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.

QUEER|ART|ANNUAL PARTY

The Queer|Art Annual Party—our biggest event of the year—soared to new heights this time around! The celebratory night honored the graduating Fellows of Queer|Art|Mentorship, occasioned the ceremony for the Queer|Art|Prize, and—as of 2021—bestowed the inaugural Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers.

The grand event took place on Tuesday, December 14 from 7-9:15pm EST, and was live streamed from The Whitney Museum of American Art. Hosted by poet/performer Candystore and activist/drag artist Junior Mintt, the night culminated in a dazzling cabaret presented 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.

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

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 (QAM) community. Founded by Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artists Group, 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. This year, judges included celebrated writers, artists, and performers, Maria Bauman, Felicita (Felli) Maynard, and Saeed Jones. 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. 

The inaugural Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Award for Artists and Organizers has been awarded to artist and multi-year Queer|Art Mentor Pamela Sneed. Bauman, Maynard, and Jones remark, “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 Universities’ 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.

“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.” Sneed also treated the audience to excerpted readings from her poetry collection, Funeral Diva.

2021 SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT WINNER:
LOLA FLASH

In the area of Sustained Achievement, the award has been granted to Lola Flash. The 2021 Sustained Achievement panel of judges; Jonathan González, Ryan Inouye, and Nancy Rodrigo; remarked on Flash’s lifelong commitment to activism centered on elevating marginalized voices. Lola Flash’s energy, their tenacity, and can-do attitude, is what the 2021 Queer|Art|Prize represents. 

“We need to elevate [Lola Flash] right now, this year. A lot of nominees in ACT-UP, are part of our history, but so much of that history and narrative is dominated still by wealthy white gay men. Lola Flash changes that dialogue, with their portraits of the queer community but also of people of color, their photography is and of itself a legacy to our history this time rewritten and inclusive.” shares Nancy Rodrigo. 

Jonathan González states that “Lola Flash’s sustained creative and mentorship contributions animate, for me, how Queer People of Color are always on the move; building collective geographies of care that persists on lower frequencies; always building kinships that slip through the rigidity of queer archives and the dominant gaze; spatializing support intergenerationally and across landscapes; keeping queer memories expansive, alive, and felt.”

Ryan Inouye 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.”

Working at the forefront of genderqueer visual politics for more than three decades, photographer Lola Flash’s work challenges stereotypes and gender, sexual, and racial preconceptions. 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 Brooklyn Museum, and the National African American Museum of History & Culture. They are currently a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective. Flash works primarily in portraiture, engaging those who are often deemed invisible. Their practice is firmly rooted in social justice and cultural difference.

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.”

2021 RECENT WORK WINNER:
ANAÏS DUPLAN

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.

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.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of forthcoming book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at Bennington College, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City's artist-run organization Public Space One.

2021 Recent Work Finalists

Finalists for the Recent Work award, which honors specific projects completed between Pride 2020 and Pride 2021, include artists working in a number of different mediums. The Finalists for Recent Work are: Anaïs Duplan for Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2020), Heesoo Kwon for Leymusoom Universe (2021), Le’Andra LeSeur for Le’Andra LeSeur: In Reverence (2021), and Moises Salazar for Puto El Último (2021).

2021 ADJUDICATION PANEL

SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT ADJUDICATORS

Recent work adjudicators

2021 NOMINATING COMMITTEE

Nominations for each award were made by a diverse committee of 18 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.

QUEER|ART|PRIZE ARCHIVE