Queer Artist Survival Strategies: Salon and Workshop #1

EARTH Lab SF (Beth Stephens) and Jason Wyman / Queerly Complex are hosting THREE Peer Exchanges at the new 465 Collective Space to harness the peer power of San Francisco Bay Area Queer Artists to co-create survival tactics, tools, and frameworks. 

TOPIC ONE: Strategies for Hope and Joy – How do we remain hopeful and practice joy even while under assault? Using the concept of a “recipe card,” we will invite all who attend to create their recipe for hope and joy, sharing “ingredients” and “actions” with others. We will compile the recipe cards into a mini cookbook, “The Hope & Joy of Cooking,” and publish it via the Culture Tending Commons. Our “cookbook” will be a fabulous outreach and organizing tool, which we will share with other LGBTQIA+ community centers throughout the South and Midwest to convey our collective resources and start strengthening alliances between more rural and urban queers / dykes / fags.

We, as queer / dyke / fag artists, know that our art / work / collections have been, continue to be, and will likely always be censored by domination, oppression, and tyranny. We will think, dream, and work together to develop tactics that ensure our being / art / work survives these attacks. Each Peer Exchange in this series focuses on a different aspect of queer / dyke / fag survival and uses arts-based activities to generate collective wisdom. We will gather our results into an online resource guide with the participants’ consent. This guide will feature a summary of the Peer Exchanges, art activities to aid personal and collective exploration, and suggested material and actions for deeper understanding and analysis. We will autonomously and collectively take action to ensure queer / dyke / fag art / artists are more interconnected, documented, and their work shared, so that it / we survive long into the future.