A Night to Remember: Recapping the 2021 Queer|Art Annual Party — QUEER

Documentation by Summer Surgent-Gough and Natalie Tsui.

The grand event was live streamed from The Whitney Museum of American Art, and was hosted by poet/performer Candystore and activist/drag artist Junior Mintt. This year's Prize honored photographer, QA Board member, and Multi-Year QAM Mentor Lola Flash, and trans* poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan with awards recognizing their significant contributions to queer culture and community. The Prize awards artists in two categories: Sustained Achievement and Recent Work. And in its debut year, the Black QAM Award was granted to poet, artist, and Multi-Year QAM Mentor Pamela Sneed.

In the area of Recent Work, the award was granted to Anaïs Duplan for Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2020), a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry. Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book.

*Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture* by An Duplan (2020).

Judges in this category remarked on the work’s vision of a reality that doesn’t depend on violence, and its unique engagement with writing, essay, and a hybridity of borderlessness through the perspective of a Black trans poet. The judges also remarked on Duplan’s virtuosic capacity to weave between interior/personal spaces and historical/social ones, and his compelling argument for a space of freedom in mundanity.

“I know I’m supposed to talk, but this is the most speechless moment,” Duplan said upon receiving the Prize. He continued, “thank you to Queer|Art, thank you to all of the artists & writers who I wrote about in Blackspace, many of whom are friends. I’ve been talking with students a lot about this quote from Glissant, a fragment: ‘consent to not be a single being.’ I love that tenderness, that we might think about ourselves as, not individuals in a vacuum, right? Sort of toss out this individual genius model and think more about the beauty that we embody together.” To conclude his remarks, Duplan shared a live reading of his poem, “Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colscott’s George Washington Carver crossing the Delaware,” giving the audience a stirring and profound glimpse into Blackspace.

Finalists for the Recent Work award included Heesoo Kwon for Leymusoom Universe (2021), Le’Andra LeSeur for Le’Andra LeSeur: In Reverence (2021), and Moises Salazar for Puto El Último (2021).

In the area of Sustained Achievement, the award was granted to Lola Flash. Ryan Inouye, one of the 2021 Sustained Achievement judges, expressed that “this Sustained Achievement award honors Lola Flash as a giant of history. As we think through how we want to be with each other both inside and outside of institutions, the artist’s multi-faceted practice consistently centers the exuberant life and community that precedes a politics of resistance, just as their work charges us to protect what we have and question how to build in the future.”

At the Annual Party, Flash spoke to the value of beauty in her work: “I photograph some famous people like Ruth Pointer and then I photograph those who don’t consider themselves famous, they don’t consider themselves beautiful. But with me, often coming in the door with my big 4x5 camera, people know that I’m there to shoot their beauty. It’s been really important for me to shoot those people that know they’re beautiful, but also those people who don’t. Because we all know what beauty is, we all know that we’re beautiful, but it’s taken the world a long time to see that and people are saying, ‘how do you continue doing this work?’, like forty years on, and it’s because when I grew up, I never saw myself.” To close, Flash shared a metaphor that her mother would often repeat. Looking into our history “is like walking through a rose garden—thorns and all—but at the end, you end up with a beautiful bouquet. And I want to thank Queer|Art for this beautiful bouquet; thank you all.”

The Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers is a new $10K award founded by Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artists Group, that acknowledges Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Mentors and Fellows who uplift critical histories of Black queer mentorship and exemplify steadfast commitment to values shared by the Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) community. This year, judges included celebrated writers, artists, and performers, Maria Bauman, Felicita (Felli) Maynard, and Saeed Jones. The award was awarded to artist and Multi-Year QA Mentor Pamela Sneed. Judges remarked, “as a jury and as members of a richly Black artistic community, we have been and continue to be deeply moved by Pamela Sneed’s gift for moving all of us forward. In recognition of the fact that mentorship itself is as beautiful, gorgeous, and vital as any other artistic discipline, we are pleased to award Sneed the inaugural Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award as a recognition of not only her brilliance and accomplishments in the field of literary arts but also for her longstanding commitment to nurturing younger Black queer voices, both through Queer|Art|Mentorship and outside of QAM.”

“It is a great honor to receive this award for my artistry, mentorship, and leadership and to be recognized by my peers of BlaQ, dedicated to supporting Black queer artists within Queer|Art. This is an inaugural award, and fittingly, I was an inaugural Mentor for Queer|Art when it started in 2009,” Sneed recounted during her acceptance remarks. “I’m proud of the way that the organization has grown and expanded so many lives of queer, LGBTQIA people, who have been saved and recognized in their artistry, recognized across generations. I consider teaching, mentorship in art to be spiritual work and I try to do so with love, honesty in the hopes to make a positive difference in people’s lives and on the planet. I would like to thank the BlaQ nomination committee: Saeed Jones, Maria Bauman, Felli Maynard. Thank you for seeing me and for the courage in everything that all of you do.” In recognition of Sneed’s significant contributions, the award will henceforth be known as the Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers.

The Annual Party also recognized the 2020-2021 QAM Fellows, a fiercely tight-knit group of creatives who forged incredible bonds this year with one another in spite of the fellowship’s virtual nature. Via remote teleconference from Toronto, Literature Fellow Erica Cardwell took a moment to recognize the lasting presence and impact of April Freely (1982-2021), a Literature Fellow from this cohort and a brilliant writer in our community who passed away this past summer. After additional remarks from QAM Program Manager Matice Moore and Junior Mintt, the Fellows were celebrated with a triumphant graduation ceremony.

But that’s not all!

To conclude the evening, co-hosts Candystore and Junior Mintt presented a dazzling cabaret curated around the theme of “Performance as Resilience.” The illustrious slate of performers included Dev Doee, Filthy June, Juniper Juicy, and Cecilia Gentili, who put on a raucous show that blended drag, politics, dancing, lip-syncing, and storytelling.

To learn even more about Queer|Art|Prize and this year’s honorees and finalists, visit our Prize page.