Radar Superstar 2011

Since 2003, RADAR Productions has hosted monthly literary performance  with an emphasis on queer-centric and underground voices. Each June, RADAR joins forces with the National Queer Arts Festival and the James C Hormel Center of the San Francisco Public Library  to present their queerest and most bombastic lineup of the year. Join us for a multi-media presentation by queer arts theorist, curator and scholar Jonathan Katz, curator of the National Portrait Gallery Hide/Seekl exhibit; photographer Catherine Opie, whose subject matter veers from San Francisco leather dykes of the 90s to the couture creations of designers Rodarte, with surfers, high school football players and Los Angeles freeways in between; scholar, poets and professor Renee Gladman, author of Event Factory, Newcomer Can’t Swim, The Activist, and other titles; and Chinaka Hodge, poet and playwright, author of the acclaimed play Mirrors in Every Corner, which explores race, sex, family, pop culture violence, and more with drama, humor and wild imagination. Hosted by Michelle Tea. Q+A+Birthday Cake to follow!

Biographies

Catherine Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her selected solo exhibitions include shows at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Thread Waxing Space, New York; Art Pace, San Antonio; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York; Stephen Friedman, London; Barbara Gladstone, New York; Galeria Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Foncke Galerie, Ghent; and Ginza Art Space, Tokyo. Selected group exhibitions include Age of Influence, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Century: Art and Culture 1900–2000, Whitney Museum of Art; Plain Air, Barbara Gladstone, New York; Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Signs of Life, Melbourne International Biennial, Australia; Love’s Body: Rethinking Naked and Nude in Photography, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan; From the Corner of the Eye, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Made in California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; American Art 1975–1995, Whitney Museum of American Art; Sunshine & Noir: Art in LA 1960–1997, Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography, Guggenheim Museum, New York and Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Pictures of Modern Life, École des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Black and Blue, Groniger Museum, Holland; Persona, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Feminine-Masculine: the Sex of Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris; La Belle et la Bête: Art Contemporain Américan, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the 1995 Biennial and the 2004 Biennial, Whitney Museum of Art. Opie was a recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. In September of 2008, the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened a mid-career exhibition titled, Catherine Opie: American Photographer.

Chinaka Hodge is a poet and playwright. Originally from Oakland, California, Chinaka graduated from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May of 2006, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing for Film and TV at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She received co-writing credit for Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Scourge, sponsored, in part, by the Creative Work Fund, which opened in May 2005, in San Francisco. She was the Assistant Director of Suzan Lori Parks’ 365 Plays, 365 Days,at its San Francisco debut in November 2006. She also co-wrote The One Drop Rule: A War Piece, which debuted in Fall 2008. Her first independently written play, Mirrors in Every Corner, commissioned by SF’s Intersection for the Arts, is a recent Rockefeller MAP Fund grantee.

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.

Renee Gladman is the author of Arlem, Not Right Now, Juice The Activist, A Picture Feeling, and of a work in-press, Newcomer Can’t Swim. Since 2004, she has been the editor and publisher of Leon Works, a perfect bound series of books for experimental prose. She was previously the editor of the Leroy chapbook series, publishing innovative poetry and prose by emerging writers.