How do you not love artists?
A sculptor has created a sculpture of her and her wife, in bed naked and embracing, as their headstone in Woodlawn cemetary. She said:
“Since all we were legally afforded was death, I was going to make the most elegant statement on our government not allowing us to marry as I could muster.”
What an amazing statement and an amazing response to discrimination.
Bodies of Work, a new Art and Literature Magazine is looking for submissions.
We, the editors, are three trans artists who believe art and literature are two of the most vital parts to our world today. At this moment, there is no magazine which brings all transgender, transsexual and gender variant writers and artists to the forefront. We believe it is time to publish such a magazine!
The purpose of Bodies of Work is to publish and promote literature and art that celebrates the diverse visions and understandings of the transsexual, transgender and gender-variant international community through language and image. We want to inspire and be inspired by the innovative output of our communities and come together with trans artists of all genres in creative discourse. We want to engage and support our creative processes and learn how trans artists and writers create.
Bodies of Work will:
* Introduce a wide audience to literature and art by the trans and gender-variant community.
* Provide a unique opportunity for underrepresented writers and artists viewpoints.
* Discover and publish emerging and developing writers and artists. More
To a lot of people, transgender identities are new, some emerging idea that’s only happened in the modern era, & to some degree, that’s true: without the discovery of hormones (turn of the last century) and the development of surgeries (middle of the last century), it is much more difficult for people to live in a body that’s wrongly gendered.
But that, however, is only for the people who require medical intervention. There have always been bodies that bridge male and female, that express secondary sex characteristics of both. Evidence:
How fantastic is she? At the very least, when some moralizing pundit talks about trans or intersex as some kind of new perversity, and a sign that the world is coming to an end, we can at least point out that it’s a very old perversity indeed. Most perversions are. We don’t invent much, but instead mostly forget, or otherwise bury some histories and identities and pretend they never did exist. (For the record, for those of you who aren’t careful readers: I do not think trans or intersex is a perversion.I am employing rhetoric in order to make my point clear. Civil and cultural recognition of trans and intersex identities and bodies is a sign of civilization, to me.)
But they did exist. This piece is not on display, but owned by the Louvre, yet this other one is on display, and in my opinion, far more sensual. Museum stats below the break.
On Wednesday, January 12th, Jonanthan D. Katz, author of Hide/Seek, will be speaking about the recent Smithsonian exhibit.
Where & When:
The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, Rm 9204
6pm-8pm
Jonathan D. Katz and the Omission and Censorship of Queer Art
Despite 30 years of scholarship from him and other experts, Katz says that most major institutions gloss over gay and lesbian sexuality in their collections – which is why Hide/Seek is such an important show. “Punishing the one institution that broke the blacklist will enable all the other institutions to sit on their hands,” says Katz. “My goal in doing the show was not simply to do the show, but also to make it safe for other institutions to do the show. We have been falsifying art history for decades.”
Here’s an interview with Katz, where he talks about the decision by the Smithsonian to pull the exhibit, & about the artists who have pulled their art and/or funding in response.
I’d go if I were in NYC, that’s for damn sure.
This is more like a four-tune Tuesday, or a 17+ tune Tuesday, depending, but I found this lovely list of 2010′s best queer indies and thought I should share it, but I also wanted to share some cool stuff I’ve discovered this year as well. So in addition to those, here’s a preview of some tracks by one of my favorite discoveries of the year: British Sea Power. You can hear some of the tracks, but it’s the Zeus EP I’ve been loving – “Kw-h” in particular. If you like The Kills, definitely check them out, too.
Thank you, Ben Harrison, as always, for tuning me in. His band Etc. has a super(hero) track out, too.
That’s my attempt at The Onion‘s version of the headline, but here’s the scoop: The Smithsonian does an exhibit of LGBT people, and there are objections. It’s the typical “you’re defiling Christianity” issue that comes up over & over again in the art world.
You can listen to the story at NPR.
Henri Cartier-Bresson died in 2004, and for the first time since then, MoMA has launc
hed a retrospective of his work. There are slide shows on both MoMA’s site & on CNN, where I found this info, via Fareed Zakaria (whose show I love, as it’s one of the only shows that is actually international in perspective, as opposed to being Here’s some stuff abotu some other countries, now back to the US, true center of the universe).
I’m sorely tempted to get to NYC before it ends in late June in order to see it. Here are a few of my favorites:
A Lawrence student has been taking photographs of faculty, staff & students who wanted to participate in the NOH8 campaign, and yesterday, 
on our 12th anniversary, we decided to (finally) get ours taken. Here are some of the shots.
CNN, despite being the ones who did that awful Stanton biopic, just put up a beautiful photo essay of trans people photographed with signs they wrote themselves. Great stuff. I love #6, but #5 made me tear up.
Really nice work. Make sure you read the captions, which toggle on/off in the bottom right corner of the frame.
(That said, someone else did something similar not long ago, & I hope CNN didn’t just rip off the idea.)
A Vermont artist who was also trans died in Haiti during the earthquake.
Our love & condolences to his parents, friends, & family.
Happy Christmas Eve! Check out this amusing post from 2004 about the 10 Least Successful Christmas Specials. Here’s my favorite:
Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)
In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”
Courtesy Bilerico & Gloria Brame, a lovely YouTube slideshow of the erotic works of Egon Schiele. I’ve long been a fan.
I missed it, & maybe you did too, but here’s Jeff Sheng’s Fearless photography series, which is a collection of photos of out LGBT athletes.
I discovered it via The LA Times’ blog and Sheng’s new series called Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
= Amazing work.
What amazes me particularly about the first set is how images of LGBT people tends to focus on white people in particular, & then too on men. Gathering their photos based on this other part of their identity – their atheleticism – gives a much larger range of racial & ethnic identity, & a much larger range of genders, too.
Morehouse College has chosen to have a clothing policy that prohibits crossdressing:
The dress-wearing ban is aimed at a small part of the private college’s 2,700-member student body, said Dr. William Bynum, vice president for Student Services.
“We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men,” he said.
Before the school released the policy, Bynum said, he met with Morehouse Safe Space, the campus’ gay organization.
“We talked about it and then they took a vote,” he said. “Of the 27 people in the room, only three were against it.”
There has been a positive response along with some criticism throughout the campus, he said.
Senior Devon Watson said he disagrees with parts of the new policy, especially those that tell students what they should wear in free time outside of the classroom.
I’m wondering if someone needs to tell them about straight crossdressers, and about pre-transition MTF trans people. Hopefully Morehouse’s Safe Space already does – but I doubt it.
At the TransOhio “Fabulously Fluid” performance night, I got to see Adam Apple do a fantastic performance based on Dylan’s signs that was intense & personal, & made a whole bunch of us in the audience cry.
This series of gorgeous photos asking questions about gender by L. Weingarten reminded me of Adam Apple’s performance, which I found on YouTube (even if the video/audio quality is crap, it gives you an idea).
