QUEER|ART ANNOUNCES 2022 QUEER|ART|PRIZE AND BLACK QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP AWARD: NEW ORLEANS-BASED ARTISTS GET THEIR FLOWERS!

COMMUNITY LEADER WENDI MOORE-O’NEAL TO RECEIVE $10,000 AWARD FOR SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT; PLUS FOUR FINALISTS FOR RECENT WORK

AND WRITER ALEXIS DE VEAUX TO RECEIVE $10,000 PAMELA SNEED AWARD FOR BLACK QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP ARTISTS AND ORGANIZERS

Awards Honor the Brilliant Work of Queer Artists Across Generations; Winners Will Be Celebrated at the 2022 Queer|Art Annual Party at The Whitney Museum on November 10

Queer|Art, New York City’s home for the creative and professional development of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce the winners of two of its biggest annual awards. Writer, educator, and activist Alexis De Veaux is the winner of the 2022 Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers. And orator and community leader Wendi Moore-O’Neal is the winner of the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement. Both artists are based in New Orleans – a significant regional first for both awards. Four additional artists—stefa marin alarcon, Marie Amegah, Uhuru Moor, and Grace Rosario Perkins—have also been named as the finalists of the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize for Recent Work. Winners for all three awards will receive a $10,000 cash prize; and new this year, each Finalist for the Queer|Art|Prize for recent work will also receive $5,000. All three awards are made possible with support from HBO Max. 

De Veaux, Moore-O’Neal, and the four Recent Work Prize finalists will be honored in a public ceremony—The 2022 Queer|Art Annual Party, Queer|Art’s biggest event of the year—on November 10th, 7pm streaming Live from The Whitney Museum of American Art. The ceremony will be hosted by activist/drag artist Junior Mintt, and also occasions the reveal of the winner for the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize in the category of Recent Work, as well as the graduation of the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows. An After Party emceed by Cecilia Gentili with DJ sets by Body Hack artists Cisne and NYMPH will immediately follow, beginning at 8:45pm.

2022 PAMELA SNEED AWARD FOR BLACK QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP ARTISTS AND ORGANIZERS

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

This year, Allen, Sneed, and Winter recognize multihyphenate writer, educator, and activist, New Orleans-based author and 2021 Queer|Art Mentor Alexis De Veaux (Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, 2004; Yabo, 2014) as a “pioneering force” within the queer community: 

“Alexis De Veaux is a pioneering force within the LGBTQIA community. Her expansive practice is wide-ranging: from poetry and journalism to children’s literature. Alexis has made invaluable contributions to the queer community across mediums. As a writer, educator, and public speaker, Alexis’s longstanding dedication to mentorship is clear across fields and generations. To be in the presence of her generous wisdom and infectious spirit is to be inspired.”  

2022 QUEER|ART|PRIZE FOR SUSTAINED ACHIEVEMENT 

 In the area of Sustained Achievement, the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize has been awarded to Wendi Moore-O’Neal, who also is based in New Orleans, where she is a recognized community leader. The 2022 Sustained Achievement panel of judges—Barbara Browning, Lia Gangitano, and Alicia Grullon—remarked on Moore-O’Neal’s commitment to organizing and storytelling within Black queer communities in the South:

“In the words of the nominator, “Wendi Moore-O’Neal [is] a Black Feminist butch dyke from New Orleans, Louisiana. She uses story circles, theater, performance, and song sharing… as tools for growing inspiration and building democratic processes… Wendi has made profound positive impacts on southern queer community…” Our choice for awarding Wendi comes from prioritizing a different kind of art making rooted in the traditions found in the Queer community which push up against hetero-normative partiarchial capitalist structures.” –Browning, Grullon, and Gangitano

QUEER|ART|PRIZE RECENT WORK

Finalists for the Recent Work award, which honors specific projects completed between 2021 and 2022, include artists working in a number of different mediums. Each artist will receive a $5,000 award, and the winner, to be revealed at the Queer|Art Annual Party, will receive an additional $5,000. The Finalists for Recent Work are: 

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

Through live performance, STEFA* continues to explore their relationships to Mother/Earth as a queer trans being. In living, fighting, and surviving the fascist, yt-cis-heteropatriarchical neo-colonial powers, STEFA* reveals the beauty and contradictions that emerge in the face of destruction and pain. With lush harmonics, spiraling loops, ancient ululations, somatic jazz, and rage-pop, they channel their ancestors and guides in their complex compositions towards revolution.

Marie Amegah for All of our Soft Parts (2022) With a focus on time spent together, this series of mixed media paintings explore the way we anchor each other through touch. Saturated with a black lesbian perspective, the gaze in the work sets the stage for a conversation between the figures and the viewer. The women portrayed in these life-sized paintings are depicted in moments of rest and togetherness. Who are we in the presence of women we love? Where do we lay our arms? How do we rest our head? What does our caress look like? This body of work is made in an effort to set the stage for black queer femmes to see themselves and their romances mirrored back at them. 

Uhuru Moor for The Uhuru Dreamhouse (ongoing), The Uhuru Dream House is a communal project to create a safe art house for disabled QTBIPOC. It will be a sacred space to create. It will also be an artist residency program & transitional living space: owned, operated and maintained by disabled Black trans people, for Black trans people. The residency program will exist on the property of Moor’s home, where disabled Black trans & intersex artists are welcome to visit New Orleans for one month to work on a project of their choice. Moor, who uses a wheelchair, intends for the home to be completely wheelchair accessible. 

And Grace Rosario Perkins for The Relevance of Your Data (2022), The Relevance of Your Data is an exhibition centered on a suite of new large-scale paintings by Grace Rosario Perkins commissioned by MOCA in conversation with objects by Lonnie Holley and Olen Perkins, video by Fox Maxy, and soft sculpture by Eric-Paul Riege. Bound by an intuitive approach to their chosen materials, an investment in process, and friendship, Perkins and her collaborators reflect on land, community, and home. The artists often incorporate found materials with an intent to release them of the intended utility and histories they hold, and use abstraction and an abundance of webs to serve as strategies for expansiveness and protection. Together, the group approaches artmaking as a means for building solidarity and collective healing.

About the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize

The Queer|Art|Prize is a community-nominated and adjudicated national awards program, now completing its sixth year. It was developed in collaboration with the Queer|Art artist community and features a revolving Nominating Committee of esteemed arts professionals from around the country. The Queer|Art|Prize highlights the impact of Queer|Art’s programming and support on a national level and has established itself as one of the most significant awards specifically created to recognize the artistry and contributions of U.S. and U.S.-based LGBTQ+ artists. 

Previous years’ winners include: Catherine Opie (2017), Vaginal Davis (2018), Joan Jett Blakk (2019), Julie Tolentino (2020), and Lola Flash (2021) for Sustained Achievement. 

And Tourmaline’s “The Personal Things” (2017), Xandra Ibarra’s “The Hook Up/Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour” (2018), jumatatu m. poe in collaboration with Jermone Donte Beacham for “Let ‘im Move You: This is a formation” (2019), Yulan Grant for “BUSS DEMON CHOAT” (2020), An Duplan for Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2021) for Recent Work. 

For the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize, a panel of six judges was selected based on recommendations from staff and previous judges. The winner of the Sustained Achievement Award was chosen by cultural critic, novelist, and dancer, Barabara Browning; curator Lia Gangitano and multidisciplinary artist, Alicia Grullon. The four finalists and the winner of the Recent Work award have been chosen by poet and editor, Jaye Elizabeth Elijah; multidisciplinary artist, Baseera Khan, and dancer and curator, Marýa Wethers.

THE 2022 QUEER|ART ANNUAL PARTY: LIVE(STREAMED) FROM THE WHITNEY!

Thursday, November 10

The award ceremony for the Pamela Sneed Award and the 2022 Queer|Art|Prize takes places as part of The 2022 Queer|Art Annual Party on Thursday, November 10 from 7pm EST live streaming from The Whitney Museum. Drag artist and inspirational speaker Junior Mintt will emcee the ceremony, followed by a celebratory Afterparty (starting at 8:45pm)  emceed by storyteller and community organizer Cecilia Gentili, with dance tracks provided by Body Hack artists Cisne and NYMPH. RSVP opens shortly at https://www.queer-art.org.

Junior Mintt is a Brooklyn–based “activist and drag artist who has made it her mission to spread a message of Black trans power through both live performance and illustration and video slides on Instagram.” (The Cut) “Every aspect of my drag and performance is in reference to my identity and honoring the legacy of every Black trans person before me,” she says. Mintt educates and entertains with the same Motivational Speaking, Burlesque, Drag, Visual Arts, and Stand Up flavors you love, but with an empowering and intersectional twist. No matter what happens, when you see Junior Mintt, you’ll leave feeling motivated and embraced.

Cecilia Gentili is an advocate, organizer, and storyteller working at the intersections of sex work, immigrant rights, incarceration issues, and trans liberation. Originally from Argentina, Cecilia came to the United States and survived for 10 years as an undocumented immigrant, gaining a living through sex work. She has years of experience working in direct services with organizations like The LGBT Center and Apicha Community Health Center, which led to her moving into policy work, becoming the Director of Policy at GMHC before creating Trans Equity Consulting to advocate directly for better policy for trans people at the local, state, and federal level. Cecilia is a founding member of Decrim NY, a coalition working towards the decriminalization, decarceration, and destigmatization of people in the sex trade. Cecilia has also performed in the hit FX Show Pose, in her one-woman show The Knife Cuts Both Ways, and in countless storytelling events across the country. This fall, Cecilia published her memoir, Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist, with Little Puss Press.

About the Honored Artists 

Alexis De Veaux
Pamela Sneed Award Winner

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

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

Wendi Moore-O’Neal
Sustained Achievement Winner

As a Freedom Singer and founder of Jaliyah Consulting, Wendi Moore-O’Neal is a Black Feminist butch dyke who works to connect groups like Southerners On New Ground’s mission, vision and values with how everyday work gets done.

Wendi uses spiritually grounded practices learned from her family of freedom fighters like story circles and freedom singing as tools for growing inspiration and building democratic practices. Born and raised in New Orleans, she has worked in local, regional, national and trans-national organizations over the last 25 years. Wendi’s heart’s work is rooted in the Deep South of the United States, especially the kind of organizing and mutual care that happens during porch time, around kitchen tables and always sharing good food.

stefa marin alarcon, Born with an extra rib (2021)
Recent Work Finalist

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

Marie Amegah, All of our Soft Parts (2022)
Recent Work Finalist

Marie Amegah is a visual artist currently based in the Baltimore-Washington DC area of the united states. Her work encircles themes of immigration, identity, queer storytelling, nostalgia, and human connection. She explores these core themes through various 2D media such as painting, illustration, collage and books. In the past few years, her work has been shown in numerous shows in the DC area, a televised news program and in a couple online exhibitions. 

Uhuru Moor, The Uhuru Dreamhouse (ongoing)
Recent Work Finalist

Uhuru Ali Moore aka The Uhuruverse aka Master Satanas (he/him) is a physically disabled and neurodivergent, New Orleans based, Los Angeles displaced, multi-disciplinary PROTEST ARTIST, dominant , musician and curator who uses multiple mediums and performance styles to speak against oppression and demand/encourage liberation, Black|Native Empowerment. Common themes in his work include; LGBTQI/Sex Workers (SW) rights/Black/poor/disabled inclusivity/ empowerment, Black/indigenous futurism, horror themes rooted in anti-Christianity, anti-capitalism and anti-government.  As a musician, he is best known as the electric guitarist for the band Fuck U Pay Us aka FUPU, a punk band demanding reparations for the African Holocaust and free self-defense training for non-cis men.  In 2016 Uhuru directed the psychedelic film noir, “FIGHT IN HEELS”, a collaboration with the artist collective he founded, #SNATCHPOWER.  Uhuru directed his second film in 2018 titled “Channeling Calafia” (a pre-colonial/post-apocalyptic short film about a Black indigenous leader of California).   Uhuru has curated live shows and events since 2014, most recently a Black SW Variety show “Black Widow”.  His work has appeared in/at; Afropunk, Art Institute of Chicago, The Art School (Glasgow, Scotland), Mexicali Biennial, MOCA/Geffen, MomaPS1 Pan African Film Festival, African Movie Academy Awards, William Grant Still Art Center, and many more. ” 

Because Master Satanas requires assistance, he works closely with his loyal submissive, and artner, Doomsfae aka Phenomenah, an autistic wiz kid and mad genius. Doomsfae contributes to the Dreamhouse with maintenance, gardening, cleaning, love and care. Doomsfae is studying herbalism and providing herbal medicines to the community as well as providing meals and fun. Doomsfae serves as the host to all guests at the Dreamhouse. 

Grace Rosario Perkins The Relevance of Your Data (2022)
Recent Work Finalist

Grace Rosario Perkins (b. 1986, Santa Fe, NM, lives and works in Albuquerque) is a self-taught Diné/Akimel O’odham painter interested in disassembling her personal narrative through layered words, objects, colors, and signs. Some recent sites of engagement include MOCA Tucson, Cushion Works, ONE Archives, Residency Art Gallery, Jack Barrett Gallery, Unpaved Gallery, Oakland Museum, Mills College, Cooper Union, The San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of New Mexico.

The Queer|Art|Prize and Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers are both made possible in part with generous support from HBO Max.

Since 2016, HBO Max has generously supported Queer|Art and our diverse community of LGBTQ+ artists. Queer|Art remains deeply grateful for HBO Max’s ongoing investment in our work.

Queer|Art is a proud community partner of the Whitney Museum’s Education department and a member of the Whitney Education Community Advisory Network (WECAN).

About Queer|Art

Queer|Art is a community-based nonprofit with a mission to connect and empower generations of LGBTQ+ artists. It was founded in 2009 by filmmaker Ira Sachs. Born out of the recognition of a generation of artists and audiences lost to the ongoing AIDS crisis, Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss and provides artists with the tools, resources, and guidance necessary for achieving success at the highest levels of their chosen field. Recognizing that queer artists need support that extends beyond frameworks of creative and professional development, Queer|Art works closely with our community to center collective care and creative resilience in all aspects of our work, guided by a belief that no artist should ever be faced with a choice between their survival and creative practice.

The current programs of Queer|Art include: the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship program; the long-running Queer|Art|Film series, held monthly at the IFC Center in lower Manhattan; and Queer|Art|Awards, a national (and in some cases international) initiative of grants, prizes, and awards that provides various kinds of direct support—monetary and otherwise—to LGBTQ+ artists.

A list of the intergenerational community of artists supported and brought together by Queer|Art includes: Tourmaline, Silas Howard, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, Hilton Als, Sarah Schulman, Pamela Sneed, Justin Vivian Bond, Jibz Cameron, April Freely, John Kelly, Hao Wu, Everett Quinton, Geo Wyeth, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Saeed Jones, Jonathan Katz, Rodrigo Bellott, Sasha Wortzel, Ryan Haddad, Morgan Bassichis, Angelo Madsen Minax, Raja Feather Kelly, Troy Michie, Tommy Pico, Justin Sayre, Kate Bornstein, Jacolby Satterwhite, Lola Flash, and Hugh Ryan, among many others.

Website: www.queer-art.org
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Twitter: @queerartnyc