Category: In the News

Tara Lee – Inside Vancouver – June 14, 2018

Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival Marks A Decade Of Provocative And Innovative ProgrammingFor its tenth year, the Queer Arts Festival (QAF) will be a showcasing an array of multidisciplinary artists who offer complex, nuanced, and boundary-challenging work meant to incite conversation.

This year’s QAF will feature performance, panels, curated exhibitions, and parties that will be sure to engage attendees in new avenues of thought and artistic creation.

Running from June 16 to 28, 2018, the QAF takes place at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews). This year’s festival is so monumental, not only because of its tenth anniversary, but also because Pride in Art is celebrating their two decades in existence. Organizers hope to continue to give voice and space for those marginalized and/or silenced, as well as to bring to the forefront the possibilities of contesting what is considered normative and acceptable. The QAF is special in that it is artist run, and is considered one of the top five festivals of its kind.

Here are five events/exhibitions/programming to look forward to:

CAMERA OBSCURA (HUNGRY GHOSTS)

June 19-23, 2018 (June 19 preview)
This world premiere, written by Lesley Ewen and presented with the frank theatre company, is a multimedia performance that looks at the early years of Paul Wong and a project of his, “Murder Research.” It explores the fraught nature of creativity, the ghosts of past artistic work, and the difficulties of racialized artists to create within the nation.

DECADENCE: CURATED VISUAL ART EXHIBITION

June 16-27, 2018
Curated by Valérie D. Walker, DECADEnce considers what is marked and what is unmarked within a “settler colonial society,” particularly drawing attention to that which exists beyond official and mainstream notice. Artists represented include Jenny Lin, TJ Norris, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Guerrilla Girls.

JEREMY DUTCHER: WOLASTOQIYIK LINTUWAKONAWA (MALISEET SONGS)

June 27, 2018
Jeremy Dutcher, an operatic tenor, will sing traditional pieces from his Wolastoqiyik ancestors. He will incorporate, in his performance, recordings from century-old archival wax cylinders that he was able to locate.

SKIN & METAL: HOMOEROTIC MUSIC THEATRE WORKS BY BARRY TRUAX

June 24, 2018
This thirty-year retrospective concert looks at the work of Barry Truax, a ground breaking electro-acoustic Vancouver composer. Music will be performed by Erato Ensemble with special guest Jerry Pergolesi, with selections focusing on those that leverage music’s ability to challenge boundaries.

EVERYTHING

June 26, 2018
This performance by dancer Lee Su-Feh promises to be a complicated examination of Asian diaspora, Canadian indigeneity, and the conflict and possibilities of movement and object flight.

LAY OF THE LAND

June 19, 2018
Curated by Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), the evening will entail erotic literary readings. Writers featured include Lydia Kwa, Smokii Sumac, and Johnny Trinh.

Further info and tickets can be found online.

Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival Celebrates 10 Years of Boundary-Pushing Art

 ALEXIS BARAN– MetroSource – June 13, 2018

Dare to be challenged. Risk being changed. That’s the motto behind Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival. The festival marks its 10th anniversary this year, with DECADEnce as the theme — celebrating a decade of trailblazers and progress while honoring losses.

They’re doing it loudly with many voices expressing strength and vulnerability through art. SD Holman, the festival’s artistic director, is one of the founders who has been participating since the very first show of Pride in Art in 1998 and is part of the continuation, change, and development that paved the way for today’s trans-disciplinary Queer Arts Festival.

Holman is a photo-based artist whose accolades include a YWCA Women of Distinction Award for Arts and Culture. But if you ask, Holman self-identifies as a failure. “When you embrace failure,” says Holman, “you are not beholden to society’s rules, it frees you up to follow your own. If you have never failed, you have never tried something new.”

Queer artists and everyone who is inspired by art that’s daring and sometimes delightfully uncomfortable can thank Holman for being a “failure;” it’s Holman’s perseverance that has in part made the Queer Arts Festival a success. “I considered Vancouver a small town when I came here 35 years ago,” says Holman, who hails originally from LA, a city of some four million locals (as opposed to Vancouver’s approximately 2.5 million population).

“With a smaller demographic, it’s an uphill battle to put on an art festival called ‘Queer,’ but it is important to make art that is thought-provoking, contemporary and avant-garde.” With events ranging from the world premiere of Lesley Ewen’s multi-media play Camera Obscura,to Barry Truax’s homoerotic avant-garde music — to films addressing how violence is navigated by trans and gender-non-conforming artists, to a concert by two-spirit rising star Jeremy Dutcher — visitors who jump into the festival with an open mind have an opportunity to experience new perspectives in creative ways.

The first decade of the festival also marks a beginning: the opening of a permanent, year-round art gallery. The Pride in Art Society (the society behind the Queer Arts Festival) has just opened the SUM Gallery, the only permanent gallery and presentation space in Canada dedicated to multidisciplinary queer art and artists.

In the heart of Vancouver’s Chinatown, SUM shares space with other arts groups such as the Vancouver Indigenous Arts Festival and the Talking Stick Festival. To honor their location, the inaugural solo show was of Karin Lee, a fourth generation Chinese-Canadian queer female-identified artist with a transgressive breadth of work. Going forward, SUM gallery will be a festival hub and will be a place to see queer art year-round.

“I think it’s important to be challenged every day,” says Holman,“when people say ‘I don’t understand it,’ then that’s the beginning of something interesting. Art changes people, and people change the world.” The Queer Arts Festival runs June 16-27, 2018 and June 15-27, 2019.

Stuart Derdeyn– Vancouver Sun– June 13, 2018

Vancouver visual artist SD Holman is also the artistic director of the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival. 

Queer Arts Festival: DECADEnce

When: June 16 to 28, various times

Where: Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre and other venues

Tickets and info: queerartsfestival.com

The 2018 Queer Arts Festival marks 10 years of presenting an annual showcase for boundary pushing work which raises the profiles, voices and work of diverse creators in a society that still has a long way to go in recognizing them.

The multi-disciplinary summer celebration, titled DECADEnce will also honour Pride in Art’s 20th year as an artist-led organization dedicated to exhibiting unique art.

Among the highlights of the summer festival is the world premiere of Lesley Ewen’s work Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts), a 30-year retrospective concert honouring Barry Truax’s three decades of trail-blazing musical experiments and the local debut of operatic tenor Jeremy Dutcher’s performance of traditional Wolastoqiyik songs from his highly buzzed-about debut release Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (Maliseet Songs).

Artistic director SD Holman says that the Queer Arts Festival’s evolution into the event it is today wasn’t without challenges, but now the event is both better and bigger.

“I always said I wanted the event to keep getting better, and to keep bringing more innovative, adventurous and cutting edge artists to Vancouver,” said Holman. “That didn’t have to mean getting bigger, but this year we have opened a gallery so I guess that means bigger too. Ultimately, I just want to give artists exposure because I’m an artist first, not an arts administrator.”

Holman said that events such as the Queer Arts Festival and Pride in Arts Society are key in giving support to artists that haven’t really found a place for their art in the mainstream.

Holman’s photo-based artwork in projects such as BUTCH: Not like the other girls challenges traditional gender roles and the highly limited range of women depicted in mainstream media and has toured North America. With the opening of the SUM gallery — in the Sun Wah building in the heart of Vancouver’s Chinatown — not only does the festival have a permanent home but there is now a year-round space available for use in Canada’s only permanent space devoted to exhibiting queer art.

SUM takes its name from the fact that the fourth floor space in the Sun Wah building on Keefer Street was originally intended for use as a dim sum restaurant but was never occupied. The inaugural exhibit is a solo show of video works by Karin Lee curated by Paul Wong and Holman. Holman is also the executive director of SUM.

“SUM is one of the very few spaces of its kind in the world and, here where it is so expensive to have a home, we have had to move every few years,” said Holman. “This is the land of festivals for that reason, because a permanent space is next to impossible to secure, and now we have a place to do work year-round when the artists are available rather than under the mandate of a set time event.”

Right from its roots, the Queer Arts Festival has always been on the cutting edge of inclusion.

Founded by artists Robbie Hong and Jeff Gibson, the event has tackled such challenging topics as UnSettled (2017), curated by Two-Spirit and queer-identified Indigenous artists; Stonewall Was A Riot (2016) and Trigger: Drawing the Line (2015), which looked at the increase in “trigger warnings” placed on art to alert viewers about the potentially disturbing material long before the term became a hot topic.

Both exhibits and performances at QAF aren’t shy about taking on challenging subject matter in fascinating ways.

“I’ve been working towards getting more and more recognition of those kinds of subjects, and Camera Obscura (hungry ghosts) gets into our lonely specificities that are set about by these larger systems of oppression and marginalization,” said Holman. “It’s almost 10 years in the making and having it for our anniversary is quite special. Paul Wong, who inspired the play, is a Governor General Award-winning Vancouver-based artist who has been with us for a very long time, both featured in exhibits and as a curator.”

Despair, death and being haunted by the past all turn up in this latest piece by Lesley Ewen which is being co-produced by QAF. QAF commissioned a theatre work earlier. Leslie Uyeda and Rachel Rose’s lesbian opera, When the Sun Comes Out, was groundbreaking. Holman says it’s deeply satisfying to participate in this kind of creation as it is “work that needs to be done.”

The artistic director takes inspiration for the hard work that goes into these sorts of collaborations from a quote by new music titan Barry Truax. The composer receives a 30-year retrospective titled Skin & Metal: Homoerotic Music Theatre Works By Barry Truax at this year’s festival (June 24, 7 p.m.).

“He says “if art is meant to mirror society and you look in the mirror and see no reflection then the implicit message is that you don’t exist,”” said Holman. “Our event challenges that view and it’s exciting to me every year to see our reflections in big deals such as our signature art show, DECADEnce, which has always set us apart from most festivals.”

Among the famous works on display will be AA Bronson’s Felix Partz, a giant vinyl print of the famous painting from the Whitney Gallery collection of the departed artist Partz depicting him right after his passing from AIDS. The 14 foot print on loan from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University took four conservators to hang.

twitter.com/stuartderdeyn

Elizabeth Holliday– Sad Mag– June 18, 2018

Over the past 10 years, the Queer Arts Festival (QAF) has staked its place in the histories of Vancouver and the world. Beginning in 1988 as a volunteer-run community arts show through artist collective Pride in Art (PIA), and now one of the top festivals of its kind worldwide, the QAF and its precursor has a total of 20 years of showcasing queer art in Vancouver under its belt. With this year’s theme—DECADEnce—the QAF celebrates their anniversary and looks to the future while honouring the past.

Since its early days, the QAF has striven for representation of and professional opportunities for queer artists. SD Holman, the festival’s Artistic Director, got involved with the organization because there “wasn’t a place for [them] in the art world, a butch doing a lot of work around identity, and [they] wanted to make a space for other artists to show their work in a professional context.” Holman has been involved since the beginning, when PIA was run by Two-spirit artist Robbie Hong. They began working in an organizational capacity as PIA gained not-for-profit status in 2006, and soon it became a full-fledged professional festival. Holman was hired as Artistic Director, and the team have been “working [their] assess off” ever since.

Plenty has changed in the last 10 years, with perhaps the biggest change being recent establishment of the QAF’s first permanent location, the SUM Gallery in Chinatown. SUM is “the only dedicated queer visual arts gallery in Canada,” Holman relates. They express how important it is to the QAF that the space does not contribute to displacement in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. The building that houses SUM has sat unoccupied since the 1980s, and the festival organizers intend to assistin the neighbourhood’s current struggles against gentrification. Along with translating all materials into Chinese and establishing community partnerships, they intend to fight with art: “The first show that’s in there, Karen Lee’s show, is really addressing some of [those tensions],” says Holman. “She’s fourth-generation Chinese, she grew up in that area, and her work is really talking about the Chinese experience and dysphoria and displacement.”

The importance of providing a dedicated space for queer art is manifold and has always been the centre of the QAF vision. As Holman shares, “We believe that art changes people and people change the world. Art is really the first step to revolution.” They share a quote from artist and composer Barry Truax, whose work is receiving a 30-year retrospective at this year’s festival: “Art is said to mirror society, but if you look in the mirror and see no reflection, the implicit message is that you don’t exist.” The Queer Arts Festival holds up that mirror, while tapping into the “visceral power of the arts” and inciting change.

This force of change extends into the festival itself. From its visual art beginnings, it has grown to include transdisciplinary works in a wide breadth of formats, including media art, music, and theatre. Maintaining their community roots, the festival still features an open community visual art show, as well as a central curated exhibition, along with a constellation of other presentations and performances. And the aim of providing professional opportunities for queer artists and youth goes beyond exhibition; the QAF has recently made mentorship a central part of their operations, enabling them to build up their community while creating opportunities for a variety of skillsets: “We find with all marginalized folks, [they] sometimes don’t have the same access to education, and of course we still live in such a misogynist world and racist world—we are not necessarily given those kinds of opportunities,” Holman shares. “Coming from our own experiences, [we know we need to] make those opportunities available.”

“Youth are our future,” they stress, “I think teachers are the most important professionals.”

This year’s theme of DECADEnce honours and explores the legacies of queer artists who have blazed a trail for the modern generation. Holman expresses how important it is that queer youth “know their elders and know their history.Their histories are erased over and over and over again. If we knew throughout history that most of our [creative] masters were queer […] how could there be homophobia? How could there be queer youth having the highest homeless and suicide rate if we knew these things?” The curator of this year’s Visual Arts Exhibition is Valérie d. Walker, an interdisciplinary multimedia artist whose work deals with environmentalism, technology, and gender. “A lot of my work revolves around time,” Walker says, “so it was very interesting for me to come for the 10th anniversary of the QAF and the 20th of PIA. We’re at a time when there’s a lot of other anniversaries going on in queer art and many artists are being lost to us now.” As a teacher at Emily Carr and Concordia University in Montreal, Walker expresses surprise at the lack of historical knowledge in younger queer artists. “A lot of the artists that I’m dealing with, the ones that are now in their 60s or older, are achieving a certain level of fame, but at the same time most of their life and their practice has been built on trying to find ways to just exist in the shadows,” Walker shares. “It’s about appreciating the precariousness of our position in time and pushing it forward. This feels like a time when cycles are changing, and it’s time to pass on a lot of knowledge to the next generation so that we can continue from a strong place.”

Walker has curated a selection of works from both established and emerging artists, including General Idea member AA Bronson and Carl Pope. “What I said to everyone was, “this is our anniversary, this is our chance to stand in the public and say it took us so long and we’re here and we’re going to keep going. What do you have in your art archive that you’ve never shown anyone, but that conveys your sense of being a queer, gay, out there artist, and show me that.”The results of this entreaty include some never-before-seen works by foundational Canadian artists, sitting amongst works by artists for whom DECADEnce marks their first professionally curated show. Syrus Marcus Ware and Dayna Danger, as well as installation artist Chandra Melting Tallow, are just a few of the many diverse creative folks.“In the form of results,” Walker says, “it’s been my best curating practice so far.”

Yet with a roster so full of incredible artists and work, “the biggest struggle,” SD Holman says, is “getting people to come to the shows. It’s hard to sell a festival called ‘queer.’” They cite recent events wherein artists’ friends refused to come to the festival, and artists’ agencies intentionally left QAF bookings out of their tour listings. “We still struggle with getting recognition and respect because we chose to call ourselves queer,” Holman says, but “the artists are so happy to be in a place where they can be one-hundred percent themselves.” Ultimately, providing that kind of space is what the history—and future—of the Queer Arts Festival is all about.

The Queer Arts Festival runs from June 16 to June 28. More information can be found on the QAF website. We hope to see you at some of their excellent upcoming events, gazing at art and meeting new friends!

Murray Patterson Marketing Group – April 25, 2018
The sun was shining and the view of the city was spectacular as we sat perched on the tailgate of SD Holman’s truck on the rooftop of the Chinatown building that is home to the new Pride In Art Society office and SUM Gallery (which will open for its inaugural exhibition next month). Holman, Artistic Director of the above plus the Queer Arts Festival, is a passionate and impactful MPMG client and we are thrilled to share SD’s insights and musings.

Queer Arts Festival is one of the top three LGBTQ festivals in the world. What are QAF’s differentiating qualities when compared to other LGBTQ festivals in this distinguished list?

That’s a tricky question. I don’t want to do a compare and contrast. Queer art spaces are limited and contingent worldwide, we are all doing really great work, and I’m glad for everyone that exists.

One thing that distinguishes us is the curated visual art exhibition—something that few festivals have, and which is our signature program.

I would say our longevity, as we head into our 10th Anniversary, is a differentiating quality. Some on that ‘Top 5 Queer Arts Festivals in the World’ list sadly aren’t functioning anymore. The New York festival that was featured lasted only a couple of years. I’ve had a difficult time finding much info on the Singapore one. I am looking forward to going to the other two on the list, Melbourne and San Francisco, which is the first and longest-running.

What is the importance of creating spaces dedicated to the queer community within the arts? and/or spaces dedicated to the arts within the queer community?

Our program is to create space for the things that are hard to do as queers in the art world, as well as hard to do as artists in the queer world. To paraphrase Jonathan D. Katz, North America has reached a place where we have carved out a space for queers in entertainment, but not, if you’ll pardon the term, in high art.

In art, although we’ve come a long way, there’s still homogenizing. I recently read an article about how the galleries representing Félix González-Torres have totally sanitized him. They don’t mention his partner, they don’t mention AIDS or HIV, and that’s what his work is about.

Some people say ‘well, why does this person’s sexuality have anything to do with their art?’ But of course it does—who you are informs your work. The arts are honeycombed with homosexuals. Throughout history, many of the great masters were “that way.” What would happen if the sexualities of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Caravaggio et al. were not left out anymore when they are taught in the schools? We might see less hatred and less bullying if we all grew up knowing how many of the people we admire are queers.

It’s the naming of it. There is this polite silence—queer artists are welcome, so long as we don’t flaunt it. At the Queer Arts Festival, the work itself doesn’t have to be identity based, but it’s identified as queer art. It’s not stripped of that. We get a lot of artists telling us how much they appreciate being in a festival where they can be completely themselves, and they can just do the work without having to be concerned about it being perceived as too queer.

All that said, you see why we’ve kept our name the way it is, but it comes with challenges. Creating a dedicated space for queer art, we can find ourselves fighting for legitimacy and recognition. Folks have misconceptions and a narrow view of what queer art is and can be.

How does your experience as an artist inform your work as an Artistic Director and your role as a leader?

Well, I don’t call myself a leader. You know that Bif Naked song? ‘I’m no leader, don’t wanna be your leader…”

I did this because I hadn’t found a place for myself in the art world here, so I wanted to create that space for other artists. I’m not trained as an administrator. It has all been learning on the job.

As an artist, I don’t want to think about the commodification of the art. I want to think about whether it’s interesting, important, challenging, connected. That is what informs my decisions as an artistic director.

I wish everybody went to art school — not only artists, but lawyers, doctors politicians, everyone. Art is the first step to revolution. You learn to look at the world in a consciously critical way through art.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you are ‘learning disabled’ and that becoming an administrator was somewhat challenging. What advice do you have for others who may not have confidence in their abilities to take on such roles?

Know that you’re in good company. Albert Einstein was learning disabled as well as so many illustrious folks.

Remember that you have superpowers. Realize that if you’re learning differently, you have a different perspective. That’s valuable.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” My favourite Samuel Beckett quote. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be a loser, embrace that, make it into an art. Read ‘The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly.’ Don’t watch the video, read it. Read ‘Art Objects’ by Jeanette Winterson, my favourite book right now, it will give you courage.

Finally, surround yourself with smart people who believe in you. You only really need one person if they truly believe in you. I found that in my late wife Catherine.

With the 10th anniversary of the Queer Arts Festival approaching, what is one thing you’ve learned as Artistic Director and what do you hope to achieve for the festival over the next ten years?

I couldn’t possibly choose one thing. I’ve learned so much.

I’ve learned to not give up. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Keep your heart open to what’s possible, even through rejection.

I’ve learned how important it is to look to history and consider who decides what marks are worth noting. We have to do this kind of palimpsest un-layering, because our histories are erased over and over, but they are there. We must continue to uncover, expose, write anew, as it keeps getting erased—resistance is important too, not because it changes anything but because it keeps us human.

In the next ten years, what do I hope achieve? Save the world of course. To have our work survive and thrive, as living well is the best revenge. I hope to continue making and presenting work that is meaningful and transformative

Our Gallery SUM has just opened, the only dedicated queer gallery and presentation space in Canada and one of very few in the world, so working and nurturing that. I hope to do some travelling to other festivals, and expand our research and connections. We have some exciting plans to connect queer presenters around the world to a greater extent.

Anything else you’d like to share with MPMG readers?

Come to the festival. Dare to be challenged. Risk being changed. You’ll like it.

Queer Arts Festival: DECADEnce
June 16 – 28
queerartsfestival.com

SUM Gallery Inaugural Exhibition
Karin Lee: QueerSUM 心
May 12 – August 18
queerartsfestival.com/queersum-show-karin-lee

Peter Knegt· CBC Arts· May 9

Karin Lee’s My Sweet Peony, part of the first exhibition at Vancouver’s new SUM gallery. (SUM)0comments

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Next week, Vancouver’s SUM Gallery debuts its very first exhibition with “Karin Lee: QueerSUM 心“. It’s both a long time coming and a very big deal. The organization behind it — Queer Arts Festival— has been actively working toward having a permanent, year-round space since it began in 1998 as a volunteer-run artist collective. But as we all know, space in Vancouver isn’t exactly cheap.

“With a mix of dogged perseverance, some luck and a lotof help from our friends, SUM became a reality this year,” SUM artistic director SD Holmantells CBC Arts.

And in that reality, SUM becomes the only queer multidisciplinary gallery in Canada — and one of only a few in the entire world.

The name SUM is inspired by its location in the B.C. Artscape Sun Wah building in Vancouver’s Chinatown, which, according to its website, “was designed to house a Chinese restaurant, complete with a traditional round window, but was never occupied and has existed only in shell condition.”

“To honour the space’s original intended use as a Dim Sum (點心) restaurant, we dubbed our new gallery and presentation space SUM,” Holman says.

But it’s more layered than that. Holman’s explanation of the name’s meaning essentially breaks down like this:

• summation (∑) the sum of its parts, the sum total = LGBTQ2Si+
• Sum (心) means heart in the Cantonese dialect which we use here, to pay tribute to the early immigrants from the Pearl River Delta in Canton who settled here 150 years ago.
• The word for queer in Chinese 同性戀 has Sum 心 in it.

We wanted the first solo exhibition be a female-identified queer artist. We wanted an artist with deep links to Vancouver’s Chinese and queer communities both. We wanted a woman whose work was challenging, and transgressive, and very queer — in other words, we wanted Karin Lee.- SD Holman, SUM artistic director

On that note, Holman and her co-curator Paul Wongwanted SUM’s inaugural exhibition to represent much of what its name does.

“We wanted the first solo exhibition be a female-identified queer artist,” she says. “We wanted an artist with deep links to Vancouver’s Chinese and queer communities both. We wanted a woman whose work was challenging, and transgressive, and very queer — in other words, we wanted Karin Lee.”

Born and raised a fourth generation Chinese-Canadian in Vancouver, Karin Leeis “a unique storyteller whose critical voice and perspective touches on the past and the present, both local and international,” Holman says. “Themes of trans-Pacific migration, gender, identity and intercultural contact surface in her work. Lee often uses humour and transgression in her work, traversing untold territories.”

The poster for SUM’s first exhibition. (SUM)

And Lee is only the beginning. SUM will build on the model developed at the Queer Arts Festival, where Holman worked with guest curators. The programming will be queer not only in its sexuality but in “the most fundamental sense of the word.”

“‘Queer’ takes its etymological roots from the German ‘quer’ — oblique, or cutting across categories,” Holman explains. “SUM’s programming will be transdisciplinary, extending that connective principle to bring artists together across discipline, time and place. Inhabiting a demographic so irreducibly diverse that we are commonly identified by an acronym, we bring those lessons of intersectionality, coalition-building and complex, fluid identities to our artistic collaborations, risk taking and genre-bending explorations.”

SUM is a room of our own, here and queer for not only a couple weeks, but all year.- SD Holman, SUM artistic director

Holman notes that for generations, LGBTQ people have had to carve our own spaces “out of a hostile world.”

“Spaces where we can sing and dance and draw and rhyme and fuck our resistance,” she says. “Spaces that meld struggle with celebration, politics with sex, serious purpose with more fabulous than anyone could ever swallow.”

Like the Queer Arts Festival that it grew from, SUM has been consciously created to be of these spaces.

“[It’s] a site for queer artists to do the things that are hard to do as queers in the art world, as well as those things that are hard to do as artists in the queer world, including — perhaps especially — at the intersections that get stonewalled in both of these worlds. Unlike QAF, SUM is a room of our own, here and queer for not only a couple of weeks, but all year.”

Read more about SUM Gallery here.

Kevin Griffin – Vancouver Sun – May 9, 2018

In art-world terms, something unusual is happening Saturday, May 12* in Vancouver.

It’s the opening of SUM Gallerywhich describes itself as the country’s only permanent space dedicated to exhibiting queer art. It’s on the fourth floor of the Sun Wah Building on Keefer east of Main in Chinatown.

SUM Gallery opens with a solo show of video works by Karin Lee. It’s curated by Paul Wongand SD Holman. Holman is also the executive director of SUM.

SUM is both a gallery space and the year-round home of the annual Queer Arts Festivalof which Holman is also the artistic director.

Programming in the new space will include solo shows, workshops and performances.

“We’re going to continue doing our diverse programming that pushes boundaries and initiates dialogue,” Holman said in a phone interview.

The permanent space gives a curator of the QAF group show the option of choosing an artist or artists for solo exhibitions at SUM. The gallery will also be able to accommodate QAF events that previously would have been held at other venues.

“If we have a group exhibition at the festival, I’ll see artists and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about what you might be able to do in the gallery,’” Holman said.

Historically, explicitly queer art spaces have tended to be transitory.

From 2012 to 2016, Videofagwas an alternative arts space in the home of Jordan Tannahill and William Ellis in Toronto’s Kensington neighbourhood.

Also in Toronto is FAG Feminist Art Gallerystarted in 2010 by Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logue. Although its name suggests a permanent space, FAG’s online presence makes it sound more like a two-artist collective project that moves from venue to venue.

In Vancouver, Vancouver Arts and Leisureor VAL is another arts group with a slightly different focus on electronic dance music and club culture. It’s also functioned as a venue for fashion, visual arts and dance but has had to move into several different locations for the past four years. VAL now has a permanent home again at Manitoba and Sixth Avenue

The best known permanent home for queer art, however, is theLeslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York. As part of its mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ art, the museum has amassed a collection of 30,000 objects spanning 300 years. In 2006, it moved into a ground floor space in Soho.

From 1999 to 2001, Holman ran Studio Q, an art salon in Vancouver. Ever since that closed, she’s been looking to revive the idea of a queer art venue. Involved in the Pride in Art Societysince 2006, she became festival director three years later and then artistic director.

In 2009, Pride in Art organized the first Queer Arts Festival.

The tipping point was the arrival of BC Artscape, the west coast version of the successful Toronto arts organization called Artscape. In 2014, BC Artscape was given $300,000 seed money from the city of Vancouver to start developing creative spaces for arts organizations and artists.

“With (BC) Artscape, everything moved really quickly because they were able to cut the red tape,” Holman said.

BC Artscape’s first big project is the Chinatown Community Cultural Hub in the Sun Wah Centre, the big red brick building on Keefer. Although finished in 1987, the 3rd and 4th floors of the building were never occupied. BC Artscape identified the space and has been able to turn it into permanent homes for a diverse range of arts groups and artist studios. Next door to SUM Gallery, for example, is artist Paul Wong‘s new studio.

SUM Gallery and Pride in Art Society are among the hub’s inaugural tenants.

“Having a home base really changes the whole game,” Holman said.

“It makes us able to do so many more things.”

The gallery is called SUM after the dim sum restaurant that was planned but never opened in the space where the gallery is located. As well, the Chinese characters for the ‘sum’ in ‘dim sum’ mean heart; in Cantonese, the version of Chinese spoken by many of the original immigrants from China to Canada, words referring to queer people includes the same ‘sum’ character.

The gallery logo is ∑. It’s a symbol used in math to designate summation.

QueerSumopens Saturday, May 12 from 2 to 4 pm. The exhibition continues to Saturday, Aug. 18.* The exhibition presents three of Lee‘s films: My Sweet Peony, a drama shot in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden; Portrait of a Girl: A Story of Dance, Sexuality, Adoption and Love, a documentary about Han Dong Qing in Beijing; and Small Pleasures, a period drama set in Barkerville about a Chinese women explaining her bound feet to a European woman and an indigenous woman.

Some of Lee’s other films include: Made in China: The Story of Adopted Chinese Children in Canada, Comrade Dad: Growing Up With a Socialist Father, and Vancouver 1907 Race Riots: Shattered.

SUM Gallery and Pride in Society Office– which organizes the annual Queer Arts Festival– are in the Chinatown Community Cultural Hub, Sun Wah Building, Suite 425, 268 Keefer.

Georgia Straight – Mar 6, 2017 – Craig Takeuchi

With the theme UnSettled, Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival (QAF) announced today (March 6) that this year’s Queer Arts Festival will explore two-spirit viewpoints and issues through art.

In a statement on the QAF website, curator Adrian Stimson explains the visual arts exhibition will address the absence of two-spirit people and art from popular culture and that the artists will “expose the issues of historical extermination of two-spirit people, the lack of alternative aboriginal sexuality and gender in contemporary western culture/media, the two-spirit movement and future as a part of the reclamation of two-spirit identity and practice.”

Stimson also points out that homophobia was introduced to indigenous cultures through colonization.

“Two-thirds of the 200 Indigenous languages spoken in North America have non-negative terms to describe those who are neither male nor female, speaking to the primacy of multiple genders and sexualities within aboriginal cultures. Being identified as two-spirit often meant carrying unique responsibilities and roles within the community, knowledge keepers being one of the most important.

“Homophobia came with colonization, as the Urban Native Youth Association attests, ‘The religious dogma of the Residential Schools erased a proud and rich history of Two-spirit people in most Aboriginal communities. As a direct result of the residential school experience, homophobia is now rampant in most Aboriginal communities, even more so than in mainstream society.’ ”

Several highlights at the festival will provide further exploration of two-spirit perspectives in a variety of media.

Musical elements will include the Chippewa Travellers and the Allegra Chamber Orchestra performing Cris Derkesen’s Orchestral Powwow on June 24.

A poetry and spoken-word event (June 26) will feature singer-songwriter Kinnie Starr, DJ O Show, and Tiffany Moses on June 26.

Online male hookup culture, fuelled by apps like Grindr, will be reflected upon in a dance piece by lemonTree creations entitled MSM [men seeking men] on June 20 and 21.

Dance works by Byron Chief-Moon and JP Longboat with Full Circle First Nations Performance will be paired together at Greed/Resolve, a program focusing on commerce, greed, and disenfranchisement, on June 27 and 28.

Local curators June Scudeler and Lacie Burning, with Vancouver’s Indigenous Media Arts Festival, will present an evening of indigenous film, video, and new media art on June 23.

The festival will be held from June 17 to 29 at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews).

Beatroute • Thursday 13th, April 2017 • by Kendell Yan

VANCOUVER – SD Holman has been a participating artist with Pride in Art (PiA) since its inception in 1998 as a volunteer-run community visual art show. In 2010, PiA rebranded as the Queer Arts Festival (QAF), has since then achieved charitable status, and is currently recognized as one of the top five of its kind across the globe. Besides being passionate about the environment and animal welfare, SD works with artists through QAF as the artistic director to promote visibility and respect for all of us who transgress sexual and gender norms with the transformative power of the arts.

BR: Can you describe your experience working with the Pride in Art Society as the Artistic Director of the Queer Arts Festival?

SD: When Two-Spirit artist Robbie Hong was ready to move on as the primary organizer, I stepped up. My goal was to ensure artists would be paid for their work; to become professional and support contemporary art — so the collective incorporated as a non-profit, expanded to become a festival open to all artistic genres, and began applying for grants. The funders told us we needed to hire paid staff to become ‘professional’, and the other artists nominated me. I protested — I’m learning disabled, and never thought of myself as an administrator — but they insisted that I was already doing the work, and a decade later, I’m still doing it, together with a fabulous crew of queer artist/administrators/activists.

I started work with the festival because there was no place for me as an artist. I wanted to provide a professional venue where art is presented in a queer context. Queer art is relentlessly discredited as too emotional or obsessed with sexuality, often dismissed as amateur, or unworthy of the definition of art itself. Art history is teeming with queers, but their identities as such are rarely acknowledged — even in retrospectives or obituaries of prominent queer artists today, their work is seldom contextualized as queer. This context is important, as composer Barry Truax wrote: “Art is said to mirror society, but if you look in the mirror and see no reflection, then the implicit message is that you don’t exist.” And queer teens — who are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers — are clearly getting that message.

BR: How has this complemented/influenced your own artistic practice?

SD: In some ways, it’s eaten it alive. In others, it’s fed it — I have met, supported, and been supported by so many fascinating, talented artists through QAF, who have inspired me and sparked ideas. And QAF has helped grow a movement worldwide, so that there are more places now that consider my work seriously than there were in 1998.

BR: Can you tell me a little about UnSettled and the importance of decolonization and Indigenous Two-Spirit perspectives within the QAF? Within the LGBTQ2+ community at large?

SD: QAF 2017: UnSettled is a Two-Spirit curated festival. The term “Two-Spirit” is used by many Indigenous people in reclaiming and restoring traditional Indigenous concepts of gender, sexual, and spiritual identity — often inclusive of LGBTQ+.

Many contemporary queer struggles focus on changing the way our society thinks about gender — for example, the current battles around pronouns, or bathrooms. Yet how many people know that non-binary gender was once the norm here? Two-thirds of the 200 languages indigenous to this continent conceive of gender norms as having between three to six categories. These non-binary genders, and the people who identified with them, were brutally suppressed by colonial heteronormativity, especially through the residential school system.

So in 2017, as we look back on the last 150 years, we’re also asking what’s the best way to build a better future for queers? Amplifying the voices of Two-Spirit artists was for QAF the most relevant choice.

I invite a guest curator to select the artists for our visual art exhibition each year; for 2017, I expanded that practice to the other artistic disciplines as well. I’m delighted to present to Vancouver works brought to us by Adrian Stimson, Cris Derksen, Kinnie Starr, Full Circle First Nations Performance, and Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival, to name a few of our partners.

BR: Are there any particular events/galleries you are most excited about for the upcoming festival this summer?

SD: I’m excited about every single event at the Queer Arts Festival, which runs from June 17–29, 2017.

But if I had to single out a few highlights, I’d particularly recommend:
UnSettled | June 17–29 
Two-Spirit Blackfoot visual art curator Adrian Stimson curates an exhibition of Indigenous work exploring Two-Spirit identity in Canada. Performance art curated by Stimson will take place at the opening Gala on Saturday June 17, 7–10 p.m.

MSM [men seeking men] | June 20 & 21 | 7 p.m.
A dance deconstruction piece by lemontree creations, inspired by online Grindr ‘hook-up’ culture.

Unsettling Colonial Gender Boundaries | June 23 | 7 p.m. | with VIMAF
Local curators June Scudeler and Lacie Burning program an evening of Canadian Two-Spirit film, video and new media art.

Cris Derksen’s Orchestral Powwow | June 24 | 7 p.m.
The Chippewa Travellers and the Allegra Chamber Orchestra perform cellist/composer Cris Derksen’s Juno-nominated composition.

Kinnie Starr, DJ O Show & Tiffany Moses | June 26 | 7 p.m.
Poetry and electronic music by Kinnie Starr, DJ O Show and Tiffany Moses, performing with guests from QAF’s young artist program.

Greed / REsolve | June 27 & 28 | 7 p.m. | with Full Circle First Nations Performance
Commerce, greed, and disenfranchisement are key themes in these two paired dance works by Byron Chief-Moon and JP Longboat.

BR: In your artist statement you start by discussing what you call “the dark pond” and end on a note about cognitive dissonance and paradox within your artistic framework. Does being queer inform your concerns with dissonant concepts?

SD:
The word “queer” by definition implies dissonance — it stems from the German “quer”, meaning oblique, or cutting across categories. As our 2016 visual art curator Jonathan D. Katz wrote: “Queerness works a seduction away from naturalized, normative and thus invisible ideological creeds, towards a position that is precisely other to, at a tangent from, social expectation. In deviating from social norms, queer art thus calls the viewer, of whatever sexualities, to an awareness of their own deviancy.”

I would be really happy to talk more about my own work at another time, in another interview. There’s a strong tendency, in looking at collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists or arts organizations, to focus the lens on the non-Indigenous collaborators. So I’m deeply involved and deeply invested in UnSettled, as artistic director of QAF, but I’m not the story here.

However, I’ve been around long enough to know that if I answered interview requests with, “Don’t talk to me, talk to these artists instead,” the festival would likely just lose a lot of media coverage. But it feels not quite right, in the context of promoting UnSettled, to be publicizing my own work. I’d like to close instead with words by QAF’s visual art curator this year, Adrian Stimson:

“For too long, the absence of representations of Two-Spirit people, art, and being from contemporary popular culture has been equally embedded in hegemonic practices of colonization. With UnSettled I explore the art and being of Two-Spirit artists, and in turn, they expose the issues of historical extermination of Two-Spirit people, the lack of alternative aboriginal sexuality and gender in contemporary Western culture/media, the Two-Spirit movement and future as a part of the reclamation of Two-Spirit identity and practice.”
— Adrian Stimson

BR: Is there anything I haven’t addressed that you would like to speak about?

SD:
Start something.
Stop something.
Buy art, not drugs.
Change the world.

Kevin Griffin • Published June 30, 2016

Drama Queer is a mass of contradictions — and that’s exactly as intended.

It has works that are both utterly beautiful and shockingly disturbing. It has provocative political works and quieter intimate works. It also has works that are designed to evoke an emotional response in the viewer.

Drama Queer is easily one of the best art exhibitions of the year in Vancouver. It’s a shame it’s only up for nine days. Drama Queer is on display until later today — Wednesday, June 29th — not Thursday, June 30 as previously indicated. The exhibition ends at 10 p.m.

There are outstanding works by local artists and a lot of work by artists from the U.S. and Europe that I’ve never heard of or seen before. Works in different mediums are treated with an egalitarianism that’s rare in Vancouver. Contemporary painting which usually has to fight for its critical existence here is given a place alongside works in other mediums such as photography, video and text-based works.

As well, the didactic panels are well written, understandable and devoid of art talk. For the most part, they convey just the right amount of information to put the works in context and help viewers understand what’s in front of them.

Drama Queer sets its tone right at the start with three photographic works by Del LaGrace Volcano. The one I found most powerful shows the face of an African-American woman in tears wearing men’s formal clothing from the 19th century. Inspired by the story of an American slave who passed not only as a man but also as white, the portrait captures what it must be like for someone to be trapped in socially-constructed blackness.

Hips by Andrew Holmquist in Drama Queer. Vancouver Sun

The exhibition includes three epic historical paintings by Attila Richard Lukacs inspired by the second U.S.-led second war against Iraq. Of the three, my favourite is 7 Devils Dead, a painting full of soldiers, devils, weapons and young men.

In the left foreground are a group of four U.S. soldiers. One without a helmet looks directly at the viewer with knowing eyes as he holds a grey gun, the vertical barrel and colour echoing oil derricks in the landscape behind. The gun is connected by a drip to a pink skeleton of death floating cavalierly on its side in the space above. His skull is a cigarette ashtray. Over its head written in text designed to look like smoke is the ironic phrase ‘Why Can’t I Quit Smoking.’

Strapped to the skeleton’s left arm is a hockey stick that morphs into another gun which shoots a bullet and rips apart the chest of a man swinging a cricket bat riddled with bullet holes that spells Git Mo. Below, a naked young man looks like he might be flying is led away by a blue devil. The naked youth’s right leg is caressed and maybe held back from death by another U.S. soldier who has an erect penis in place of his right arm. On a chain, the soldier has a tombstone that reads ‘My Beloved Boner RIP.’ It’s a great painting that not only acknowledges the homoerotic appeal of all-male environments but also the deadly consequences of being at war against other men.
I found myself lingering for several minutes on three photographs by Laura Aguilar. They’re abstracted portraits of the artist’s fleshy, Rubenesque body in a desert-like landscape.
Grounded 107 shows the artist lying on her side on a grey boulder. I had an immediate response to seeing her soft flesh on top of a hard surface: it produced a sensation that rippled down the back of my neck. I could feel the rough hardness of the stone against my skin.

Aguilar has abstracted her body so much that I couldn’t tell which end was which. Was the limb extending down into a dark cavity her leg or her arm? Aguilar’s self-portraits deny showing her face as one of the usual markers of individual identity. Their setting also made me think of the desert paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Just What Is It About Today’s Homos That Makes Them So Different, So Appealing by Joey Terrill in Drama Queer at the Queer Arts Festival, 2016 [PNG Merlin Archive] Vancouver Sun
Kent Monkman has a wonderful work in the exhibition called Dance of the Berdache. It’s a five channel video projected onto synthetic buffalo hides in the main exhibition hall. The work is an exploration of identity and how the contemporary idea of ‘Indian’ is a mixture of old and new, past and present, western and indigenous. Accompanied by a soundtrack of traditional aboriginal singing along with orchestral music, it features indigenous dancers performing a mix of movement styles from Hollywood, acrobatics and indigenous traditions. In the centre, Monkman performs as Miss Chief Eagle Testikle. She’s a cross-dressing berdache who, as Monkman has said, “looks back at European settlers.”

As artist Paul Wong pointed out to me, showing Monkman’s video in The Roundhouse works far better than showing it in a traditional white cube. The Roundhouse was originally part of a complex of buildings designed to service the original steam trains which brought settlers to the western terminus of the CPR. The Roundhouse is a building whose history embodies the colonialism that inspired Monkman’s video.

There were many other works that stood out in the exhibition. One of Joey Terrill’s paintings (above and detail below) takes its title from the collage by Richard Hamilton that’s often called the first example of pop art. Terrill’s Just What Is It About Today’s Homos That Makes Them So Different, So Appealing depicts examples from his daily life as a Mexican-American living in Los Angeles. Sharing the canvas with a playful presentation of sex, AIDS pills and various consumer items such as a bottle of Coca-Cola are several monarch butterflies which symbolize the Chicano community. In a few expressive but controlled gestures of paint in lime green, Andrew Holmquist combines both masculine and feminine in Hips (above). Photographs of Cassils record a performance by the transgender artist when she attacked a 300-pound pile of clay. Her insanely muscular and ripped body is the result of working out for two years. Keijaun Thomas’s slow, methodical almost ritualistic movements in his video installation The Poetics of Trespassing (detail above) were hypnotic and powerful. The video depicts the harshness of racism by softness when the brown skin on the artist’s back and shoulders is covered with a dusting of white flour.

The exhibition also included works that I found difficult to look at.

One in particular is from series of erotic photographs by George Steeves, a Nova Scotia artist who identifies as straight. One of them shows an older man seated awkwardly at the bottom of a banister. He’s naked and has a big erection that parallels the verticality of the posts on the stairway.
The photograph provoked a response because it made me confront my own fears of aging and sex. It was his expression that I found particularly disturbing: he appeared totally possessed by his fetish. With his missing and blackened teeth, he no longer looked human. He looked like a ghoul.
The one work that I found by far the most troubling was Naked Boy Cutting by Andreas Fuchs. It shows a naked young man with several piercings and tattoos in the moments after he’s cut his left arm. He’s bleeding profusely. As a photograph it reads as a document of an event in a pristine white environment.

The didactic panel says that the photo embodies the contradictory drives of masochism and sadism in one person. The young boy is both the active partner inflicting pain and the passive partner receiving it. Although it’s difficult to get inside the mind of someone, the description seems a fair one. He looks as if he’s amazed at what he’s done to his body.

This is one case where more information would have been helpful. It wouldn’t have reduced my visceral reaction to the photograph, but it would have helped to know how this one image fit into the artist’s other work and whether the one in the exhibition was part of a series. On its own, it looks provocative for its own sake.

As well, I kept thinking about the relationship between the model and photographer. Was there a sense that the model was performing for the camera and making the wound deeper and more dramatic for a ‘good’ picture? Did the photographer ask for a deeper cut to produce more blood? The photograph was so foreign to my own experience that it both fascinated me and repelled me.

Drama Queer is curated by Jonathan D. Katz, one of the leading queer art historians and curators in the U.S. He’s an associate professor and director of the doctorate program in art history/visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I’ve written previously on both Drama Queer and Katz.

Drama Queer is part of the Queer Arts Festival. The art exhibition ends today while the festival continues to June 30th.

Detail from Just What is It About Todays Homos That Makes Them So Different, So Appealing by Joey Terrill in Drama Queer. Vancouver Sun

*Grammatical corrections made Thursday, June 30, 2016. See original article here.

Kevin Griffin: Published on: June 15, 2016

In the contemporary art world, the language used to talk about art is often as dull as a quarterly corporate report. It steers clear of poetry, devalues emotion and elevates dry intellectual concerns above all others.

The idea that a work of art might want to provoke a strong response or that someone might feel something is often considered a sign of failure in the art and weakness in the viewer.

Jonathan D. Katz, a leading U.S. art historian, challenges that notion with an art exhibition at the Queer Arts Festival. Drama Queer looks at emotion and emotional engagement as an alternative to the traditional intellectual and formalist understanding of art that has come to dominate the art world.
Katz said the idea for the Drama Queer came indirectly from a 1966 essay by Gene R. Swenson for an exhibition called The Other Tradition on the overlooked role of emotion in modern art. Katz said while almost all the artists chosen by Swenson were gay or lesbian, Swenson couldn’t talk about sexuality because of the era’s homophobia. But since then, society has changed so that scholars such as Katz can specialize in studying where art history and queer history overlap.

“We have stinted attentiveness to emotion in favour of intellectual and formal qualities,” said Katz, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

“I wanted to return to it because fundamentally our response to art is, so often, but not always, emotional.”
Drama Queer is framed in a queer context that might appear to exclude people who don’t define themselves as queer, a word that was once exclusively pejorative but is being reclaimed and used to describe not only lesbians and gays but people of all genders who transgress traditional ideas of normalcy. But Katz said the exhibition is also about what we share in common such as concerns about personal security, happiness and love.
Even if viewers consider themselves straight, he hopes the work will emotionally connect with people. Queer emotions, he said, are contradictory: they’re both different from and similar to what everyone else experiences.

“Very often we have a misunderstanding of our emotional relationship with others so that if they don’t reflect us we don’t see ourselves in them,” he said.

“This show is about how those who might be quite other in many respects reflect us.”

As an example, he cited Moj of the Antarctic. The photographs in Drama Queer are based on Mojisola Adebayo’s one-woman play that was inspired by Ellen Craft, a 19th-century African-American slave who passed not only as white but also as a man.

One of the photos shows a close-up of the face of Moj wearing a top hat and formal men’s clothes with tears streaming down her blackface.

Grounded by Laura Aguliar is in Drama Queer. Vancouver Sun
The photographs were shot in Antarctica by Del LaGrace Volcano, a self-described “gender abolitionist.” Born with male and female characteristics, Volcano lived for 37 years as a woman and now lives as both male and female.

“It’s a series of works of someone who is born black, who is literally in an (Antarctic) landscape, all white, and is in blackface and crying,” Katz said about Moj of the Antarctic.

“So often we live emotional lives that are either performed for others or that we seek sort of sequester or hide ourselves behind a facade. I think people will come to understand, especially as they move through the exhibition, how often the emotional realities that simmer just beneath the surface of appearance are actually the defining ones.”

Katz doesn’t believe sexuality is in and of itself enough for an art exhibition. It needs to be linked to other forms of identity such as ethnicity, gender and class.

“One of the things I’m very proud of is that my notion of queerness is one that seeks to decentre hetero-normativity but it doesn’t depend on what you yourself as an artist practise,” he said in a phone interview from Buffalo.

“I love it when straight people make queer art.”

Katz is arguably the best known queer art historian and curator in the U.S. One of the highest profile exhibitions he co-curated was the groundbreaking Hide/Seek exhibition in 2010 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Hide/Seek was the first time a major U.S. art museum looked at sexuality and its influence on modern American portraiture. But the show led to complaints by a Roman Catholic group and Republicans in Congress over a film that showed ants crawling on a crucifix by David Wojnarowicz. The Smithsonian succumbed to pressure and pulled the film from the exhibition.

7 Devils Dead by Attila Richard Lukacs is one of more than 80 works in Drama Queer in the Queer Arts Festival at The Roundhouse Community Centre. Vancouver Sun

Katz was asked to curate an exhibition at the Queer Arts Festival by artistic director SD Holman when he was in Vancouver last year for a panel during the The Mainstreeters art exhibition.
Katz said yes to Holman because of the freedom the Queer Arts Festival would give him in picking a theme.

“I tend to do lots of exhibitions, but I tend to work with big museums and big museums have requirements,” he said.

“There was a lot of freedom associated with the arts festival that I appreciated. For this one I wanted a wide open, complicated and chewy topic. I wanted one that offered lots of points of purchase for Canadian, U.S. and European artists. That’s exactly what we have.”

Drama Queer features more than 80 paintings, photographs and sculptural works by 23 artists, some whose work is well known but many who will be showing in Vancouver for the first time. Artists in the show include Cassils, Joey Terrill, Laura Aguilar and Monica Majoli along with Attila Richard Lukacs and Angela Grossmann from Vancouver, Kent Monkman from Toronto and 2Fik who is from Morocco and France and now lives in Montreal.

Katz said even though emotion is often discredited, even by activists, it can be the most effective way of political engagement.

“If you can affect a change in an individual internally, then you’ve got them,” he said.
“Whereas if you just convey a slogan, you may have their immediate attention, but you won’t have changed anything. It’s the emotional experiences that people remember and live with.”
Drama Queer: Seducing Social Change is part of the Queer Arts Festival 2016. The exhibition opens Tuesday, June 21 and continues to Thursday, June 30 at The Roundhouse Community Centre. Katz will be on a curator panel Wednesday, June 22 at 7 p.m. at The Roundhouse.

View original article here

Jonathan D. Katz’s quest to queer the art world one exhibition at a time

Vancouver Sun – Kevin Griffin – June 21, 2016

Click here to watch the video: http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/art-seen-jonathan-d-katzs-quest-to-queer-the-art-world-one-exhibition-at-a-timeIn 2005, Jonathan D. Katz curated a unique art exhibition at Yale University’s art gallery.

On display were works by artists such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Louise Nevelson, Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol. The exhibition was unique because all the works were by American gay and lesbian artists from the Yale University art collection.

Night Out: Yale University Celebrates a Legacy of LGBTQ Artists didn’t last long. Yale told Katz it could only be up for one evening.

“I wanted to make a point that there was an alternative history that could be told and what the museum elected to tell was, in some sense, premised on inattentiveness to questions of sexuality,” he said.

“I’m not saying that sexuality is the only story in art that needs to be told. I’m just saying it’s a story that’s not been told and that museums won’t tell.”

The exhibition coincided with the end of funding for the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies of which Katz was executive director.

“You probably picked up my mixed tone,” he said.

“I’m incredibly grateful that Yale allowed me to tell that story with their collection and I’m also unhappy that it was only for one day.”

Katz is an art historian at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As a scholar, he’s interested in the intersection of art history and queer history. Historically, queer was a pejorative word but it has changed over time and is now being reclaimed and used to describe not only gays and lesbians but also gender non-conformists and others who consider themselves at odds with definitions of normalcy.

I was interviewing Katz because he’s the curator of Drama Queer, the art exhibition at the Queer Arts Festival which opens today at the Roundhouse Community Centre.

His work puts him at the forefront of art historians and curators studying art from a queer perspective. Because of his huge expertise American art history and LGBTQ issues, I wanted to ask him about more than Drama Queer.

I had come across the story of the one-day queer art show at Yale in a speech given by legendary AIDS activist and playwright Larry Kramer to the school’s Gay and Lesbian Association. Kramer explained that in 2001, his brother gave $1 million to the university to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative. Katz’s queer art show took place when the funding for LKI was coming to an end.

Katz said the disappearance of LKI came down to the university not liking his kind of interdisciplinary program in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department.

“We were a free radical and the one thing Ivy Leagues are worried about are free radicals,” he said by phone from Buffalo.

“We had to be made official. When I was there, they hired a queer historian in the history department. (Yale) moved it into the traditional departmental structure which makes universities much happier because then they operate with levels of containment and control.”

Katz is one of the leading queer art curators in the U.S. His exhibitions have included exploring the relationship between Robert Rauschenberg and his gay lover Jasper Johns and the politics of camp. As well, he was guest curator for the groundbreaking exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference, Desire and the Invention of Modern American Portraiture for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Hide/Seek was the first time a major U.S. art institution looked at the relationship between art and sexuality in an exhibition. More recently, he co-curated the exhibition Art AIDS America on how AIDS changed American art.

Katz is also president of the board of trustees of the New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art,* the first art museum dedicated to showing the work of gay and lesbian artists.

Besides curating queer art exhibitions, he’s also writing a book with a provocative title: The Homosexualization of American Art: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet.

The book looks at what Katz describes as a “curiously understudied aspect of U.S. modernism”: the period when the aggressively heterosexual abstract expressionists led by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning of the 1950s were replaced by a generation of almost entirely queer artists such as Johns, Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol in the 1960s.

“I’m looking at the shift from one generation to another and how it came to pass, broadly speaking, that queer artists represented America to itself,” he said.

Katz said he’s spent years researching and writing the book which will be published next year.

“I have been bedevilled in writing the book, for example, by reproduction rights. It is not something people pay attention to but the fact of the matter is that when you’re writing an art history book you have to get permission from artists or from artist’s estates.

“Until recently, that permission was very hard to get if was around, for example, sexuality. Even the most successful artists were worried about the revelation about their sexuality.”

Katz recalled a conversation he had with Elsworth Kelly about getting art work for the Hide/Seek exhibition. Kelly was a hard-edge abstract painter as well as a sculptor and printmaker. He died last year. In 2014, a painting by Kelly sold for $4.47 million US at Christie’s.

“’You’re going to destroy my prices,’” Kelly told him.

“I’m thinking: ‘My god, you’re Elsworth Kelly and you’re worried about that.’ But that’s evidence of how deep the scars from the 1950s run.”

Katz’s Drama Queer is showing work by European, American and Canadian artists. The exhibition includes paintings by Vancouver artist Attila Richard Lukacs.

“I don’t think he would object if I called them antiwar paintings,” Katz said. “I embarrassed him when I praised him.”

Katz said Drama Queer is a museum-quality show that is only up for 10 days because that’s the duration of the Queer Arts Festival. Most exhibitions he curates are usually on display for several months.

“One of the things that I’ve been on a crusade for is to make the world safe for queer exhibitions in mainstreams museums.”

Despite the fact that queer-themed exhibitions generate lots of interest and high attendance, he said, museums are terrified of presenting them.

“Because fundamentally, at least in the U.S., decisions are made not by the attendance of these exhibitions — that’s not what makes an exhibition valuable,” he said.

Because directors on boards of museums are the big collectors with big money, they’re the people with the greatest influence on programming.

The contrast between Canada and the U.S. in terms of the source of funding is striking. One Canada Council study (admittedly with dated information from 2005) said that per capita public funding for all the arts in Canada amounted to about $56 per person compared to $7.14 in the U.S.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, has raised $858 million for its new building: $500 million privately from pledges of board trustees and $65 million from the City of New York.

“You can say and write anything you want about poetry because there isn’t big money in poetry,” he said.

“But there is very big money in art. The social class that is in a position to fundamentally influence the museum world is currently standing at the top of the social hierarchy. They’re not going to embrace things by and large that are going to threaten that position.”

Drama Queer opens today, Tuesday, June 21, and continues to Thursday, June 30 at The Roundhouse Community Centre. Drama Queer is part of the Queer Arts Festival.

*Correction to title Wednesday, June 22, 2016.

by Craig Takeuchi, Georgia Straight, March 15th, 2016

Vancouver’s Queer Arts Festival continues its dedication to LGBT art and social progress with the theme of the 2016 edition of the festival. That commitment is further underscored by the change of its dates this year from August to the Stonewall season in June.

This year’s QAF visual art exhibition will explore what role emotion plays in queer art as political activism.

Drama Queer: Seducing Social Change will be curated by New York–based queer studies scholar Jonathan D. Katz.

The exhibition will centre around three paintings by Vancouver artist Attila Richard Lukacs, and will include work by international artists, including Angela Grossman, Bill Jacobson, Vika Kirchenbauer, Alice O’Malley, Del LaGrace Volcano, and more.

Australian composer Lyle Chan’s An AIDS Activist’s Memoir will be performed at the 2016 Queer Arts Festival.

Another politically charged festival highlight is An AIDS Activist’s Memoir, performed by the Acacia Quartet and narrated by Australian composer Chan, who conceived of the work during the height of the epidemic.

Art and social politics will be further explored in Buddies in Bad Times and frank theatre production The Pink Line, a new play about the history of art, activism, and racism.

Queer Noise will offer an evening of short film, video, and media art performances by artists such as Kami Chisholm, Rémy Huberdeau, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Larose S. Larose, Blaire Fukumura, Scott Fitzpatrick, Elisha Lim, and more.

Toronto ensemble Contact, with composter Allison Cameron will present A Gossamer Bit, a fusion of avant-garde jazz, Charles Ives, and hypnotic music.

This year’s festival runs from June 21 to 30 at the Roundhouse Community Centre (181 Roundhouse Mews). The new dates reference and pay tribute to the Stonewall Riots, which began on June 28, 1969, in New York City. The Stonewall Riots are credited with the formation of the modern queer-rights movement. VIEW ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Image Credit: 7 Devils Dead is one of three paintings by Vancouver artist Attila Richard Lukacs that the Queer Arts Festival’s 2016 visual arts exhibition will centre around.

By On The Coast, CBC News Posted: Nov 28, 2015

Artists at the time had to be discreet when exploring the new disease in art, a curator says

When AIDS first emerged in 1981 it profoundly affected lives, politics and society, but few people considered the impact the syndrome would have on art.

Jonathan Katz, curator for next summer’s Queer Arts Festival, was in Vancouver on Thursday for a lecture called How AIDS Changed American Art.

He says American art would not be what it is today had AIDS not existed, because the epidemic was the defining force in American art through the 1980s and ’90s.

“The artists working at this time had to negotiate a political and social context that was virulently homophobic,” he told On The Coast guest host Gloria Macarenko.

“In 1987 a Neanderthal senator by the name of Jesse Helms actually passed a rule that said that any federal funding that mentioned homosexuality or intravenous drug use was illegal. Most museums received at least some federal funding, so that meant there was a virtual silence on any AIDS or gay-related art.”

Katz is also the co-curator of a new exhibition called Art/AIDS/America at the Tacoma Museum of Art.

At that exhibit, he is exhibiting what is thought to be the first work of art about AIDS, an abstract piece made by Israeli-born artist Izhar Patkin in 1981.

“I was actually quite suspicious of it when I first encountered it, because it seemed to me impossible that the first work of art about AIDS would antedate the first press reports and published reports about a new disease,” he said. “But Patkin told a wonderful story about sitting in his dermatologist’s office and recognizing as early as 1981 that the people around him all shared the same symptoms.”

Art works about AIDS could not look like they were about AIDS

That work was Unveiling of Modern Chastity, a painting that Katz says “erupts in lesions.”

Katz says artists working at this time had to “throw their voice.” He says that most works about AIDS at that time didn’t look like they were about AIDS.

He says that while sensitive viewers were often aware of these works’ true meanings, there was a subtlety that obscured the artists’ true intentions.

Things only began to change for artists tackling AIDS once drug cocktails and treatments were developed that made the disease a chronic, but livable condition.

“But one of the sad things about that is that people understand AIDS as a thing of the past, whereas that is simply not true. People are dying every day,” he said.

AIDS brought humanity back into art

But 30 years after the AIDS epidemic first emerged, Katz believes the crisis still is affecting the creativity of artists.

“Before AIDS presented, the international standard for art was stuff like minimalism. Cold, geometric, intellectual,” he said.

“The traditional values of art making, those expressive and emotional values, AIDS brought them back.”

VIEW ORIGINAL ARTICLE