The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers, recognizes the work of Black Fellows and Mentors with long-term engagement and dedication to the Mentorship community at Queer|Art and to uplifting critical histories of Black queer mentorship at large.
ABOUT
Maria Bauman-Morales & Olaiya Olayemi by Lola Flash, 2019 Queer|Art Community Portrait Project
The first of its kind, The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers, (formally known as The Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers) is a new annual award 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 community. The award highlights Black queer artists within the Mentorship community that uphold guiding principles and practices like intergenerational exchange, collective care, creative resilience, preservation of Black queer legacies, and an engagement with grassroots organizing within their creative practice and beyond. The award is accompanied by a $10,000 cash prize, and the winner is honored at the Queer|Art Annual Party, in conjunction with the Queer|Art Prize ceremony.
The award emerged collectively from ongoing conversations among Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artists Group in 2020. The award not only recognizes the contributions of Black queer artists within Queer|Art|Mentorship, but also celebrates foundational histories of mentorship and fellowship among Black queer artists whose labor too often remains underrecognized and undercompensated. With this award, the group seeks to correct this oversight and illuminate lineages of Black queer mentorship and world-building for today and tomorrow.
ADJUDICATION
The award is facilitated through a nomination process that welcomes nominations from past and current Black Mentors and Fellows of the Queer|Art|Mentorship program. The judges are selected by Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artist Group.
Portfolios for nominated artists are assembled and distributed to the judging panel by Queer|Art staff. They are organized into two sections: the first highlights a history of the artist’s QAM community engagement, and the second section uplifts the artist’s other work––art-related or otherwise––taking place outside the Queer|Art|Mentorship community and that is in keeping with the values shared by Queer|Art and the intentions of this award.
For questions, email Queer|Art|Film & Awards Coordinator, Dani Brito at dbrito@queer-art.org.
2021 PAMELA SNEED AWARD JUDGES
From left to right: Maria Bauman, image by Lola Flash; Saeed Jones, image courtesy of artist; Felicita (Felli) Maynard, image by Lola Flash.
Maria Bauman is a NY-based “Bessie” award winning (Outstanding Performance, skeleton architecture) multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer. She creates bold and intimate artworks for her company, 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 living rooms and nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Maria is a 2018-19 UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship Candidate, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance. She is also a co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), undoing racism in arts fields, and was recently honored with a 2019 BAX Arts in Progress award for that work.
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.
Felicita “Felli” Maynard is a first generation Afrolatinx genderqueer interdisciplinary artist, storyteller and educator. They use analog and wet plate photography to explore their identity as a descendant of the African diaspora. They received their BFA from Brooklyn College, with a concentration in photography. Maynard has exhibited at Bushwick Open Studios in NYC, Brooklyn College, Westchester Community College and Pen + Brush Gallery in NYC. They are a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellow (2018-19) and a BRIC Media Fellow (2018-19). They have participated in residencies at Smack Mellon and Nurture Arts.
2021 AWARD WINNER
In its inaugural year, the Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers, selected artist and multi-year Queer|Art Mentor Pamela Sneed for her indelible contributions as a writer and mentor. In honor of the inaugural winner, the award is now called the Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers. Over the past three decades, Sneed’s dedication to uplifting younger Black queer voices has remained at the forefront of her practice as an educator at institutions like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia University but also, within Queer|Art|Mentorship, where she has served as Mentor for four cycles. Across acclaimed works like Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, and Funeral Diva, the artist’s deeply textured prose and poetry has moved many across generations, rendering Sneed one of the most brilliant artist’s of her time. 2021 Award judges, Maria Bauman, Saeed Jones, and Felicita (Felli) Maynard echo this sentiment:
“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.”
Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist, author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams and two chaplets, Gift by Belladonna and Black Panther. In 2021, She published a chapbook If The Capitol Rioters Had Been Black with F magazine and Motherbox Gallery. She has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic and on the cover of New York Magazine. She is online faculty in SAIC’s low res MFA teaching Human Rights and Writing Art and has also been a Visiting Artist at SAIC in the program for 5 consecutive years. In 2020, she was the Commencement Speaker for the low-res MFA program at SAIC. She also teaches new genres in Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Poetry Project, MCA, The High Line, New Museum, MOMA, Broad Museum and the Toronto Biennale. She delivered the closing keynote for Artist, 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 Push Cart Prizes in poetry. She is widely published in journals such as The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum Magazine, The Paris Review, and Frieze Magazine. She recently published an article for Harpers Bazaar U.S. and has upcoming work in The New York Times. She is the author of a poetry and prose manuscript Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020 featured in The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award. Additionally in 2021, She was a finalist for New York Theater Workshops Golden Harris Award and received a monetary award. In 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School and NYU’s Center For Humanities. She currently has work on view at Leslie Lohman. She is a multi/year Queer Art mentor.
ABOUT QUEER|ART’S BLACK LGBTQ+ ARTIST GROUP
Lola Flash and Felicita (Felli) Maynard for the 2019 Queer|Art Community Portrait Project, captured by Lola Flash.
BlaQ, Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artist Group was founded in 2020 in response to the ongoing crisis of state violence against Black lives. The group centers fellowship and skill-sharing among the Black LGBTQ+ artists in Queer|Art|Mentorship through resource mapping and organizing for Black liberation. In 2021, the group conceived The Flash Fund at Queer|Art. Named in honor of Lola Flash, a celebrated photographer, a Mentor in our community, and the first Black board member at Queer|Art, the fund provides $500 micro-grants to Black queer artists within the Queer|Art|Mentorship community for artists' projects.