Gazi Nafis Ahmed. Shahinoor & Nipa #2, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist. “I am a woman and I love another woman. I want to live with my lover. I don’t want anyone to come between us. We don’t want anyone among us to commit suicide, to get hurt, to become addicted to drugs, to cut themselves. Let us live the way we want to. Now is the time to open up and talk about it.”

In the United States, we tend to think of citizenship as a privilege, but it is not hard to imagine how it could instead be a curse when your very right to exist is challenged in your home country. In 2015, Europe received more than a million refugees—many of whom destroyed their own identity cards in order to erase their national identity so that they could not be deported back to their home countries. The UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention guarantees asylees the right of non-refoulement, which prevents any signatory state from sending refugees back to countries where their lives are in danger due to persecution. This was a response to the persecution of Jews and others under Hitler’s Third Reich, and the Convention constitutes an effort to ensure that such genocides never happen again. But as the global refugee population climbs to sixty-five million, receiving countries struggle to adjust, and many countries have closed their borders altogether so that refugees might never arrive. Forced migration is an issue that often remains in the shadows, but many artists are struggling to find a place where they can express their own views without fear of persecution.

The singer Paul Robeson famously quipped that he was a citizen of the world, and while this sentiment is more common than ever in our globalized age, Robeson’s own experience demonstrates citizenship’s limitations. While speaking out against injustice in the United States, he was hounded by Joseph McCarthy’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and was even denied the right to travel abroad in the 1950s. Robeson’s story is tragic and represents a kind of wound that many artists confront to this day. Ai Weiwei was jailed in 2011 and had his passport confiscated for years by Chinese authorities due to his criticism of the government. These cases are but symptoms of a much larger trend of persecuting artists whose work transgresses the norms of their eras or expands social or political conversation beyond the views advocated by the government. Robeson and Ai allow us to see how making art with a conscience can lead to a form of precarious citizenship.

Read the full article here.

L.J. Roberts. Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky Singing at the 2013 NYC Dyke March, 2013; single-strand embroidery on cotton; 4 x 8 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

L.J. Roberts: Do think your use of abstraction mixed with craft is a strategy that inserts political concerns and agendas into a form that can be accessed by a wider range of people with more avenues for interpretation? If so, my work differs greatly from yours in that way. I thought I worked very literally, but now I’m actually working figuratively, which is not where I saw myself going at all. Perhaps that closes doors on the conversation and creates less of a gateway for multifaceted conversations.

Sheila Pepe: I think we are all working literally, but we are also working to combine layers of literal signs and signals that work as metaphor and analogy. It is what it is—and it points to something else. That’s why I’m thinking again about craft and art. One could say that within the context of art, craft may be queer but only if the latter is understood as a static self-sustaining location, invested in and empowered by its marginality. To this end, there must be an inherent disinterest in becoming part of the larger whole. As a personal quest, this sounds good, but as a political one, it doesn’t: Few people have the luxury of—or interest in—living and/or working in a static state of marginality.

I’m wondering what your political ambitions are for the concepts of queer and craft. What do they look like, in your mind’s eye?

In disciplines that have been traditionally practiced by women, like textiles, we’ve seen a group of men—particularly cisgender men—become highly visible, which is quite different than how women working in textiles have been positioned, both historically and contemporarily. Many representations of masculinity in mainstream culture are quite violent, and so to see a man exuding a feminine masculinity—like knitting or crafting, for example—is enticing. Most of these men who position themselves within the realm of queer craft (if we want to use that term) are making work about men, male identity, and male desire (usually toward other men). The valuing of men engaged in textiles is often hyper-gendered and what I call slyly misogynist. For instance, the show Man-Made: Contemporary Male Quilters that recently opened in Los Angeles at the Craft and Folk Art Museum seems to embody a lot of the problems you and I have been talking about, in terms of the intersections of queer identity and craft. It’s a show composed entirely of white cisgender men (queer and straight) who all are making work about being male. It’s convenient to engage in women’s work to accentuate and declare masculinity. I think of these men-who-sew shows as illustrating Sedgwickian Triangles, a dynamic in which men flirt or bond through a woman who acts as a conduit—but in this context, it’s a creative practice that has been historically marginalized that is a catalyst for these homosocial dynamics. These shows have systemic consequences on so many levels, micro and macro.

Read the full interview here.

Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke. The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015 (screenshot).

Not long ago I wrote an article celebrating the work being done by cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. In a post-Snowden world that’s seen few legal or structural changes since the first leaks, and one that’s filled with male-dominated tech conferences that sound more like advertising than critical discussion, I still consider Deep Lab’s work to be invaluable.

However, after the piece was published, Dorothy Santos—a writer, curator, and friend who’s currently organizing an exhibition on privacy and surveillance and their relationship to gentrification in the Bay Area—wrote to me to express concerns about the lack of women of color (WOC) and queer or trans women of color (QTWOC) artists in Deep Lab. She questioned why I didn’t discuss that lack of representation in my article.

With Santos’ encouragement, I decided it would be valuable to do a follow-up piece and include perspectives from WOC and QTWOC artists and writers regarding Deep Lab, new media and technology-based art, and representation. We emailed a small questionnaire to twenty such women. Seven responded, and their comments are featured below along with Santos’ own answers. We encourage any WOC/QTWOC readers to comment on this article or email to share your perspectives. As Deep Lab continues its work in 2015, with exciting partnerships with the MIT Media Laboratory and NEW INC, we hope these voices will be taken into account.

Read the full article here.

Nathan Vincent. Locker Room, 2011 (installation view); 144 x 228 in. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Stephen Miller.

The terms “queer” and “craft” have both been reclaimed by their communities to dislodge disparaging and ghettoizing stereotypes (in considering the reclamation of terms historically associated with marginalized communities into ones of agency and empowerment, I am indebted to L.J. Roberts’ article, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It and Reverse It: Re-imaging Craft Identities Using Queer Theory”).[1] “Queer” became employed as a term of agency and empowerment in the 1980s, embraced for its ability to recognize a wide and fluid range of sexual identifications, and for shedding the associations with which the term “gay” was saddled at the height of the AIDS crisis. “Queer” is by nature ambiguous, rejecting simplistic heteronormative labels and systems. Likewise, in the early 2000s, the field of craft was in dire need of reclamation. Connotations of craft as amateurish, hobbyist, traditionally feminine, or conceptually empty spurred several major art institutions to drop the term from their official title. In 2002, the Bay Area art school California College of Arts and Crafts became just California College of the Arts, despite the institution’s deep history with the Arts and Crafts movement. In 2003, the American Craft Museum in New York became the Museum of Arts and Design. These very public dissociations from the word “craft” have prompted a new generation of craft activists and theorists to fight against craft’s second-class status in visual culture. New terms like “critical craft” or “contemporary craft” are being employed to shape a new progressive discourse around the medium.

Consideration of these fields’ analogous backgrounds of repression and reclamation underscores why craft can be so advantageous in articulating queer experiences and queer identities. Disidentification, a queer theoretical tactic, is about the “recycling and rethinking of encoded meaning.”[2] Craft has been burdened with a host of gendered and disempowering assumptions, but these assumptions become assets in the hands of artists aimed at exposing essentializing and exclusionary cultural messages about identity, sexuality, and desire.

LJ Roberts. The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, 2011; Poly-fill, acrylic, rayon, Lurex, wool, polyster, cotton lame, sequins, and blended fabrics. 138 x 114 x 108 in. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo: The Smithsonian American Art Museum.

For Queer Threads, artist Nathan Vincent created Locker Room (2011), a life-size installation of a men’s locker room made entirely out of crocheted yarn. This site, loaded with heteronormative machismo and a history of vulnerability and exposure for queer bodies, is now completely covered with the ultra-feminine handicraft of crochet. The clever mixing of references dismantles the stability and validity of both sets of gendered assumptions.

Melanie Braverman’s piece, titled Queer (date), is a handmade patchwork quilt embroidered with a series of queer terms. Words like “top,” “pussy,” and “fag” are carefully embroidered in the palest of pink silk ribbon. The quilt itself is small and delicate, conjuring up a girlish childhood item of comfort and protection. The text on top raises both the queer notions of being “born this way” and the enculturation of gender norms inescapable in childhood. The quilt can thus fluctuate between acting as a metaphor for the “blanket” conventions of gender that society and parents enforce on children, and the experience of knowing at a young age one’s own dissonance from such conventions.

Sheila Pepe. Your Granny’s Not Square, 2008; crocheted shoelaces and yarn. 72 x 144 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Also invested in working with familial allusions is the artist Sheila Pepe, whose Your Granny’s Not Square (2008) is a clever play on the granny-square crochet technique and a reference to the grandmotherly associations tied to the medium. Pepe also directly references her own family in her material choice, using shoelaces in addition to yarn as a nod to her father, who was a shoemaker.  She seeks to position the work formally and theoretically with seminal fiber works by Eva Hesse and Faith Wilding, putting herself in conversation with the history of textiles in feminist art practices. She is literally interweaving her personal history within a larger network of craft-specific art history.

Similarly concerned with a forging of new queer connections is the artist LJ Roberts, whose work, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Brueklen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (2011), is a vibrant assemblage of  knitting, embroidery, and quilting that documents queer collectives in Brooklyn. Making reference to both the AIDS quilt and ACT UP iconography, it aligns itself with a lineage of queer advocacy. Its DIY aesthetic, overwhelming scale, and the detail of the work are ripe for examining the effort and endurance required to make new safe spaces for the queer community. It is an archive of the new families that are built in an enduring quest for belonging.

Queer Threads is a thoughtful record of the ongoing conversation between queer theoretical investments and critical craft theory. It also accentuates a shared potency between craft and queer thought: the ability to articulate difference and even flexibility within their own labels. As the art historian Julia Bryan Wilson has said, “Craft objects, like queer desires, are multiple….they refuse to be any one thing.”[3] The works in this show epitomize this ability to oscillate in their meaning. They underscore the strength of critical frameworks that disavow overdetermined and essentializing expectations, and thus make space for a richer multiplicity of identities, practices, and interpretations.

Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community is on view at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art through March 16, 2014.

[1] L.J. Roberts, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It, and Reverse It: Re-Imaging Craft Identities Using Queer Theory,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011).

[2] Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pg 30-31.

[3] Julia Bryan Wilson, “Queerly Made: Harmony Hammons Floorpieces,” The Journal of Modern Craft,Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2009): pg 59-80.

Karol Radziszewski. Kisieland, 2012 (film still); high-definition video; 30:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

Kisieland (2012), a documentary film by the Polish artist Karol Radziszewski, explores the importance and historical context of the personal slide collection of Ryszard Kisiel. Kisiel, his boyfriend, and a small circle of friends shot more than three hundred homoerotic slides (some of them featured in Kisieland) mostly between 1985 and 1986, while Poland was still under a communist government. Kisiel kept the collection secret. Radziszewski’s project, which in addition to the film includes a book that will feature reproductions of all the slides, makes Kisiel’s work available to a wider public for the first time. Kisieland has been recently shown in the United States, at Performa 2013, and has also been extensively screened in Europe, where it has stirred debates on the implications of divulging a private, homoerotic body of work and the contextualization that this requires. When I spoke with Radziszewski about the film, he said he hoped it would draw attention to the way that Poland’s LGBT movement has banished sexuality from its contemporary public discourse, feeding into what Radziszewski sees as a generally sex-phobic climate.

Read the full article here.

Wynne Greenwood. Pink Head, 2013; ceramic and acrylic paint; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Soloway.

For us, Wynne Greenwood was a kind of star of the lo-fi, DIY riot grrrl scene, and during my undergrad days in Seattle—one of the hotbeds of West Coast riot grrrl culture—I was lucky enough to take a workshop with her called “Video, Performance, and Identity.” For Wynne, doing it yourself was closely linked to doing what’s inside of you—keeping the work you make close to yourself both in the means of production and in the material you focus on. Greenwood makes music and performance, she says, to “practice culture-healing.” Her videos present an intoxicatingly simple mix of self and self-fantasy.

In her current two-channel video and accompanying sculptural installation at Soloway, Greenwood continues her practice of multiplying herself through video as she presents, quite literally, “more heads.” The show offers a pared-down continuation of one of Greenwood’s consistent motifs: repetitive images of herself integrated into self-drawn landscapes. These spaces are often dotted with disembodied cartoon heads that lie like boulders or rocks on the floor; sometimes Greenwood draws these cartoon heads on her own body. At Soloway, the heads in her videos are haunted by their abandoned, tangible counterparts, displayed in the gallery’s back room.

By literally constructing alternative spaces that traverse both sides of the screen, Greenwood practices productive techniques of queer world building. I remember her saying in class, “If you don’t own a camera, maybe use the camera on your phone. Which might be better anyway.” This feminist technique of hacking the method of media production as a way to control our own technological reproduction has stuck with me as a powerful tool for resistance. Though he tends to align with the historically patriarch-obsessed school of abstract painting, we might borrow from artist Kenneth Noland’s 1977 comment in an interview with Diane Waldman: “…We wanted to use materials in an economic, basic and fundamental way…. This is something that artists have always done. They’ve always used a minimum of the means of technology in any given period…  Art has never used the maximum of what technology has to offer, only the least…. There is always the instinct to use a minimum means.” [1]

Wynne Greenwood. More Heads/More Heads, Belgrade, 2013. Installation view, Soloway, Brooklyn. Courtesy of the artist and Soloway.

Greenwood provides an important model, and in viewing her work we must take intricate note of everything that appears to be very bare. For working in “minimum means” is also an effective method for keeping production close to personal truth. If we can control as many aspects of the technology we use as possible, we might get closer to alternative methods of reproducing our technological archetypes. Wynne’s sarcastic Valley-Girl affect (a hallmark of her videos) always provides us with little slivers of recognition. Her head conversations are marked by thick ellipses that betray either a kind of spacey carelessness or extreme caution. I always get the sense that everything is inside the pauses between her words, but I can only guess at what that everything is. The contemplation and chatter of the heads (at least, what we are allowed to hear) are only fragments, suggestive of some deep and incisive cavern that goes deep.

As we film ourselves, we repossess the gaze. Greenwood uses video as a space to reconstruct her identity, but by the same token, her flippant multiplicity of conversations refuses to commit to any one fiction that might constrain it. The heads chatter in barely coherent slivers of the everyday, and Greenwood’s subject fidgets, elusive inside the silences between her commentary. But… like… whatever…

Wynne Greenwood’s More Heads is on view at Soloway through November 2, 2013.

[1] quoted by Diane Waldman, in an excerpt from “Color, Format and Abstract Art: An Interview with Kenneth Noland by Diane Waldman,” Art in America 65, no. 3 (May-June 1977): 99-105.