left to right: Alexis De Veaux, Wendi Moore-O’Neal, stefa marin alarcon photographed by Summer Surgent-Gough.

ALEXIS DE VEAUX WINS 2022 PAMELA SNEED AWARD FOR BLACK QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP ARTISTS & ORGANIZERS

WENDI MOORE-O’NEAL AND STEFA MARIN ALARCON WIN SIXTH ANNUAL QUEER|ART|PRIZE AWARDS

GRADUATION OF 2021-2022 QUEER|ART|MENTORSHIP FELLOWS

On Thursday, November 10th, a radiant crowd of LGBTQ+ artists and allies convened in-person at The Whitney Museum of American Art for Queer|Art’s biggest event of the year: The 2022 Queer|Art Annual Party. This year’s grand celebration took the form of a hybrid event, with 150 members of Queer|Art’s vibrant community of artists and supporters attending in-person and many more tuning in virtually via Zoom. Activist and drag artist Junior Mintt guided attendees through a dynamic awards program and an uplifting graduation ceremony that honored the outgoing Fellows of the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship program cycle. The night concluded with a dazzling afterparty emceed by advocate, organizer, and storyteller Cecilia Gentili, and DJ sets by Body Hack artists Cisne and NYMPH. 

This year’s slate of awards (made possible with generous support from HBO Max) celebrated luminaries and emerging artists alike within queer creative communities across the country. The 2022 Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers offers a $10,000 prize to a Black Mentor or Fellow from the Queer|Art|Mentorship (QAM) community for uplifting foundational histories of Black queer mentorship. In its second year, a judging panel of celebrated artists– Justin Allen, Stephen Winter, and Pamela Sneed–bestowed the honor to multihyphenate writer, educator, and activist, Alexis De Veaux.

The 2022 Queer|Art|Prize Award honored the New Orleans-based freedom singer and community leader, Wendi Moore O’Neal, along with multidisciplinary artist, stefa marin alarcon with $10,000 prizes, each recognizing their significant contributions to queer culture and community. Moore-O’Neal was acknowledged in the category of Sustained Achievement, a category that serves to highlight art practices that have significantly impacted queer community and contributed to its endurance and expansion. alarcon received the award for Recent Work, a category that recognizes an outstanding work created by a US-based LGBTQ+ artist between Pride of 2021 and Pride of 2022, for their transdisciplinary opera, Born With An Extra Rib. 

ALEXIS DE VEAUX, 2022 Pamela Sneed Award Winner
The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art|Mentorship Artists and Organizers was founded by BlaQ, Queer|Art’s Black LGBTQ+ Artists Group to acknowledge Black QAM Mentors and Fellows who uplift critical histories of Black queer mentorship and exemplify steadfast commitment to values shared by the QAM community. The judges selected Alexis De Veaux as the award’s second annual recipient for her “invaluable contributions to the queer community across mediums.” 

Judges remarked, “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.” 

Upon accepting the award, De Veaux remarked, “I’m really, really just thrown by this opportunity and this award. I’m grateful to the judges, to all the other nominees, to this entire community that I am part of… I’m also deeply thankful to all the people up here that you may or may not see that may or may not be visible to you, but they are here with me. These are my ancestors and my future, and I introduce them to you tonight so that you can bear witness to their presence and so that you don’t see me as singular. I am not singular. I am part of a great and grand community.” 

WENDI MOORE-O’NEAL, 2022 Queer|Art|Prize Winner in Sustained Achievement
In the area of Sustained Achievement, the award was granted to Wendi Moore-O’Neal. As she welcomed O’Neal on stage, 2022 Sustained Achievement judge Alicia Grullon spoke to her significant impact: “Wendi Moore O’Neal implores her audiences to create an irresistible possibility of what can be. What would the world look like if at an atomic level, generosity and love so central to Wendi’s work and the queer community were the motivations to creating the future?”

During her acceptance speech, O’Neal shared, “I come from a tradition of congregational singing, and it’s a practice of experiencing our collective power… When I sing it’s not for performance, it’s a call for us to charge the air together and feel what it feels like to be together. Kwame Ture would say our work as organizers is not to convince people that they need to be free; it’s to show people what we can do when we organize and that’s what congregational signing practice does for me.” She then invited audience members to join her in call and response verses, enlivening The Whitney Museum’s auditorium with an inspirational chorus of song.

STEFA MARIN ALARCON, 2022 Queer|Art|Prize Winner in Recent Work for Born With An Extra Rib (2021)
In the area of Recent Work, the award was granted to stefa marin alarcon for Born With An Extra Rib, a transdisciplinary opera emerging from the questions behind the artist’s upcoming record “Born With An Extra Rib.” Using video collage, live music, and ritual performance, they ask their most pressing, embodied questions to engage in an emergent process of collective liberation. 

2022 Recent Work judge Baseera Khan explained the adjudication panel’s decision: “My heart was drawn to a particular artist that reminded me about where I came from and how important music and night culture is to a femme, to a queer, to a marginalized, to a black and brown community, to build confidence in these communities, and to learn about desire because desire is essential and is part of our very being.”

alarcon’s acceptance speech touched on the power of being uncategorizable: “I want to start by saying this may be my biomythology, my origin story, but this honor belongs to many hands and many hearts. There’s no such thing as a solo artist and creating this work reminded me of that over and over again. I got to work with the most incredible team of visionaries, many of whom are my friends and my chosen family… I made this opera, I made this film, I made this installation and this ritual because being uncategorizable has actually protected me and there is power in being uncategorizable. Isn’t that queer art? …I hope to continue learning, to continue investing in myself, my spirit, and my practice. I hope this is one of the many times we come together to hold up our queer artists and our community. Thank you for this honor.”

About the Program
The 2022 Annual Party also recognized the 2022 QAM Fellows, a fiercely tight-knit group of creatives who forged incredible bonds this year with one another in spite of the fellowship’s virtual nature. After additional remarks from Junior Mintt, the Fellows were celebrated with a triumphant graduation ceremony.

To conclude the evening, Cecilia Gentili put on a raucous show that blended drag, dancing, lip-syncing, and storytelling.

About the Winners
Alexis De Veaux (Pamela Sneed Award)
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 website, www.alexisdeveaux.com.

Wendi Moore-O’Neal (Queer|Art|Prize, Sustained Achievement)
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 (Queer|Art|Prize, Recent Work)
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.

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.

Major Support Provided By
The 2021 Queer|Art|Prize is made possible by lead support from HBO. Additional support for Queer|Art programs is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council for the Arts.

Website: www.queer-art.org
Instagram: @queerart