Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
I have exhibited extensively in Chicago, nationally, and internationally for over thirty years. My video installations, videos, drawings, digital and mixed media works have been shown in alternative spaces, university museums, international film and video festivals, queer venues, and spaces that support experimental and politically-charged work.
When i was younger, i was a painter, then moved to murals, graphics, and agit-prop. In 1983, i moved from NYC to Chicago, joined a loose community of anarcho-surrealist artists (Axe St. Arena), and together with other queers founded ACT UP Chicago, a new model fusing politics, desire, and survival. In 1990 i made my first multi-channel video installation, and at age 39 entered grad school to test out my ideas on a different audience. i have been nourished by many different kinds of art, cinema, and writing to “make art politically,” to explore new sensorial and affective worlds, imagine expanded audiences, read, write, make art, and get out of my chair.
Writing plays a crucial role in my interdisciplinary art and media projects. I often create speculative fictions that re-figure and transform experiences from my own checkered autobiography, remembered history, and archives. The frailties of memory are evident in my work and research, where I claim authorship, fully aware that there are no wholly original ideas, that we are all shifting composites of one another.
I am long-time activist, archivist, and artist, with commitments to social movements for racial justice, against the carceral state, to fight the AIDS crisis, and for queer and LGBT liberation. I have led or participated in many public collaborations for over 30 years – murals, billboards, and large scale interdisciplinary projects. I continue to be drawn to collective forms of cultural production to re-claim language, feeling, and political passions from fundamentalist thinking, to reclaim a utopia of the everyday – a way of being together in the world that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. Sometimes working collaboratively means slipping under the radar, but that’s a risk worth taking.