Queer Lives: The Art Festival And Cultural Agency
Mentor 1
Mair Culbreth
Start Date
16-4-2021 12:00 AM
Description
Arts festivals serve as catalysts for innovation and community building among practitioners within their disciplines. However, within these normative curatorial spaces, queer artists face challenges and experience marginalization especially with regard to specifically queer content. Currently, there are no queer arts festivals in the Midwest. We have therefore identified a need for a dedicated space for queer artists to engage in artistic praxis and develop cultural agency. Our three-pronged methodological framework consists of 1) an academic survey of studies on the cultural impact of queer arts festivals, 2) determination of format and scope through data collection from other regional and national queer arts festivals, and 3) interviews with LBGTQ+ individuals in the Midwest to determine community needs. Academic research suggests that queer arts festivals challenge the terms of queer performance itself, spur innovation within an artistic field, and increase the cultural capital of the queer artist communities through aspirational, navigational, resistant and transgressive modeling. Data collected regarding format and scope indicate festival utilization of gallery, film screening, and workshop spaces, and live performance stages (with COVID-related contingencies in recent times). Some anticipated results of the Midwest LGBTQ+ interview process are: the need to include multimedia arts inclusive of all disciplines; the need for collaboration with extant community organizations; and other recommendations of programming for attendee participation. We expect that establishing a Queer Arts Festival based in Milwaukee will provide a place to celebrate queer experience, and will help queer artists develop their artistic voices, engage in meaning-making, and collectively innovate their practices to better inform the field as a whole. More broadly, the Queer Arts Festival will make significant steps towards social change on a larger scale in increasing queer cultural capital and community building in the Midwest, even among non-artists.
Queer Lives: The Art Festival And Cultural Agency
Arts festivals serve as catalysts for innovation and community building among practitioners within their disciplines. However, within these normative curatorial spaces, queer artists face challenges and experience marginalization especially with regard to specifically queer content. Currently, there are no queer arts festivals in the Midwest. We have therefore identified a need for a dedicated space for queer artists to engage in artistic praxis and develop cultural agency. Our three-pronged methodological framework consists of 1) an academic survey of studies on the cultural impact of queer arts festivals, 2) determination of format and scope through data collection from other regional and national queer arts festivals, and 3) interviews with LBGTQ+ individuals in the Midwest to determine community needs. Academic research suggests that queer arts festivals challenge the terms of queer performance itself, spur innovation within an artistic field, and increase the cultural capital of the queer artist communities through aspirational, navigational, resistant and transgressive modeling. Data collected regarding format and scope indicate festival utilization of gallery, film screening, and workshop spaces, and live performance stages (with COVID-related contingencies in recent times). Some anticipated results of the Midwest LGBTQ+ interview process are: the need to include multimedia arts inclusive of all disciplines; the need for collaboration with extant community organizations; and other recommendations of programming for attendee participation. We expect that establishing a Queer Arts Festival based in Milwaukee will provide a place to celebrate queer experience, and will help queer artists develop their artistic voices, engage in meaning-making, and collectively innovate their practices to better inform the field as a whole. More broadly, the Queer Arts Festival will make significant steps towards social change on a larger scale in increasing queer cultural capital and community building in the Midwest, even among non-artists.
