♀♑∞

afrodiaspores: Blackberri wearing the sacred necklaces of a...

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:07:44 -0400

Blackberri wearing the sacred necklaces of a priest in the Afro-Cuban Yorùbá-inspired Lucumí tradition, by Robert Giard, 2001. Elisa Rolle quotes his profile from Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Participation in African Inspired Traditions in the Americas:

Born in 1945 as Charles Timothy Ashmore, Blackberri is a singer, composer, poet, photographer, and political activist. He is of mixed origins and started his career as gospel singer. He came out to his mother when he was a teenager and his mother accepted his being gay. After going into the armed services, he stopped singing gospel, but he returned to music in 1967…

In recent years, although Blackberri has continued to perform, he has devoted much of his time to the AIDS-related causes and organizations, including the Black Brothers Esteem Program at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center, also in San Francisco. In 2002, he was honored at the San Francisco Candlelight Vigil with a Lifetime Achievement AIDS Hero Award.

Today, Blackberri is a priest of Lucumi, or babalorisha: he first became seriously involved in this spiritual tradition in 1984 and was initiated in Oriente, Cuba, in 2000…In 1995, he [had] decided to visit Cuba with Queers for Cuba, a Bay Area-based organization. There, he “met Oshun, who blessed [him] in a lot of ways.”

Blackberri has visited Cuba seven times since 1995. On each of these visits, he has experienced a spiritual epiphany. This was the chief reason he ultimately decided to undergo initiation in Cuba: “That’s where I feel most strongly connected to spirit.”

Blackberri once said: “I think we choose [to be queer] as a part of our destiny, because of the things we have to teach other people about themselves, about life.”

#The Finding Aid: The Finding Aid: Black Women at the Intersection of Art and Archiving...

Mon, 06 May 2013 23:31:35 -0400

#The Finding Aid: The Finding Aid: Black Women at the Intersection of Art and Archiving...:

mambubadu:

kameelahwrites:

You should definitely be here! A labor of love for the past 3 months. Co-curating this event has been a pleasure. Come out and support us at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on May 21st @ 6:30pm :)

thefindingaid:

The Finding Aid: Black Women at the Intersection of Art and Archiving is an interactive, multi-media dialogue that explores the intersection of experimental art practices and community-based archiving.

The event’s organization is based on the idea of a finding aid. A finding aid is a document used in archives for accessibility and discovery. We will transform a finding aid from an archival inventory/guide into an artistic archival experience.

Our goal for this event is that people leave knowing what an archive and archivist is or can be, and that people feel empowered to begin their own archival/artistic practice or feel moved to engage with existing archives.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 @ 6:30pm

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Langston Hughes Auditorium

***

Joyce-LeeAnn is a writer, archivist and performance artist from Denver, Colorado based in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University via Hampton University. She received a MILS with an Archives Certificate from Pratt Institute. She works as a professional project archivist. Joyce-LeeAnn’s writing explores the poetics of archival processing and investigates ways to tell stories through preserved documents. Subjects covered in her prose | poetry include: grief, healing processes, beautiful moments, writings on restroom walls and a fragment of black Denver history. Her experimental literary performances usually include a makeshift typewriter-drum-kit.

// joyceleeann.com

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985) is a photo-based artist, writer, and educator from East Palo Alto, CA based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a Gallery/Studio Instructor at the Brooklyn Museum as well as a public school teacher working with court involved youth in East New York. Kameelah’s work enlists archival as well as archeological traditions to explore collective memory and her family narratives through found images from eBay and estate sells, material objects, and original photography. An object-based body of work, she interrogates the trinity of spatial trauma within Black communities — homelessness, incarceration, and forced migration and how this influences both collective memory and the way we reconstruct narratives from material fragments. Currently, she is an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Book Arts. In 2012, Kameelah was an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She will have her first solo exhibit at Real Art Ways in July 2013 tentatively entitled The Imagined Archive. A former Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Kameelah received her Master of Education from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College.

// kameelahr.com

Marilyn Nance is an American visual artist known for her images of 20th century African American life—spirituality, music, art, and African retentions, She grew up through many movements—The Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, Black Arts, Anti War, Students Rights, the Women’s Movement, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

A two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography, her photographs can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and in the Library of Congress.

// marilynnance.com

Image © Albert Chong

Arianne Edmonds is a Los Angeles native, storyteller and archivist. Her historical collection spans from 1886-1950 and explores the uniqueness of early black Los Angeles, through the lens of genealogy. She received her Bachelors of Science in Communications, from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and started her career in educational media at Sesame Workshop. She currently works with the Taproot Foundation managing consultant relations and community partnerships.

// edmondsfamilyexploration.tumblr.com

Ladi’Sasha Jones is a is a collector and witness worker of oral history narratives with a special interest in documenting Black women’s stories and Black American family life. She approaches her documentation practice by working from the intersections of cultural equity and collective community memory.

Currently, Ladi’Sasha is working on the curation of a public forum to share her collection of oral history records via a digital sound art gallery — coming Summer 2013. Having earned her B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University in 2010 and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2012, she recently completed a Certificate in Oral History from Baylor University in April of 2013. She aims to move towards freelancing and sharing her documenting services with community and cultural arts organizations along with individual artists.

// ladijones.com

Shawn(ta) Smith is a lesbian separatist, writer, archivist and reference librarian. Her essays blend storytelling with documentation and archiving. Her work will appear in “Black Gay Genius Interview with Lisa C. Moore” in Black Gay Genius: Joseph Beam and In the Life (forthcoming). She is currently editing a new anthology Her Saturn Returns: Queer Women of Color Life Transitions, a compilation of narratives of queer women and color in their Saturn. Shawn is a collective member of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the WOW Cafe Theater where she co-produces Rivers of Honey, a monthly Cabaret highlighting the art of women of color. Shawn is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Queens College while working as a reference & instruction librarian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the former Archive Coordinator for StoryCorps.

// hersaturnreturns.com // riversofhoney.com

Photo © Arianne Benford

Sonia Louise Davis (b. 1988, New York City) is an artist and photographer. Using a large format view camera, her work mines the public and private archive, exploring collective memory and family history through site-specific and community-based projects. Sonia is currently participating in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. An honors graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds a BA in African American Studies, with a concentration in Music and Visual Art.

// sonialouisedavis.com

Born in Las Vegas, Salome Asega is an Ethiopian visual artist and independent curator working in Brooklyn. She received her BA in Transnational Visual Art and Social Practice from the Gallatin School at NYU and is currently an MFA candidate in the Design and Technology program at Parsons The New School for Design. She is also a founding member of theSistah Friends Project.

// eyesearsmouth.com

—-

Mambu Badu’s own Kameelah Rasheed co-curated this event, which also features Sonia Louise Davis, whose work appeared in Volume 2 of Mambu Badu magazine. If you live in NYC, you should definitely support this event!

CHANCE THE RAPPER on Everybody's Something (ft. Saba & BJ The Chicago Kid)

Mon, 06 May 2013 03:45:00 -0400

I got a lotta off days but it ain’t often I’m off the clock
y’all know what I mean

I got the Chicago blues
we invented rock before The Stones got through

We just aimin back because the cops shot you
buck buck bang bang
yelling fuck FOX news

Audio

Mon, 06 May 2013 03:37:27 -0400

tobia: MOCAtv Presents DLIHCYOB - boychild -...

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:34:44 -0400

tobia:

MOCAtv Presents DLIHCYOB - boychild - Performativity

“remember you are human. remember the world is over. remember the world is over. remember the world is over. remember you are human.”

boychild IS #apocalypse — http://instagram.com/boychild

boychild
DLIHCYOB
2012
Video, 4:33 minutes

Credits: Director - Mitch Moore

Im a cismale looking for fraction of my identity yet to be discovered. Do have any suggestions?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:25:45 -0400

First I suggest do some reading— on your privilege and privilege in general. Then I suggest DO-ing. Make sure that you are situated within a community (however small or large) that supports you in experimentations with visual presentation and allows you space to explore masculinity, femininity and all parts of self between and beyond the binary. I’d also like to stress that these experimentations/ explorations of self don’t necessitate a public space or even visible changes. Conversation- with yourself or a supportive friend- is a small but crucial start to understanding your own identity. I’m also not an expert, by any means, but hope this is useful?

what is your email?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:18:29 -0400

aminaross@live.com

prettycolors: #cd2dd2

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:01:56 -0400

prettycolors:

#cd2dd2

Black Queer Culture and the Misappropriation of Voguing

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:27:31 -0400

Black Queer Culture and the Misappropriation of Voguing:

fogo-av:

The act of voguing symbolizes the freedom to literally take up space with unbound and evocative movement, and in a world in which queer people of color are too firmly shoved into the margins to do so anywhere else. A world where white people are the default faces for every letter in LGBTQI, while QPOC are flattened into stereotypes and reduced to statistics, if not ignored entirely. Voguing is a dance form not only defined by its sassy, emphatic gestures, couture poses and gleaming confidence, but by its history as a safe space for QPOC. The dance form itself is inseparable from the racial and sexual identity of the performers, as the dancing symbolizes the lived experience specific to its performers. Therefore, a white person voguing is a destruction of the symbol.

All of this!

nic-kay: call for submissions3rd Language: Issue #3: Lineage...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:10:24 -0400

nic-kay:

call for submissions
3rd Language: Issue #3: Lineage and Archive

**In our 3rd publication, we will explore queer lineage and the archive. We ask: how does one articulate, emulate, and preserve the past? This artist-run publication aims to showcase the work of upcoming queer artists, writers, and thinkers in a quarterly online and print format.

Points of interest include but are not limited to:
Structures of time
Queer heroes / self-created family and homage
Subjective and group memory
Interpretations of past LGBTQI narratives
Souvenirs
Rarity/ value
Queer geographies
Methods of archive and preservation
Display and exhibition
Identity-based collecting
Urban archeology

3rd-language.com

Back

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 02:40:00 -0400

I have been wanting for a back
for too long
or asking for one year and one half
of my body a gaping wanting closed

With a twist
every bone cracks over and over
unto one another I do
do it again do it again
Every sinew a back I have been wanting for a back break for so long
for demanding
the dead cow on my back holds on too tightly
do it again
let’s

ROMARE BEARDEN blue is the smoke of war, white the bones of...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:57:37 -0400

ROMARE BEARDEN

blue is the smoke of war, white the bones of men
1960

fuckyeahdykes: http://thestudmagazine.com/ submitted by...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:54:27 -0400

fuckyeahdykes:

http://thestudmagazine.com/

submitted by studswag

nic-kay: ABOUT FACE THEATRE & CHANCES DANCES Present…THE...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:23:18 -0400

nic-kay:

ABOUT FACE THEATRE & CHANCES DANCES Present…

THE DROP!!!

ALL AGES QUEER DANCE PARTY!!!

Saturday ~ April 20th ~ 6:30pm-10:30pm
Performances start at 7:30pm
BOTTOM LOUNGE - 1375 W Lake St.

$10 Tickets at the door or

in ADVANCE : http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=3490734&pl=bl

The Drop is a safe, intentional, fierce party space that is inclusive and empowering to queer folks and allies of all ages, gender identities, races, and sexual identities. Proceeds will go to support the remount of About Face Theatre’s youth-driven play WHAT’S THE T, running May 19th – June 2 at the Victory Gardens Upstairs Loft Space. The play advocates for more space and access for queer youth in Chicago. By throwing an all-ages party, we hope to set a standard for collaborating across lines of age and other privileges.

DJ’S AND PERFORMERS TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON!!!!

on the murder of Kimani Gray and the resulting protests

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:15:00 -0400

on the murder of Kimani Gray and the resulting protests

Help Kate Bornstein Stay Alive!!!!

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:22:26 -0400

Help Kate Bornstein Stay Alive!!!!:

hoaxzine:

Kate Bornstein has cancer. The good news, direct from the team of skilled doctors on her case, is that the cancer is curable. However, the treatment plan that gives Kate the best chance of beating cancer is incredibly expensive. Kate has spent the past thirty years helping the rest of us Stay Alive—now it’s our turn to give back. Let’s HELP KATE BORNSTEIN BEAT CANCER AND STAY ALIVE!

This August, Kate was diagnosed with lung cancer. She underwent surgery, after which extensive testing led her doctors to believe that the cancer was gone. However, in February, Kate’s doctors discovered that this was not, in fact, the case. The cancer was back. Since receiving this news, Kate has seen numerous talented physicians and other medical professionals. The consensus is that Kate’s cancer IS CURABLE. However, Kate’s treatment plan is more complicated than most because she has suffered from another kind of cancer—CLL, or Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia—for over fifteen years. Kate will undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatment. She will eat according to strict nutritional diet plan and she will take a large number of supplements that will strengthen her body’s ability to handle the chemo and radiation.

This is the treatment plan is Kate’s best—and only—chance at survival. However, it is also exceptionally expensive. While Kate does have health insurance, she must pay the very high deductable, make high monthly insurance payments, and make co-payments for doctor visits and prescriptions. Also, Kate has to travel to the hospitals that are best suited to administer her unique treatment plan. Right now, this means going to Chicago five times over the next two months for chemotherapy. In the coming months, she may also have to travel to San Diego and Texas for additional treatment. Luckily, Kate will undergo radiation therapy in New York City, where she lives, but because of her weak immune system, she will have to take cabs to and from the hospital five days per week for at least two month s . Additionally, insurance does not cover the high cost of the supplements that her doctor insists are an integral part of her treatment plan.

During the course of her treatment, Kate’s immune system will be seriously compromised, she will be exhausted, and she will experience periods of extreme nausea. As a result, her doctors have insisted that Kate take a hiatus from work-related travel, speaking engagements, performances, and even writing. For the next eight to ten months, Kate will be undergoing treatment and recovering from cancer, so she will not be able to work. This means that Kate will have no way to pay for rent, utilities, food, pet care, or any other normal expense. So, not only does Kate have to worry about paying her medical bills, she also has to worry about paying her basic living expenses.

This is where we come in. Kate’s work—her books, lectures, performances, apps, and online presence—has helped countless people choose life instead of suicide. Kate’s efforts have literally saved thousands of lives. Now, it’s time for all of us to save the life of just one person: Kate Bornstein. Through our donations, each of us has the power to give Kate our thanks, to be there for her in this difficult time, and to help her save her life.

Please join me in donating whatever you can to help Kate beat cancer and STAY ALIVE.

girlsgetbusyzine: Girls Get Busy’s Zine of the Week: 3rd...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:34:00 -0400

girlsgetbusyzine:

Girls Get Busy’s Zine of the Week: 3rd Language - The Shape of Uncertainty

3rd Language is a Chicago-based Queer curatorial collective and zine publishing initiative. We assemble visual and written works from queer-identified and allied artists into a quarterly publication. We use grass-roots funding initiatives, grants and donations to afford high-quality color printing for all of our artists. We emphasize an exploration of Queerness outside of the sexualized-body. We explore all of the many other avenues associated Queer thought with emphases on shifting boundaries, malleable social constructions and transforming identities.

You can read the zine online for free here

3rd-language.com

For a chance to be featured as Zine of the Week, email your links to girlsgetbusyzine@gmail.com

3rd Language Zine #1 on Girls Get Busy’s Tumblr!

7 worst international aid ideas

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:38:27 -0400

7 worst international aid ideas:

Maybe their hearts were in the right place. Maybe not. Either way, these are solid contenders for the title of “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism.”
Read more at http://matadornetwork.com/change/7-worst-international-aid-ideas/#kXBhamVOcDoEP3rD.99

deeplezstonerwitch: socialismartnature: Demonstrators face-off...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:24:52 -0400

deeplezstonerwitch:

socialismartnature:

Demonstrators face-off against police during a protest against the shooting of Kimani Gray, March 13, 2013 in the East Flatbush neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Numerous arrests were made during the police crackdown on this protest.

16-year-old Kimani Gray was shot and killed by police on March 9, provoking unrest in the neighborhood.

this is so sad to see. i’m so sad about the state of this world.

Trenton Doyle Hancock“Bye and Bye”2002Acrylic and...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:25:53 -0500

Trenton Doyle Hancock
“Bye and Bye”
2002
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 84 x 132 inches
Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York and Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas