A national awards program, QUEER|ART|PRIZE honors the work of LGBTQ+ artists in areas of Sustained Achievement and Recent Work, with a ceremony that celebrates the entire Queer|Art community.

2022 QUEER|ART ANNUAL PARTY

PAMELA SNEED AWARD FOR BLACK QUEER|ART MENTORSHIP ARTISTS AND ORGANIZERS WINNER:
ALEXIS DE VEAUX

The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers was founded in 2021 to acknowledge Black Mentors and Fellows from the Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) community who uplift critical histories of Black queer mentorship and exemplify steadfast commitment to values shared by the QAM community. This year, judges included celebrated writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Justin Allen, Pamela Sneed, and Stephen Winter. The award is accompanied by a $10,000 cash prize, and the winner will be honored during the Queer|Art Annual Party, in conjunction with the Queer|Art|Prize ceremony.

This year, Allen, Sneed, and Winter recognize multihyphenate writer, educator, and activist, New Orleans-based author and 2021 Queer|Art Mentor Alexis De Veaux (Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, 2004; Yabo, 2014). They remark, “Alexis De Veaux is a pioneering force within the LGBTQIA community. Her expansive practice is wide-ranging: from poetry and journalism to children’s literature. Alexis has made invaluable contributions to the queer community across mediums. As a writer, educator, and public speaker, Alexis’s longstanding dedication to mentorship is clear across fields and generations. To be in the presence of her generous wisdom and infectious spirit is to be inspired.”

Alexis De Veaux, PhD., is the 2019 Distinguished Speaker for the Anne Frank Project Social Justice Festival, an honor bestowed on her by SUNY Buffalo State College. She is one of a stellar list of American writers highlighted by LIT CITY, a public art initiative of banners bearing their names and images in downtown Buffalo, New York; in recognition of the city's renowned literary legacy. Co-Founder (with poet Kathy Engel) of The Center for Poetic Healing, a project of Lyrical Democracies, and the Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company (with Gwendolen Hardwick), Alexis De Veaux is a black queer feminist writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry whose work in multiple genres is nationally and internationally known. Born and raised in Harlem, New York City, she is published in six languages-English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Serbo-Croatian and Portuguese. 

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and publications; including, most recently, Mouths of Rain, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (edited by Briona S. Jones, The New Press, 2021). She is the author of eight books, including multi-award winning works Warrior Poet, A Biography of Audre Lorde (2004) and the novel Yabo (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (2015). As an artist and lecturer De Veaux has traveled extensively throughout the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, Japan and Europe; and is recognized for on-going contributions to a number of community-based organizations. She was a tenured member of the faculty at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York from 1992-2013; teaching as Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies in the Department of Transnational Studies. Ms. De Veaux is currently serving on the board of the Roadwork Center for Cultures in Disputed Territory and co-founded (with Amy Horowitz) The Enclave Habitat, a virtual community-by-network of socially engaged artists and activists. Further information is available on her website.

Upon accepting the award, De Veaux remarked, “I’m really, really just thrown by this opportunity and this award. I’m grateful to the judges, to all the other nominees, to this entire community that I am part of… I’m also deeply thankful to all the people up here that you may or may not see that may or may not be visible to you, but they are here with me. These are my ancestors and my future, and I introduce them to you tonight so that you can bear witness to their presence and so that you don’t see me as singular. I am not singular. I am part of a great and grand community.”

2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE
SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT WINNER:
WENDI MOORE-O’NEAL

In the area of Sustained Achievement, the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize has been awarded to Wendi Moore-O’Neal, who also is based in New Orleans, where she is a recognized community leader. The 2022 Sustained Achievement panel of judges—Barbara Browning, Lia Gangitano, and Alicia Grullon—remarked on Moore-O’Neal’s commitment to organizing and storytelling within Black queer communities in the South: “In the words of the nominator, ‘Wendi Moore-O’Neal [is] a Black Feminist butch dyke from New Orleans, Louisiana. She uses story circles, theater, performance, and song sharing... as tools for growing inspiration and building democratic processes... Wendi has made profound positive impacts on southern queer community...’ Our choice for awarding Wendi comes from prioritizing a different kind of art making rooted in the traditions found in the Queer community which push up against hetero-normative partiarchial capitalist structures.”

As a Freedom Singer and founder of Jaliyah Consulting, Wendi Moore-O’Neal is a Black Feminist butch dyke who works to connect groups like Southerners On New Ground’s mission, vision and values with how everyday work gets done. Moore-O’Neal uses spiritually grounded practices learned from her family of freedom fighters like story circles and freedom singing as tools for growing inspiration and building democratic practices. Born and raised in New Orleans, she has worked in local, regional, national and trans-national organizations over the last 25 years. Wendi’s heart’s work is rooted in the Deep South of the United States, especially the kind of organizing and mutual care that happens during porch time, around kitchen tables and always sharing good food.

During her acceptance speech, O’Neal shared, “I come from a tradition of congregational singing, and it's a practice of experiencing our collective power… When I sing it’s not for performance, it’s a call for us to charge the air together and feel what it feels like to be together. Kwame Ture would say our work as organizers is not to convince people that they need to be free; it’s to show people what we can do when we organize and that’s what congregational signing practice does for me.” She then invited audience members to join her in call and response verses, enlivening The Whitney Museum’s auditorium with an inspirational chorus of song.

2021 RECENT WORK WINNER:
STEFA MARIN ALARCON

In the area of Recent Work, the award was granted to stefa marin alarcon for Born With An Extra Rib (2021), a transdisciplinary opera featuring multimedia artist and composer stefa marin alarcon. Descended from the Emberá-Chamí people, stefa is a Colombian-American musician, born and raised in Queens, New York. Emerging from the questions behind their upcoming record Born With An Extra Rib, this experimental opera creates a structure for stefa to reclaim and return to their body. They used video collage, live music, and ritual performance to ask their most pressing, embodied questions. Through the production, stefa invited the cast, creative team, and audience to engage in an emergent process of collective liberation.

2022 Recent Work judge Baseera Khan explained the adjudication panel’s decision: “My heart was drawn to a particular artist that reminded me about where I came from and how important music and night culture is to a femme, to a queer, to a marginalized, to a black and brown community, to build confidence in these communities, and to learn about desire because desire is essential and is part of our very being.”

alarcon’s acceptance speech touched on the power of being uncategorizable: “I want to start by saying this may be my biomythology, my origin story, but this honor belongs to many hands and many hearts. There’s no such thing as a solo artist and creating this work reminded me of that over and over again. I got to work with the most incredible team of visionaries, many of whom are my friends and my chosen family… I made this opera, I made this film, I made this installation and this ritual because being uncategorizable has actually protected me and there is power in being uncategorizable. Isn’t that queer art? …I hope to continue learning, to continue investing in myself, my spirit, and my practice. I hope this is one of the many times we come together to hold up our queer artists and our community. Thank you for this honor.”

stefa marin alarcon is a trans non-binary vocalist, composer, educator, and multimedia performance artist born and raised in Queens, NY to Colombian immigrants. Using an amalgamation of punk, experimental rage pop, and classical minimalism with maximalist aesthetics, stefa builds worlds that offer a somatic decolonial respite for the misfits, the displaced, and future generations of Brown and Indigenous radical artists of the diaspora. Their artistic practice explores concepts of home, identity, gender, borders, erased ancestry, and radical trans, queer & Native futures through music, theater, ritual performance, and video. stefa has shared their work, spirit, and song with Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museo Del Barrio, The Kitchen, Ars Nova, National Sawdust, BAAD!, NUEVOFest, Abrons Arts Center, Dixon Place, Tulsa Artist Residency, Cine Las Americas, The Vienna Festival, Body Hack, Fierce Futures and more. They studied euro-centric classical voice at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and concentrated in drama at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. They were an Artist-in-Residence at TrueQué Residencia Artística, Slippage Residency at Duke University in collaboration with Mx Oops, as well as a Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics EmergeNYC Fellow, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art Artist Fellow, and Artist In Residence at The Kitchen NYC. Their debut EP Sepalina was released on Figure & Ground Records in 2018 and their forthcoming multi-media record, Born With An Extra Rib, will be released Winter 2023.

2022 QUEER|ART|PRIZE RECENT WORK FINALISTS

Finalists for the Recent Work award, which honors specific projects completed between 2021 and 2022, include artists working in a number of different mediums. Each artist will receive a $5,000 award, and the winner, to be revealed at the Queer|Art Annual Party, will receive an additional $5,000. The Finalists for Recent Work are: stefa marin alarcon for Born with an extra rib (2021); Marie Amegah for All of our Soft Parts (2022); Uhuru Moor for The Uhuru Dreamhouse (ongoing); and Grace Rosario Perkins for The Relevance of Your Data (2022). Learn more at the Finalists’ features below.

2022 ADJUDICATION PANEL

SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT ADJUDICATORS

Recent work adjudicators

2022 NOMINATING COMMITTEE

Nominations for each award were made by a diverse committee of 15 esteemed arts professionals from around the country, including archivists, art historians, critics, curators, choreographers, cultural organizers, visual artists, performing artists, teaching artists, scholars, writers, directors, and filmmakers with various intersecting commitments to queer culture.

GALLERY

All images by Summer Surgent-Gough

QUEER|ART|PRIZE ARCHIVE