The BARBARA HAMMER LESBIAN EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING GRANT is an annual grant that will be awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art.
Image by Eric McNatt for the 2017 Queer|Art Community Portrait Project
Legendary lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) died this March from endometrioid ovarian cancer, which she approached with the same experimental and fearless spirit that she did everything in her life, and through which she ultimately found peace, acceptance, and new purpose. In her final years, she worked hard to make sure we—as a community of friends, colleagues, and fellow artists—were prepared for this moment: speaking out through lectures, performances, and interviews about one’s right to die when living with terminal illness; arranging for her archive of personal papers, research, and films to be safeguarded by the Beinecke Library at Yale; and establishing with Queer|Art, in her name, this grant for lesbian experimental filmmakers.
The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. The grant is supported directly by funds provided by her estate and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. In her last few months with us, Barbara decided to increase the grant amount, as she understood so well that a bit of financial help could make a big difference in a project. This year Queer|Art is pleased to announce that the grant has increased to $6,000.
ABOUT
The Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant is an annual grant that will be awarded to self-identified lesbians for making visionary moving-image art. Work can be experimental animation, experimental documentary, experimental narrative, cross-genre, or solely experimental. Applicants must be based in the U.S. This grant was established by Hammer in 2017 to give needed support to moving-image art made by lesbians. The grant is supported directly by funds provided by Hammer and administered through Queer|Art by lesbians for lesbians, with a rotating panel of judges. As of 2019, the grant is $6000.
Queer|Art Presents
"The Hammer Mix: Decades" at MoMA
Wednesday, November 13 at 7pm
The Museum of Modern Art - Titus 1 Theater
Vital Signs. 1991. By Barbara Hammer. Image courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Queer|Art and The Museum of Modern Art team up for their first co-presentation on Wednesday, November 13th at 7pm with “The Hammer Mix: Decades,” a special evening of screenings and conversation organized in honor of legendary artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), whose prolific creative career spanned more than six decades. The program includes a screening of short films made across those decades and will explore some of Hammer's many diverse creative interests, including love and intimacy, travel and human connection, and the art and politics of dying. N. Scott Johnson will perform a special live accompaniment to Hammer’s 2018 film “Evidentiary Bodies”. A post-screening conversation with film historian Sarah Keller, artist A.K. Burns, and the winner of the 2018 Barbara Hammer Grant for Lesbian Experimental Filmmakers Miatta Kawinzi, moderated by program curator Vanessa Haroutunian, will consider Hammer's influence on past, present, and future generations of artists.
Tickets available starting October 30 here
Multiple Orgasm, 1976, by Barbara Hammer. Image courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Film Lineup
Clay I Love You II. 1968-69. By Barbara Hammer. 5 min.
Multiple Orgasm. 1976. By Barbara Hammer. 6 min.
16mm print courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Vever (for Barbara). 2019. Directed by Deborah Stratman, Camera & Voice by Barbara Hammer (1975). 12 min.
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York Subway Tape. 1985. By Barbara Hammer. 13 min.
Vital Signs. 1991. USA. By Barbara Hammer. 10 min.
16mm print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Evidentiary Bodies. 2018. USA. By Barbara Hammer. 9 min.
With live accompaniment by N. Scott Johnson.
New Orleans-Based Filmmaker Alli Logout
Wins the 2019 Barbara Hammer Grant
Still from Black Silk Stocking (2018), a music video for Special Interest. Directed by Alli Logout
Queer|Art is excited to announce New Orleans-based filmmaker and performance artist Alli Logout as the winner of the 2019 Hammer Grant. Logout was one of 65 applicants who applied for the Hammer grant in its third year, with a project currently entitled “Sis, is This the End of the World?.” Logout’s piece is a film project that intimately follows the indulgently radical lives of six southern, black, queer, and trans lovers and band mates as they care for each other, struggle, and use revelrous direct action to push America to its breaking point.
Alli Logout, image courtesy of the artist
Alli Logout (they/them) is a black, gender non-conforming filmmaker and performance artist whose work explores the south, the abject, and the body. They create cinematic social experiments in collaboration with non-professional actors to author counter-narratives from within their own communities and subcultures. Centering Blackness and Queerness in the South, the creation of those identities, and their deconstruction, Logout’s work utilizes the material of lived-in stories to propose a new form of being, not as a fantasy, but with feet firmly planted in the now. They hold a BFA in Media Studies from UNT and were recently a 2019 resident at ACRE (Artist’s Cooperative Residency & Exhibitions). Their work has been seen nationally and internationally, including exhibitions and screenings at the SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, BFI Flare, London, Mix NYC, New York, and the Korea Queer Culture Festival, Seoul. Their film Lucid Noon, Sunset Blush (2015) won ‘Best Feminist Short’ at the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. Logout is also the writer and vocalist of the punk band, Special Interest. They are co-founder and co-director of Studio LaLaLa, a black and trans operated production studio focused on aiding underprivileged communities in the creation of their own narratives.
Still from Fuckin… Around (2019) by Alli Logout
Still from Fuckin… Around (2019) by Alli Logout
About “Sis, is This the End of the World?” by Alli Logout
“Sis, is This the End of the World?” is a film project rooted in narratives of queer intimacy, embodiment, and becoming. Mika, a young runaway groupie, is welcomed into the decadent life and shotgun style home of six queer punks— a chosen family blurring the lines of intimacy, friendship and sex in close quarters. Through Mika’s confrontation with identity, desire, and belonging, the viewer enters containers of time and space which open up into potentials for a full life.
Mika and the crew embark on a tour in the American South. From shotgun to tour van, the film project invites us further in while simultaneously expanding outwards. Within the identity forming tension of outside/within, dissolving formal elements, visual and structural chaos, there is an experiential demonstration of black rage through the rejection of our reliance on semiotic form. The compounded trauma brought forth is not something for the characters to overcome, rather something to be thrust forward and through. It is a departure from representation into experience. Experimental transitions, improvisational dialog, and escalating visual elements implicate the viewer, disrupting their experience of entertainment. The project challenges a compulsion which begins in consumption and ends in the full immersive experience of our collective death drive, our need for rupture, our unfaltering desire to escape, towards insurrection, with internal love and affinity. The characters are not fated, not together through destiny, rather move together giving form to their own lives, together in being and action.
Imbedded in filmmaker Alli Logout’s creative process is collaboration with QTPOC who make up the vibrancy of their life, in set design, costume and styling, dialog, and movement. The project will be filmed in New Orleans, LA with a skeleton crew of artists from the Gulf South.
2019 HAMMER GRANT FINALISTS
Still from The First Pineapple by Shalemar Coloma (2017)
Shalemar Coloma
For "Toni Dreams of Heaven," a B-movie about a lonely nanny that unknowingly falls for a baby-eating demon, known in the Phillipines as the manananggal, whose insatiable hunger gets in the way of their budding romance.
Still from blood peach by Zuri Obi (in production)
Zuri Obi
For “blood peach,” an experimental documentary that unearths the oral history and folklore surrounding an episode of racial terror committed by the Union army in Reconstruction era-Mississippi.
Still from if I could turn back time by Natalie Tsui (in production)
Natalie Tsui
For “if I could turn back time,” a hybrid documentary examining the contortions of memory and personal testimony of a filmmaker as she enlists friends and actors to recreate a two-hour audio recording of a fight between her then-lover and herself.
2019 HAMMER GRANT JUDGES
Tirtza Even is a documentary-maker and video artist. Her linear and interactive video work has been shown in the Whitney Biennial, Johannesburg Biennial, and at the Museum of Modern Art, ,as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Israel, and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight, Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, New York Video Festival, and Lincoln Center. Her work has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts Award, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Awards, Chicago (winner of top award), Golden Gate Awards Certificate-of-Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival, Media Arts Award, The Jerome Foundation, Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum (New York); the Israel Museum (Jerusalem); among others. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France; Video Data Bank; and Groupe Intervention Video, Canada. Even is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.
kara lynch is a time-based artist living in the Bronx, NY. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, she is curious about duration, being in the body, and sonic experience; and through low-fi, collective practice, and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time and space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered—Black, queer and feminist. Major projects include: ‘Black Russians’, a feature documentary video (2001); ‘The Outing’, a video travelogue (1999-2004); and ‘Mouhawala Oula’, a gender-bending trio performance for baladi dance, live video, and saxophone (2009). Her current project ‘INVISIBLE’ (2004-present) is an episodic, speculative, multi-site video/audio installation that excavates the terror and resilient beauty of Black-indigenous experience. lynch is currently an Associate Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Clara López Menéndez is an art worker practicing in the fields of curating, pedagogy, art criticism, and performance. Among her recent projects are AK Burns' solo exhibition A Smeary Spot at Human Resources, LA and the critical evening series It was quite a fiction, organized with Suzy Halajian. She is the co-curator with Andrew Kachel of the ongoing project A New Job to Unwork At, presented at Participant Inc. in NYC in August-October 2018. Her writing has appeared in Mousse, Art News, BOMB, Little Joe, and she has worked with Redcat, Participant Inc., Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and die neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, among others.
ABOUT BARBARA HAMMER
Barbara Hammer sorting through her archive by Vanessa Haroutunian
Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) began making films in the 1970s. She is most well-known for making the first explicit lesbian film in 1974, Dyketactics, and for her trilogy of documentary film essays on queer history: Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995), and History Lessons (2000). Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change, often through an exploration of the materiality of the filmmaking process and its relationship to the body’s potential as subject, form, author, and screen. She has been honored with seven retrospectives, including a forthcoming exhibition later this year at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Previous retrospectives took place at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Tate Modern in London, Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Toronto International Film Festival, Kunsthalle Oslo in Norway, and The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. Her book Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life was published in 2010 by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.
“It has been the goal of my life to put a lesbian lifestyle on the screen. Why? Because when I started I couldn’t find any! ...I picked up a camera in the 60s, late 60s, made Super 8, 8mm, finally went to school and got a 16mm camera. Made 13 films in two and a half years. All experimental. Because I think that as a lesbian at that time I was living an experimental lifestyle. Well let’s just say, I was experimenting. And I still am. And I think that lesbian film really calls out for experimental work. ...Working as a lesbian filmmaker in the 70s wasn’t easy in the social structure — the educational institution that I was in. It was difficult. And I want this grant to make it easier for lesbians of today. So you can make work that you want to make.”
— Barbara Hammer
APPLY
2019 APPLICATIONS are closed
Application TBA 2020
Complete Application TBA 2020
What information does the application require?
Contact info, narrative bio, and headshot
Synopsis of project and strategy for exhibition
Budget
Work samples (2 samples, no more than 7-10 minutes total)
2 professional references
CV
What is required in the synopsis and budget?
Synopsis:
Description of the project and the process by which it will be made. (Up to 300 words) *Required
What is your timeline for completing the work and strategy for its exhibition? (Up to 125 words) * Required
Are there any additional aspects of this work you would like the panel to be aware of? (Up to 125 words) *Not required
Budget (one page, uploaded as PDF):
Your budget should account for how the work will be made (you do not need to include presentation costs). If the cost of production exceeds the grant amount, please indicate within the budget any confirmed funding you have received or additional funding you anticipate that will enable you to complete this project.
There is a $6 application fee*
Queer|Art uses the online application software SlideRoom to organize applications. SlideRoom charges applicants for the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant a fee of $6 for each individual application. The fee does not profit Queer|Art.
HAMMER GRANT ARCHIVE
2018
2017