IN THE LOUNGE Launch Event for Sinister Wisdom 101 – Variations Organized by Alexis Clements

About This Show

This special volume of the 40-year old lesbian art and literary journal Sinister Wisdom, explores the varied meanings of lesbian feminism in today’s world. Women have not stopped loving women, and there is no indication that phenomenon will ever go away, but the language and culture of those women remain as variable today as they were in the twentieth century. The journal explores where and how does feminism link up with lesbians today.

About the Artists

Alexis Clements is a writer and documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her articles, essays, and interviews have appeared in publications such as Salon, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Two Serious Ladies, among others. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

Susana Cook was born in Argentina and is a New York-based playwright, director, and performer. Some of her latest shows include: Conversations with Humans, We Are Caligula, The Funeral of the Cow, The Homophobes, The Fury of the Gods, Homeland Insecurities, and The Idiot King. Her work is archived at the Digital Video Library of The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics of New York University.

Alexis Danzig is a third-generation New Yorker raising a fourth. She believes in the power of the bicycle, alcohol at mealtime, and deep friendship.

Leah Gilliam’s creative projects have been presented and acknowledged widely: Sapphire and the Slave Girl (video, 1995) was awarded the New Visions Video Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival and screened at the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Apeshit v3 (computer-based installation, 2000) was presented as part of the Whitney Museum’s Bitstreams exhibition. In 2015, Gilliam was commissioned by New York University Game Center to create her role-playing game Lesberation: Trouble in Paradise for the exhibition No Quarter.

Clarity Haynes is a New York-based painter. Her Breast Portrait Project is a social practice-based, feminist project exploring portraiture and the body. Upcoming exhibitions include Outwin 2016: American Portraiture Today, at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and a solo exhibition at Stout Projects in Brooklyn, NY. Awards include the Leeway Foundation WOO grant and the Community Arts Regrant Award from the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Damien Luxe is a multimedia artist who creates solo and troupe performance. Since 2004, she has toured the US and Canada with feminist live artwork. She is co-founder of Heels on Wheels, a working-class-led, multi-racial queer femme performance troupe that produces an annual national literary and art tour, and released the Lambda Award-winning anthology Glitter and Grit in 2016. Damien works as an archival catalog builder by day and her weird videos, radical narratives, and feminist, dystopic, science fiction novel can be found online.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is a separatist, zinester, archivist, and writer. A coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and collective member of WOW Café Theater as producer of women of color theater, namely, Rivers of Honey. Shawn is a librarian, appointed as assistant professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. From (the people’s republic of) Brooklyn, Shawn founded the Queer Housing Nacional List, and has since purchased a home designated for queer women of color (QWOC) with her wife in the Bronx.

Sara Jane Stoner is a PhD student in English at CUNY Graduate Center, working on a dissertation about contemporary writing, teaching, and queerness. She currently edits reviews for the Poetry Project Newsletter, and her first book, Experience in the Medium of Destruction (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015) has been nominated for a Lambda Award in Lesbian Poetry.

Stacy Szymaszek’s book A Year from Today will be published by Nightboat Books in 2017. Recent books are Hart Island (Nightboat Books) and Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (Fence Books). She is the director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

Monday, August 8 at 7:30pm

Free Admission

Estimated Runtime
50 minutes

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Credits

Featuring
Alexis Clements
Susana Cook
Alexis Danzig
Leah Gilliam
Clarity Haynes
Damien Luxe
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
Sara Jane Stoner
Stacy Szymaszek

Cover art
Clarity Haynes, Janie (detail), 2014
Oil on linen, 62” x 58″

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