels include Latin Moon in Manhattan, Twilight at the Equator, Our Lives Are the Rivers, Cervantes Street, and Like this Afternoon Forever (2019). Mr. Manrique’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. Among his honors are a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the Foundation of Performance of the Contemporary Arts, and the International Latino Book Award for Best Historical novel, 2007. He is a former associate professor in the MFA in Writing at Columbia University (2002-2008). Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at the City College of New York. In 2019, he received the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award from the Publishing Triangle.
Image by Cory Rice
Carlos Motta’s multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. Motta’s 20-year career monograph Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms will be published by SKIRA and distributed by DAP and Thames and Hudson in summer 2020.
Image by Ligaiya Romero
Maia Cruz Palileo - Migration and the permeable concept of home are constant themes in Maia Cruz Palileo’s paintings. Influenced by the oral history of her family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Maia infuses these narratives using both memory and imagination. Palileo has participated in residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower East Side Print Shop, Millay Colony, and the Joan Mitchell Center. She has received an Art Matters Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant, NYFA Painting Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, among others. Recent exhibitions include All the While I Thought You Had Received This, Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Maia Cruz Palileo, Katzen Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Way Back, Taymour Grahne, London; and Meandering Curves of a Creek, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn.
Image by Patricia Silva
Pamela Sneed is a poet, writer, performer, and visual artist, and is author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift and Black Panther by Belladonna*. She has been featured in New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She serves as faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low Residency MFA program teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has been a visiting artist at SAIC for four consecutive years. She also teaches at Columbia University's School of Visual Arts, New Genres. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum and Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for the Artists, Designers, Citizens Conference—a North American component of the Venice Biennale at SAIC. She appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems.” In 2018, she was nominated for two PushCart Prizes in poetry. She will publish a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva with City Lights in October 2020.
Image by Mickalene Thomas
Tourmaline is an activist, filmmaker, and writer. Her work highlights the capacity of Black queer and trans people and communities to make and transform worlds. In her films, Tourmaline creates dreamlike portraits of people whose stories tell the history of New York City, including gay and trans liberation activists, drag queens, and queer icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera (Happy Birthday Marsha, co-directed with Sasha Wortzel, 2018), Miss Major (The Personal Things, 2016), and Egyptt LaBeija (Atlantic is a Sea of Bones, 2017). Recent screenings of Tourmaline’s work have been presented at venues including BFI Flare, London; Seattle Transgender Film Festival; Portland Art Museum; New Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Brooklyn Museum.