September 2023
I’m grateful to be in conversation with artist Sille Storihle in their new book The Stonewall Nation, due out from Torpedo Press this fall. Sille has been a favorite co-conspirator, and their project deftly examines the utopian and colonial underpinnings of a Gay Liberation proposal to overtake the government of a rural California township in the 1970s
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The Stonewall Nation engages the archival remains of a gay colony that a group of gay men planned to establish in Alpine County, Northern California, USA, in the early 1970s. The Stonewall Nation was to be a place where gay people could be free from all oppression—a city “suitable for the Gay life-style and culture.” This project for gay liberation, however, was ultimately shaped as a project of settler-colonialism: the colony was to be erected on Indigenous lands, the territory of the Wá∙šiw (Washoe) people. The Stonewall Nation was never realized, and now lives on only in the archives.
Artist Sille Storihle first came across the story of the Stonewall Nation during a visit to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angles more than a decade ago. In 2014, they made an experimental short film about the project, which has now been extended into a publication that shares materials from Storihle’s artistic process as well as the ONE Archives. Produced in connection with the Norwegian Queer Culture Year 2022, The Stonewall Nation presents archival documents, artworks and a conversation between Storihle and former ONE Archive curator David Evans Frantz, engaging and exposing marginalized histories, the “thorns” in LGBTQ history and the dirtiness of the archive.
August 2023
Thank you to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for supporting the forthcoming exhibition Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dream at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The first retrospective of work by the influential yet underrecognized artist Millie Wilson, whose five-decade career deftly examines feminism, queerness, and their historical elision from art institutions. Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams will reassemble the installations for which the artist is most known alongside lesser-seen paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and ephemera. Wilson employed a combination of politically charged post-modern and conceptual art strategies to lay claim to a uniquely unruly conception of queerness. In the 1990s she produced the work that gives this exhibition its title: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams. A project of queer world-making that burlesqued Freudian theory and midcentury sexology research, it is but one example of Wilson’s inventive, prescient way of advancing questions about queer methods, gender and identity politics, and historical interpretation.
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Millie Wilson, Student in Lesbos, 1992. Neon on aluminum, 28 x 28 x 8 in. (71.1 x 71.1 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist
June 2022
Thrilled to share that The Paper Project, an initiative of the Getty, has awarded $100,000 to the exhibition and catalogue for Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art. This exhibition is co-organized by the Williams College Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Art Museum, and co-curating with C. Ondine Chavoya.
Learn more about the grant in an article about awards for The Paper Project on Hyperallergic.
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Teddy Sandoval, Angel Baby, 1995. 12-color silkscreen, 38 x 26 in. (96.5 x 66 cm). Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Paul Polubinskas, M.2011.14. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas
October 2021
Upcoming programs related to Axis Mundo in Cleveland: “On the Axis: Days of Discourse,” Saturday, November 6 and Sunday, November 7.
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June 2021
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. will be on view at moCa Cleveland from July 15, 2021—January 2, 2022.
Axis Mundo: At Work
Please join C. Ondine Chavoya and I on June 22, 6pm EST / 3pm PST for a conversation about Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. hosted by Independent Curators International. More information and zoom link here.
March 2021
Gerald Clarke: Falling Rock, the first publication on this inventive contemporary Native American artist, has been released! I co-edited this title with Christine Giles for the Palm Springs Art Museum and Hirmer Verlag.
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November 2020
I’m excited to share I’ve joined the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles as a Collections Research Specialist.
June 2020
C. Ondine Chavoya and I have been awarded a Curatorial Fellowship for travel and research from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support the forthcoming exhibition Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, jointly organized by the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College and the Williams College Museum of Art.
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Teddy Sandoval, Las Locas, c. 1980. Acrylic and mixed-media on unstretched canvas, 39 x 52½ in. (99 x 133.4 cm). Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen
April 2020
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. closes at The Gund Galley at Kenyon College on April 12.
March 2020 Touching History: Stonewall 50 closes at Palm Springs Art Museum on March 17.
February 2020
Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings by Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney from the University of British Columbia Press out now! I contributed a short text on the Kastle’s iteration in Los Angeles hosted by ONE Archives in 2015.
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December 2019
Axis Mundo named one of the “The Most Important Art Exhibitions of the 2010s“ by ARTnews.
I’m grateful to be in conversation with artist Sille Storihle in their new book The Stonewall Nation, due out from Torpedo Press this fall. Sille has been a favorite co-conspirator, and their project deftly examines the utopian and colonial underpinnings of a Gay Liberation proposal to overtake the government of a rural California township in the 1970s
The Stonewall Nation engages the archival remains of a gay colony that a group of gay men planned to establish in Alpine County, Northern California, USA, in the early 1970s. The Stonewall Nation was to be a place where gay people could be free from all oppression—a city “suitable for the Gay life-style and culture.” This project for gay liberation, however, was ultimately shaped as a project of settler-colonialism: the colony was to be erected on Indigenous lands, the territory of the Wá∙šiw (Washoe) people. The Stonewall Nation was never realized, and now lives on only in the archives.
Artist Sille Storihle first came across the story of the Stonewall Nation during a visit to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angles more than a decade ago. In 2014, they made an experimental short film about the project, which has now been extended into a publication that shares materials from Storihle’s artistic process as well as the ONE Archives. Produced in connection with the Norwegian Queer Culture Year 2022, The Stonewall Nation presents archival documents, artworks and a conversation between Storihle and former ONE Archive curator David Evans Frantz, engaging and exposing marginalized histories, the “thorns” in LGBTQ history and the dirtiness of the archive.
August 2023
Thank you to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for supporting the forthcoming exhibition Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dream at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The first retrospective of work by the influential yet underrecognized artist Millie Wilson, whose five-decade career deftly examines feminism, queerness, and their historical elision from art institutions. Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams will reassemble the installations for which the artist is most known alongside lesser-seen paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and ephemera. Wilson employed a combination of politically charged post-modern and conceptual art strategies to lay claim to a uniquely unruly conception of queerness. In the 1990s she produced the work that gives this exhibition its title: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams. A project of queer world-making that burlesqued Freudian theory and midcentury sexology research, it is but one example of Wilson’s inventive, prescient way of advancing questions about queer methods, gender and identity politics, and historical interpretation.
Millie Wilson, Student in Lesbos, 1992. Neon on aluminum, 28 x 28 x 8 in. (71.1 x 71.1 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist
June 2022
Thrilled to share that The Paper Project, an initiative of the Getty, has awarded $100,000 to the exhibition and catalogue for Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art. This exhibition is co-organized by the Williams College Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Art Museum, and co-curating with C. Ondine Chavoya.
Learn more about the grant in an article about awards for The Paper Project on Hyperallergic.
Teddy Sandoval, Angel Baby, 1995. 12-color silkscreen, 38 x 26 in. (96.5 x 66 cm). Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Paul Polubinskas, M.2011.14. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas
October 2021
Upcoming programs related to Axis Mundo in Cleveland: “On the Axis: Days of Discourse,” Saturday, November 6 and Sunday, November 7.
“On the Axis” is a two-day program hosted in partnership with moCa Cleveland and the Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center (JDBCAC). Curator and artist-led workshops and tours will take place at both moCa and JDBCAC.
June 2021
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. will be on view at moCa Cleveland from July 15, 2021—January 2, 2022.
This is the final stop on the tour organized by Independent Curators International (ICI). Ondine and I never would have dreamed for such an sweeping tour for the show. Thank you to everyone who made this possible!
Axis Mundo: At Work
Please join C. Ondine Chavoya and I on June 22, 6pm EST / 3pm PST for a conversation about Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. hosted by Independent Curators International. More information and zoom link here.
March 2021
Gerald Clarke: Falling Rock, the first publication on this inventive contemporary Native American artist, has been released! I co-edited this title with Christine Giles for the Palm Springs Art Museum and Hirmer Verlag.
Photos by Ian-Byers Gamber. Courtesy of Content Object
November 2020
I’m excited to share I’ve joined the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles as a Collections Research Specialist.
June 2020
C. Ondine Chavoya and I have been awarded a Curatorial Fellowship for travel and research from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support the forthcoming exhibition Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, jointly organized by the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College and the Williams College Museum of Art.
Teddy Sandoval, Las Locas, c. 1980. Acrylic and mixed-media on unstretched canvas, 39 x 52½ in. (99 x 133.4 cm). Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas. Photo by Fredrik NilsenApril 2020
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. closes at The Gund Galley at Kenyon College on April 12.
March 2020 Touching History: Stonewall 50 closes at Palm Springs Art Museum on March 17.
February 2020
Inside Killjoy's Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings by Allyson Mitchell and Cait McKinney from the University of British Columbia Press out now! I contributed a short text on the Kastle’s iteration in Los Angeles hosted by ONE Archives in 2015.
Don’t miss the L.A. book launch at ONE Archives on Saturday, February 22.
December 2019
Axis Mundo named one of the “The Most Important Art Exhibitions of the 2010s“ by ARTnews.