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As a part of the 2011 National Queer Arts Festival, “A Sustainable Queer Planet,” the Visual Arts Committee of the Queer Cultural Center presents: QIY: Queer It Yourself – Tools for Survival

Inspired by the late 1960s utopian builders’ guide A Whole Earth Catalog, QIY – Tools for Survival presents an exhibition of queer do-it-yourself culture and alternative world making.

QIY is envisioned as a laboratory for creating a sustainable queer culture and demonstrating the power of self and community organizing, re-creation, speculation, and transformation. As an antidote to anti-sociality theories of queerness (that suggest queerness can only be rendered as a negation of heteronormativity), Queer It Yourself invites artists to forge their own tools for surviving the everyday challenges of contemporary queer existence.

This exhibition encourages artists to develop workstations, participatory spaces, hands-on training areas, maps, and information kiosks. We seek workshops and lectures that create immersive and interactive experiences for viewers. We also encourage educational workshops that will help artists and newly forming artists groups to write grants, and to better understand the arts funding world.

Queering the index of the original Whole Earth Catalog, the various sections of the QIY exhibition include:

Land Use / Dig it (organic farming, community gardens, eco-projects, cruising sites, earthworks, recycling projects, rural gay culture, hippies and rednecks, RFD zine, Billy Club, 420 cultures, mountain men, off the grid living, survivalism, subsistence, indigenous and third world land use, border disputes)

Shelter / Sheltering (guides to urban and rural homemaking, urban and rural homelessness, cars, tents, bridges and freeway overhangs, tiny houses, pre-fab housing, visionary architecture, greening your living space, creating mood lighting with energy efficient fixtures, housing collectives, polyamorous living)

Craft Making / Queering it (queer arts and crafts, craft demos, how-to guides and workshops, how to use etsy.com, Blurb and self-publishing software, QIY kinky toys, homemade fashion and couture)

Commerce / Selling it (experiments with capitalism, fashion collectives, sexwork, alternative book, art, and product distribution, queer & LGBT marketing demographics, critiques, small businesses, barter, trade, resource-based economy vs. commodity-based economy)

Community / Join in (political organizing, queer community organizing, ad hoc political action committees, queer pride, gay shame, organizing your first demonstration, social & political groups, leather clubs, s/m networks, bike clubs)

Nomadics / Roaming (the culture of the road, the runway, the superhighway, jetsetting, transnationalism, queer diasporas, queer immigrant and exile cultures)

Communications / Connecting (zines, homo-hop and homo-core music, queer speed-dating, independent publishing, social networking, blogging, listserves, social media, flashmobs, promotional strategies, writing your first press release, street art, posters, stickers, queer graffiti)

Learning / Get Schooled (community art and culture projects, health activism, continuing education, grant writing and fundraising, guides for queer survival, mentorship, “training” in leather circles, drag “mothers”, informal or marginal methods of transmitting culture, service, apprenticeships)

Style / Working it (working the runway, drag king & queen culture, ball culture, leather, gear, street styles, rural styles, international styles, fashion and make-up tips and tricks, makeover demonstrations, finding the right photographer for your head-shot)

We welcome artwork, ephemera, documentation, publications, zines, music, videos, installations, DIY kits, guides, instruction manuals, maps, charts, top-ten tips, alternative cosmologies, proposals for live demonstrations, workshops and interactive QIY workstations.

Propose a history of Zine culture, show work of collective art projects, show artifacts of ad hoc political action committees, give live demonstrations of quilting and queer homemaking, offer a do-it-yourself stencil-making so that you too can be a street artist, and much more…

If you are a San Francisco based artists’ space, gallery or collective and would like to propose a satellite show, we’d like to hear from you!

Qcc’s 2011 curatorial committee members include: Terry Berlier, Cheryl Dunye, Josh Faught, Rudy Lemcke, Matt McKinley, Pam Peniston, Jordy Jones, and Tina Takemoto.

Grab your seeds and shovels, duct tape and twine, glitter and hot glue guns! It’s time to Queer It Yourself!

National Queer Arts Festival 2011

Visual Arts Exhibition

SOMArts Gallery, San Francisco. June 2011

Deadline: February 22, 2011

To submit a proposal: QIF Call For Proposals