The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers supports the creation of work by emerging LGBTQ+ photographers whose projects address issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity.

ABOUT

Queer|Art’s first international grant of $10,000 supports the creation of work by emerging LGBTQ+ photographers. The grant was organized in partnership with The Robert Giard Foundation from 2020 until 2022 when the Foundation ceased operations. The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers is made possible entirely through support provided by The Robert Giard Foundation.

Previously known as The Robert Giard Fellowship (2008-2018), the grant is named in honor of photographer Robert Giard (1939-2002), a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer whose work focused on LGBTQ+ lives and issues. The grant focuses on supporting emerging LGBTQ+ photographers whose projects address issues of sexuality, gender, or LGBTQ+ identity. This year, the grant winner will receive $10,000, and four finalists will receive $1,250 each.

B DUKES, 2023 WINNER

Multidisciplinary artist and healer B Dukes will receive the $10,000 cash grant to support the development of their series Scarred and Liberated. For this forthcoming body of work, the artist will travel to their hometown in the backwoods of South Carolina to take self portraits that document their self-harm scars. Many of these portraits will be staged on the land in which Dukes was raised—the photos capture the terrain that surrounds the home that their great grandmother built and passed down to generations to come. For Dukes, the ritual of returning home is crucial to their healing journey: it’s an embodied practice of reclamation which uplifts the sites in which they have felt “both at home and alone.” Scarred and Liberated will also include an assortment of collages that depict the artist’s top surgery and their recovery as they were cared for by their parents and siblings. Through the lens, Dukes sets out to document their personal survival and perseverance: across their deeply emotive practice, the camera is an instrument of catharsis, which reimagines the wounds of harrowing memories.

On receiving the 2023 Robert Giard Grant, Dukes writes, “Receiving this award and recognition expands the bounds of what is possible with this project as well as future visions that have been brewing in my heart space. As an artist originally from the backwoods of the Deep South, this grant shines a light on the experience of Black, trans and non-binary people from small town South Carolina and the ways that the landscapes inspire the paths forward.”

Inspired by the voices of the ancestors and plant medicines — big ma’s baby — Back Woods, Deep South raised, B Dukes (they/them) is a multidisciplinary non-binary artist, healer, medicine maker, spirit B who approaches their writing, sonic creations, DJ mixes, visual art, filmmaking and ceremonies with the transformational healing of their Black & Brown queer kin in mind. Embracing the sacred art of playing with nature, inquiry, pleasure and rest, B Dukes is currently exploring birthing sacred spaces, interactive art, films and visual art that liberates, heals and grounds. B is also the creator and lead facilitator of the When We Are Free artist residency, a space where Black and Brown, queer, trans creatives are given the space and time to connect with themselves, their practices and each other.

Grant Judge Ariel Goldberg writes: “B Dukes takes photography to another level, one of return and also release, to find stories from scars, to bring spiritual connection to and from ancestors, and step into a place of trans and non- binary gender euphoria centering Black and Brown queer life. I’m excited for B Dukes’ work to come and those of us who will be transformed by it.”

2023 ROBERT GIARD GRANT FINALISTS

2023 ROBERT GIARD GRANT JUDGES

Lola Flash challenges stereotypes and gender, sexual, and racial preconceptions across their work. As a photographer, Flash has worked at the forefront of genderqueer visual politics for more than four decades. An active member of ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Their art and activism are profoundly connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color worldwide. Flash has work included in important collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA, the Whitney, the Museum of the African American of History and Culture and the Brooklyn Museum. They are currently a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective, and on the Board of Queer Art. Flash received their bachelor's degree from Maryland Institute and Masters’ from London College of Printing, in the UK. Flash works primarily in portraiture, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. Flash’s practice is firmly rooted in social justice advocacy around sexual, racial, and cultural difference.

Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City. Goldberg’s books include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015), and their short-form writing has most recently appeared in Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image, Afterimage Journal, e-flux, Jewish Currents, Artforum, and Art in America. Their exhibition on photography’s relationship to spaces for learning, Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s is on view at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial and travels to Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in March 2023. Goldberg has curated public programs for over ten years at venues including The Poetry Project and Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center. With Noam Parness they co-curated “Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection” (2020) at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Their work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, New York Public Library Research Rooms, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and SOMA in Mexico City. They were a 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for their book-in-progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late 20th century. Goldberg has taught photography, writing, and contemporary art practices at Bard College, The New School, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University.

Leandro Justen is a Brazilian-born queer photographer and documentarian. Leandro uses photography as a way to connect with and document the queer community in New York City, and as a tool for self-discovery and liberation. From 2019 through 2021, Leandro helped organize the Queer Liberation March, a grassroots-led march created to honor the history of protest and activism of the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. In 2021, he presented his first solo show “Into The Streets: Photographs of LGBTQ+ Activism. New York City, 2018-2021.” The exhibition highlighted key historic LGBTQ+ events and the work of BIPOC activists and community organizers.

Logan MacDonald is an artist, curator, writer, educator and activist who focuses on queer, disability and Indigenous perspectives. He is of mixed-European and Mi’kmaw ancestry, who identifies with both his Indigenous and settler roots. Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, his Mi’kmaw ancestry is connected to Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk. His artwork has exhibited across North America, notably with exhibitions at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles) John Connelly Presents (New York), Dunlop Gallery (Regina), BACA (Montréal) and at the 2021 Bonavista Biennale.  In 2019, MacDonald was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award  and was honoured with a six-month residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. He is a graduate from Concordia University with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies, and a MFA in Studio Arts from York University. MacDonald is an Assistant Professor in Studio Arts and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Art at  University of Waterloo whereby his focus is on the creation of an Indigneous artist-residency program called The Longhouse Labs.

Benjy Russell is a Choctaw artist who grew up in rural Oklahoma, and for the last fourteen years has lived in rural Tennessee on stolen Euchee land. Living as a gay man in these rural landscapes can often feel impossible, yet here Russell has found a thriving and diverse community of queer and trans people to vision the new world along with him. As an artist, Russell is compelled by the conversation that happens at the intersection of philosophy, science, and art— a way to see the world prismatically and to unlearn harmful, antiquated social structures. He has always looked to science fiction as a model for how we can shape the future we want. By creating a fictionalized version of the future we desire, we take the first step towards its existence. Most of Russell’s work utilizes in-camera effects, using sculpture, studio lights, wires, and mirrors in lieu of photoshop to allude to magical realism. By creating a physical moment of impossibility, you can hold it up to the rest of the world to show what else is possible. His work points to some of the joy inherent in this life, showing it to be as much of the present moment as it is of the future.

ABOUT ROBERT GIARD

Robert Giard (1939-2002) was a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer who came to the practice of photography relatively late in life. In 1972 he began to take photographs, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, many of them artists and writers in the region, and the nude figure. He is best known for photographing over 500 LGBTQ+ writers and activists. A selection from this project, Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, was published in 1997 by MIT Press and led to a groundbreaking exhibit at the New York Public Library the following year.

In 1985, after seeing a performance of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, as the AIDS crisis raged, Giard decided to turn his camera towards the LGBTQ+ literary community to preserve a record of queer lives and histories. He began documenting LGBTQ+ literary figures, both established and emerging, in a series of unadorned, yet sometimes witty and playful portraits that would eventually number over 500 by the time of his death.

Giard’s work can be found in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the San Francisco Public Library, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; his complete archive, including work books and ephemera, can be found in the American Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ROBERT GIARD FOUNDATION

The Robert Giard Foundation (2002-2022) was formed in 2002 to preserve Robert Giard’s photographic legacy and to make the full range of his work accessible to a wide audience. The Foundation promotes the use of Giard’s work for educational purposes and supports public programs and continued scholarship focusing on queer literature in America and LGBTIQ+ cultural and political movements. The Foundation also arranges for the permanent preservation of Giard’s photographs, writing and ephemera in museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions. Through the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging Photographers, the Foundation extends Giard’s legacy by encouraging current and future generations to document, depict, and interrogate past and present LGBTIQ+ cultures. The grant was first established in 2008 in cooperation with the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

ARCHIVE

Left to right: Chen Xiangyun, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 2021. Courtney Webster & Meg Turner, Domestic Bliss, 2018. Annie Flanagan, Alex at Queer Youth Prom, Alabama, 2018. Roberto Tondopó, Holy Name of San Sebastián, 2015-2017.