Tuesday, November 16
6:30pm EST
Judd Foundation and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art present a conversation between Avram Finkelstein, curator of OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture and participating artists Camilo Godoy and Omar Mismar. The conversation focuses on new approaches to monumentality, identity, and legacies of queer image-making.
OMNISCIENT presents a group of more than forty artists navigating these rapidly evolving visual languages through various strategies. They excavate and reclaim archives of Hollywood and popular culture; propose forms of queer monumentality and intergenerational memorialization; imagine alternatives to capitalist logics; and even sidestep representation in favor of sensory citations of the body, including sound and touch. These artists’ works mark the legacy of twentieth-century visual histories while negotiating the accelerating image cultures of the present—mapping queer cultural identity with a particular affection, skepticism, and prescience arrived at from the social margins.
Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has been shown at The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum, and is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for an International Center of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing And Research.
He has been interviewed by The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, BOMB, NPR, Slate, and Interview Magazine, and spoken about art, AIDS activism, LGBT cultural production, and the American Left at Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and New York University.
Camilo Godoy is an artist and educator born in Bogotá, Colombia and based in New York, United States. His multidisciplinary projects are concerned with political histories and memories. He has been in residence at Recess, New York (2018); Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York (2018); Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, São Paulo (2018); International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (2017); Movement Research, New York (2015 – 2017). Godoy has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, CUE, OCDChinatown, New York; Moody Center, Houston; UNSW Galleries, Sydney; among others. He has performed at numerous spaces including Danspace Project, Judson Church, Center for Performance Research (CPR), New York; and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt. Godoy has participated in the Toronto Biennial (2019).
Omar Mismar is a visual artist based in Beirut. His practice is project driven, probing the entanglement of art and politics, and the aesthetics of disaster. Mismar takes up conflict and its representations via form deliberations, material interventions, and translation strategies, using the performative as gesture and rehearsal. He has participated in exhibitions in San José Museum of Art, San José (2018), Tabakalera, San Sebastian (2018), the MMAG Foundation, Amman (2018), MoMA, New York (2018), Home Works 8, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2019), Oakland Museum, California (2020), Leslie Lohman Museum, New York (2021) among others. Mismar is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the American University of Beirut.
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA) provides a platform for artistic exploration through multi-faceted queer perspectives. The Museum embraces the power of the arts to inspire, explore, and foster understanding of the rich diversity of LGBTQ+ experiences. LLMA aims to be a home for queer art, artists, scholars, activists and allies, and a catalyst for discourse on art and queerness. With a collection of over 25,000 objects, the Museum hosts major exhibitions and public programs throughout the year, publishes an annual magazine, and maintains a research library of 3,000 volumes. The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art acts as a cultural hub for queer artists, cultural workers, and LGBTQ+ communities as it examines the juxtaposition between art and social justice in ways that provoke thought and dialogue.
