ABOUT NQAF 2017
National Queer Arts Festival
QCC stages an annual month-long multidisciplinary National Queer Arts Festival, documents significant Bay Area Queer arts events on our Website, provides fundraising and other technical assistance services to emerging culturally-specific and gender-specific Queer arts groups, and conducts “Creating Queer Community,” a program that to date has commissioned more than 120 San Francisco-based artists to create new work.
Since 1998, QCC has organized an annual month-long National Queer Arts Festival. Since 1998, QCC has organized an annual month-long National Queer Arts Festival. To date, these Festivals have presented more than 800 different events featuring over 1000 Queer artists including Bill T. Jones, Alice Walker, Robert Rauschenberg, Meredith Monk, Adrienne Rich, Marga Gomez, Justin Chin, Thom Gunn, Cherrie Moraga and Dorothy Allison. The festival is the largest queer arts festivals in North America.
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
Board of Directors
Blackberri, Darius Bost, Jaime Cortez, Cheryl Dunye, Jeff Jones, Jordy Jones, Viet Le, Rudy Lemcke, Pamela S. Peniston, Tina Takemoto, Jacqueline Francis (president)
Advisory Board – Dr. Marcy Adelman, Juba Kalamka, Mia Nakano, Pratibha Parmar
2017 NQAF Staff
Pamela Peniston – artistic director
Jeff Jones – development director
Rudy Lemcke –communications & education director
Michelle Miguelez – managing director
Ramona Webb – associate artistic director
Sarah Guerra – production manager
Krista Smith – senior development associate
The Lady Ms Vagina Jenkins – development associate
LaVette Virden – finance manager
Trevaj Siller – technical director
Den— print catalog design
PSPrint – festival printing
