It’s Big. It’s Queer. It’s Arty as All Get Out. It’s ReMix: Reframing Appropriation at SOMArts Gallery, and it’s opening Friday and running through June.
Join the Queer Cultural Center in a Reunion of 15 years of visual arts programs housed at SOMArts! There will, of course, be libations to take us into the next 15 years and special recognition of those who have participated in exhibitions from FACE (1998) to QIY (2011) and the curators, funders and supporting organizations that made these shows happen!
Wear your best outfits, pick up your nametags at the door and come back to SOMArts for a fabulous Visual Arts Reunion!
ReMix: ReFraming Appropriation mines 15 years of National Queer Arts Festival exhibitions towards understanding the centrality of the act of appropriation for queer art of the recent past. Using appropriation as its lens, it sifts through all the art exhibited over the last 15 years, selecting those works for redisplay that map the parameters of queer appropriation as it has evolved through to today.
Curated by Jonathan D. Katz, former Board Member and one of the first curators of the National Queer Arts Festival, ReMix: ReFraming Appropriation in essence appropriates years of appropriations in order to both articulate and enact how queer politics so often turns on making familiar images and ideas ventriloquize new politics, new identities, and new utopias. This show revisits some of the many powerful works exhibited since the inception of the National Queer Arts Festival 15 years ago and remixes them in an effort to isolate a key theme of queer art making since at least the 1990s: appropriation. Appropriation—taking over of an extant cultural form to make it speak in a new voice—has long been a queer strategy. It’s a way of remaking dominant culture from within, as queers often do; most of us were born of a straight world, yet found a way to carve out meanings that spoke to us even if they were not intended by the larger culture. Notably, the exhibition is itself an example of the phenomenon it investigates, for it appropriates previous exhibitions–and curatorial visions–to new effect, allowing these varied works, all previously seen, to return in a new form, with new meanings. It queers the queer.
gayhighwaymen
Maštíŋčala Sáŋ
The Gay Highwaymen 