Artists and their Circles
Artists and Their Circles
Carland, Katz, and Koestenbaum are joined in an onstage discussion to address how artistic circles form and transform visual and literary artistic practices. Coinciding with the Living Room program in the Schwab Room, the panel guests inspire Gertrude Stein’s infamous salons as they weave a history of queer artists and writers and their creative communities into the present.
Living Room
The Schwab Room, 11am–5pm
Free and open to the public.
The Stein family’s Saturday salons in their Paris apartments were the crucible of the avant-garde art and writing of the period. In keeping with the spirit of those informal gatherings, this event transforms the museum’s free public spaces into a “living room,” complete with a conversation pit, listening station, and video lounge, hosted by a range of Bay Area visual and literary artists. At the same time, poets from around the Bay will perform a daylong reading of Gertrude Stein’s epic The Making of Americans in the museum’s Haas Atrium.
Biographies
Cultural critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original writers working today. He’s made an unparalleled contribution to the writing of queer cultural history. Gertrude Stein was a key figure in that history. SFMOMA commissioned Koestenbaum to write a new piece related to the exhibition The Steins Collect.
Jonathan D. Katz, a scholar of post war art and culture from the vantage point of sexuality, is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, and director of its Doctoral Program in Visual Studies, as well Honorary Research Faculty at the University of Manchester, UK and Guest Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. An activist academic, Katz was the founding director of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University– the first queer studies program in the Ivy League–and chair of the very first Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States, at City College of San Francisco in 1990. He co-founded the activist group Queer Nation, San Francisco, helped direct the San Francisco National Queer Arts Festival and founded the Queer Caucus of the College Art Association, the professional association of artists and art historians. Katz has curated the groundbreaking exhibition that opened in October 2010 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture — the first queer art exhibition at a national museum in US history—and has written its accompanying book. He has also just completed a major new essay on Agnes Martin entitled The Sexuality of Abstraction to be published by DIA/Yale in their forthcoming book, Agnes Martin. His next book, for which he won a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation book grant, is entitled Art, Eros and the 60s. His next major exhibition, sponsored by the Tacoma Museum of Art , is entitled Art/AIDS/America.
Tammy Rae Carland is an artist who works with photography, video, and small-run publications. Her work has been screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, and Sydney. Her photographs have been published in numerous books, including The Passionate Camera: Queer Bodies of Desire, and Lesbian Art in America. Her fanzine writing has been
republished in A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World.
In the 1990s Carland independently produced a series of influential fanzines, including I (heart) Amy Carter. She has collaborated on the record art of some seminal underground music releases for such bands as Bikini Kill, The Fakes, and The Butchies.
From 1997–2005 she managed in partnership Mr. Lady Records and Videos, an independent record label and video art distribution company that was dedicated to the production and distribution of queer and feminist culture. She is represented by Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.