Frederick Weston

Frederick Weston: Readings

An evening in celebration of Frederick Weston: Happening

Including:
Nayland Blake
Pamela Sneed
Sur Rodney (Sur)
Frederick Weston

Nayland Blake is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in New York. Interracial desire, same-sex love, and racial and sexual bigotry are recurrent themes in Blake's sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, which reflect their preoccupation with their own racial and sexual identities. Their writing has been published in Artforum, Interview, Out, and numerous exhibition catalogues. Their work has been shown extensively since 1990, notably in one-person survey exhibitions at the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Location One in New York, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will be on view Sept 29, 2019 - January 26, 2020.

Pamela Sneed is a New York-based poet, writer, performer and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, and a chaplet,"Gift" by Belladonna. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni’s “The 100 Best African American Poems.” She has performed at the Whitney Museum, Poetry Project, Performance Space, Joe’s Pub, and The Public Theater. Sneed will be speaking at Summer Salons with PEN America: Riots in Writing at the Brooklyn Museum June 6, 2019, Vintage: Families Of Value by Thomas Allen Harris at Anthology Film Archives, NY June 16, 2019, and at the Rally for the "Queer Liberation March" on the Great Lawn in Central Park on June 30, 2019.

Sur Rodney (Sur) is a writer, curator, and archivist. A fixture on the East Village art scene, Sur was co-director, with business partner Gracie Mansion, of the celebrated Gracie Mansion Gallery (1982–88). In the late 1980s, Sur shifted his practice to work with estates of artists affected by the growing AIDS crisis, leading to his involvement in helping to establish the Visual AIDS Archive Project. He's collaborated on curatorial projects with his longtime partner Geoffrey Hendricks, concurrently with their own FLUXUS related projects. Sur was included in the traveling exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2013) and most recently included in Club 57 Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983 at The Museum of Modern Art (2018) during which time they acquired his Super-8 films for their permanent collection.

Frederick Weston is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist who works in varied media: collage, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and creative writing. Over the course of his time in New York, he has developed a vast, encyclopedic archive of images and ephemera related to fashion, the body, advertising, AIDS, and queer subjects. Weston has exhibited his work widely in group exhibitions: Tag: Proposals on Queer Play and the Ways Forward, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (curated by Nayland Blake); This Must Be the Place, 55 Walker, NY (curated by O.O. & M.M. and Miles Huston); Inside, Out Here, La MaMa Galleria, NY (curated by Eric Booker). Weston participated in Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: Smithsonian Archives of American Art Symposium, Whitney Museum of American Art (2018).