Activating the Archive: Michelle Handelman Capsule Collection Launch

On occasion of Michelle Handelman’s Capsule Collection Launch at The Feminist Institute's Digital Archive, join Handelman in conversation with Dr. Amber Musser, Jeanne Vaccaro, and Exx Nottage, moderated by Stamatina Gregory, on the historically marginalized work being introduced into feminist queer archives. This panel will discuss how archives can serve as interventions into dominant historical narratives within collecting institutions, the cultural record, and art history. Through their activation, archives become a form of information activism, creating new possibilities for scholarship, public memory, and more equitable futures.

This panel will bring together archivists, scholars, and cultural workers to discuss how feminist + queer archives, and specifically Michelle's Collection in the TFI Digital Archive, can be activated through research, teaching, and other forms of cultural work. We'll focus on how feminist and queer archives expand the canon by bringing into the cultural record artists whose work has been historically marginalized by collecting institutions and art history, and demonstrate how archives can serve as interventions into dominant historical narratives. Through their activation, archives become a form of information activism, creating new possibilities for scholarship, public memory, and more equitable futures.

This program is co-sponsored by The American LGBTQ+ Museum and Queer|Art.

Michelle Handelman is a filmmaker, visual artist and writer who makes confrontational works about sexuality, gender and desire. Raised during the late 1960s, Handelman split her time between Chicago, where her mother was a fixture in the art world, and Los Angeles, where her father was a player in the sex industry. Her art developed through great struggle and loss throughout the era of the AIDS crisis and over the years, Handelman has voraciously traversed all these worlds, developing a body of work that investigates ways of looking at the forbidden and revealing the dark, subconscious layers of outsider agency.

Accesibility
Chairs with backs will be available. Located at 26 Wooster Street, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art strives to provide a welcoming environment to all visitors. Five external steps lead to our entrance doors: a wheelchair lift is available. All galleries are wheelchair-accessible, and a single-occupancy accessible restroom is located behind the visitor services desk: all restrooms are gender-neutral. Large print didactics are available. 

For questions or access requests, please email info@leslielohman.org with 1 week advance of your visit.