Black Trans Femmes in the Arts is an American grassroots collective that provides support to Black trans women and Black trans nonbinary femmes in the arts. The organization, founded by Jordyn Jay, is based in New York, New York. [1]
Founded in 2019 while Jordyn Jay was studying for a Masters Degree in art politics at New York University, BTFA aims to connect and uplift Black trans women and Black trans nonbinary femmes who have a mutual interest in the field of art. [2] After noticing a lack of knowledge of Black trans femme art in the art history courses at NYU, Jay began hosting open mic nights and building a social media presence to generate artist talks and performances that would provide Black trans femme artists with resources to be successful in the arts. The organization, which currently exists online, includes artist resources and directories, links to emergency relief funds, and more.
In June 2020, the organization, along with collectives and organizations like G.L.I.T.S., Black Trans Media, For the Gworls, The Okra Project, and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, teamed together to organize the Brooklyn Liberation march. [3] Later that year, the notorious fashion label Hood By Air announced a re-launch of their label. The announcement coincided with a benefit that collected over $200,000 for Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, the Emergency Release Fund, and Gays & Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (G.L.I.T.S.). [4]
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932; the first biennial was in 1973. It is considered the longest-running and most important survey of contemporary art in the United States. The Biennial helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons, among others, to prominence.
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an independent, non-profit art museum located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.
A.I.R. Gallery is the first all female artists cooperative gallery in the United States. It was founded in 1972 with the objective of providing a professional and permanent exhibition space for women artists during a time in which the works shown at commercial galleries in New York City were almost exclusively by male artists. A.I.R. is a not-for-profit, self-underwritten arts organization, with a board of directors made up of its New York based artists. The gallery was originally located in SoHo at 97 Wooster Street, and was located on 111 Front Street in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn until 2015. In May 2015, A.I.R. Gallery moved to its current location at 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..
Southern Exposure (SoEx) is a not-for-profit arts organization and alternative art space founded in 1974 in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. It was originally founded as a grassroots, cooperative art gallery in conjunction with Project Artaud which was a live/work artist community. By the 1980s, they converted the gallery to a community space for supporting emerging artists.
The Salsa Soul Sisters, today known as the African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change, is the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States.Operating from 1974 to 1993, the Salsa Soul Sisters identified as lesbians, womanists and women of color, based in New York City Arguments within the Salsa Soul Sisters resulted in the disbanding of the Salsa Soul Sisters into two groups, Las Buenas Amigas made for Latinas, and African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change made for African-diaspora lesbians.
Micha Cárdenas, stylized as micha cárdenas, is an American visual and performance artist who is an assistant professor of art and design, specializing in game studies and playable media, at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cárdenas is an artist and theorist who works with the algorithms and poetics of trans people of color in digital media.
HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a feminist journal that was produced from 1977 to 1993 by the New York–based Heresies Collective.
Women's Art Resources of Minnesota (WARM) is a women's art organization based in the U.S. state of Minnesota. It was founded in 1976 as Women's Art Registry of Minnesota, a feminist artist collective. The organization ran the influential WARM Gallery in downtown Minneapolis from 1976 to 1991.
Semillas is an all women Mexican art, justice, and healing collective based in New York City. Surging in 2014 in response to the forced disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students, the group raises awareness about Mexico's turmoil through media kits, documentary showings and cultural events. Semillas often holds political and cultural events that raise awareness for Mexico's current human rights crisis throughout Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, with links to social movements and supporting indigenous resistance. The collective is known for developing narrative based documentaries, infographics, and dance films that often serve as protests against the Mexican government's gross violation of human rights. The collective also is committed to proving trauma healing for communities marked by conflict linked trauma.
Blair Imani is an American author, historian, and activist. She identifies as queer, Black, bisexual and Muslim. She is a member of the Black Lives Matter movement, and is known for protesting the shooting of Alton Sterling and Executive Order 13769.
The term womxn is an alternative spelling of the English word woman. Womxn, along with the term womyn, has been found in writing since the 1970s to avoid perceived sexism in the standard spelling, which contains the word man.
Hood By Air is a fashion and streetwear brand based in New York City co-founded by designers Shayne Oliver and Raul Lopez. It was launched in 2006 and took a hiatus 2017–2019. Oliver left the brand in 2023.
Alok Vaid-Menon is an American writer, performance artist, and media personality. Vaid-Menon is gender non-conforming and transfeminine, and uses the singular they third person pronouns.
Queer fashion is fashion among queer and nonbinary people that goes beyond common style conventions that usually associate certain colors and shapes with one of the two binary genders. Queer fashion aims to be perceived by consumers as a fashion style that focuses on experimenting garments based on people's different body shapes instead of following the restrictions given by gendered clothing categorization.
Jasmine Wahi is a South Asian American curator, educator, and activist. Her work focuses on issues of femme empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multi-positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. In addition to running Project for Empty Space, in Newark, NJ and curating international shows independently, Wahi teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is currently the Holly Block Social Justice Curator of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Wahi is a former board member of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC).
The Okra Project is an American mutual aid collective that provides support to black trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people. The organization is based in New York City. As of January 2023, Gabrielle Inès Souza serves as the Executive Director of the Okra Project.
Ceyenne Doroshow is an author, activist, and the founder and executive director of G.L.I.T.S., an organization dedicated to creating sustainable housing and healthcare for Black transgender people. Doroshow was described in GQ as "A Godmother of the Black Trans Lives Matter Movement."
Syrus Marcus Ware is a Canadian artist, activist and scholar. He lives and works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is an assistant professor in the school of the arts at McMaster University. He has worked since 2014 as faculty and as a designer for The Banff Centre. Ware is the inaugural artist-in-residence for Daniels Spectrum, a cultural centre in Toronto, and a founding member of Black Lives Matter Toronto. For 13 years, he was the coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario's youth program. During that time Ware oversaw the creation of the Free After Three program and the expansion of the youth program into a multi pronged offering.
Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, activist, translator, and community organizer who resides in Montreal, Quebec. Their artistic practice moves between theatre, dance, spoken word and written poetry, watercolours, photography, performance, sculpture and installation. Working across multiple disciplines, La Mackerel's work explores their identity as a trans femme of colour who reaches back beyond the immediate constraints of the colonial circumstances of their life to the spiritual ancestral lineages of queer femmes.