NATIONAL QUEER ARTS FESTIVAL 2017

Director’s Welcome

Twenty years ago, a group of artists and activists met to create what would become Qcc The Center for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Art & Culture. It was our intention to give voice to the under-represented artists of our community. We began with a small SF Queer Arts Festival and a large exhibition called FACE – Queerness in Self-Portraiture.

We wanted this first exhibition to represent who we are, what we can be, and what we can accomplish. We wanted a place to start to begin a serious discourse on queer culture. A beginning that was… a place that celebrated difference as its mode of being and justice as its practice. We wanted to present ourselves not as an abstraction but as an array of unique individuals who share this ‘queerness’. ~ Rudy Lemcke and Lenore Chinn.

The curators’ statement is a good description of what our festivals have tried to achieve for the last twenty years.

But who are we now? We’re back fighting for our most basic rights as women, LGBTQI people, People of Color, immigrants, the homeless, the poor, the disabled; fighting for the right to affordable healthcare, education and to exist as artists.

Knowing that we won’t back down, I asked our artists: How and who do we see and how do we want to be seen? What are our new alliances made of and how will they be constructed? Looking back to our beginnings, what old ideas can be re-examined and what completely new allies, methods and issues will we explore?

Join us on the line to Resist.

Pamela Peniston, Artistic Director