Boyd Vance

Last updated • 4 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Boyd Vance (July 9, 1957 – April 9, 2005) was an American stage actor, director and producer in Austin, Texas. [1] Vance was particularly known for supporting and advancing African-American performing arts in Austin. [2] In 1993 he co-founded ProArts Collective, which he directed until his death following unexpected heart surgery in 2005.

Contents

Boyd Vance was born in Houston on July 9, 1957. His spent his formative years in Houston's Third Ward where he was involved in many activities. Church, school, sports, and music were important parts of his life. He made his way to Austin to attend St. Stephen's Episcopal High School from which he graduated in May 1975.

After attending Rice University for one year, his love for Austin brought him back where he graduated from the University of Texas in 1983. He then began his professional career as an actor, producer, musician, and eventually began directing and administering arts organizations on behalf of numerous artistic interests, with a special passion for multicultural events. Boyd's energy was indefatigable. He never met a stranger, nor left anyone without a smile resulting from the encounter. During his career as a professional actor, he appeared in dozens of productions, including "Cabaret", "You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown", "Bubbling Brown Sugar", "Ain’t Misbehavin", "Eubie", "Splendora" and Austin's longest running comedy "Shear Madness." He also appeared for several years with Austin's Comedy Troupe, Esther's Follies and Zachary Scott Theatre’s Project InterAct. Boyd directed over 40 main stage plays and musicals, including "Ain’t Misbehavin", "Purlie", "Blues for an Alabama Sky", "A Raisin in the Sun", "A My Name is Alice", "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone", "Love Song for Miss Lydia", "Big River", "The African Company presents Richard the Third", "Colored Museum" and many others.

His vocal range emulated that of the great vocal stylists. He was a featured performer in hundreds of performances over the years. Boyd had just recently returned from New York City, where he had been asked to be guest soloist at the funeral of Betsy Cronkite, the wife of journalist Walter Cronkite.

Boyd's collaborative work included Tapestry Dance Company, Ballet East, Aztlan Dance Company, Huston Tillotson University, Austin Community College, ‘Believe in Me’, Dance Umbrella, Ballet Austin, WH Passon Society, AISD, University of Texas at Austin. He likewise conceived and produced many community festivals, forums and cultural events. Some of these events include Soulful Christmas Bazaar, African American Festival of Dance, Tejano Low Rider Festival, United Artists for Peace Silent Auction and Art Fiesta and more.

In 1993, Boyd co-founded ProArts Collective and served as its Artistic Director since inception. In 1994, he went on brief hiatus to work with the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention as Treatment Advocacy Coordinator and then Coordinator of Direct Services. Upon returning to Austin, Boyd restructured ProArts Collective to become a Tax Exempt Non-Profit Multi-Disciplinary Arts Organization. He became a certified Non-Profit Manager. In 1998, ProArts embarked on new territory and began to encourage and sponsor various emerging artists.

In 2001, Boyd was able to form Austin's First African American Arts Technical Resource Center providing direct services, counseling, mentoring, and technical assistance to Artists of Color. At the present time, ProArts Collective and the African American Arts Technical Center sponsor and assist over 20 emerging art groups and artists of color. Boyd was also tapped as a peer panelist for the Texas Commission on the Arts Performing Arts Programs and served as consultant to Austin Independent School District's Children's arts programs.

In 2004, the Austin Critics Table inducted Vance into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame. [3] Later that same year, the Austin Circle of Theaters awarded him with the B. Iden Payne Special Recognition Award for Outstanding Achievement in Austin theater. [4] After his death, in 2005 the City of Austin renamed an existing theater at the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center in Vance's honor "for his contribution to the Austin community." [5] [6]

Boyd's overall body of work was instrumental in the exhibition and development of emerging artists. His vision provided a multicultural appreciation of artists in every discipline. This was demonstrated not only his passion for his community, but his love for performance, music, literature and dance.

Education

Vance entered St. Stephen's Episcopal School in Austin, Texas in 1973 and graduated there in 1975. [7] He remained in Austin and earned his bachelor's degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. [1]

Activism

In addition to his work with the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, Vance was an activist and organizer among gay men of color. On the local level, for example, he participated and performed at the 1989 March on Austin for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights. [8] On the national level, Vance appeared at the Third National Gay Men of Color AIDS Institute in 1993, moderating a breakout session on "organizing gay men of color." [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cherríe Moraga</span> American writer and activist

Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.

José Esteban Muñoz was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. Muñoz was Professor in, and former Chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Muñoz was the recipient of the Duke Endowment Fellowship (1989) and the Penn State University Fellowship (1997). He was also affiliated with the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, and the College Art Association.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosa von Praunheim</span> German film director

Rosa von Praunheim is a German film director, author, painter and one of the most famous gay rights activists in the German-speaking world. In over 50 years, von Praunheim has made more than 150 films. His works influenced the development of LGBTQ+ rights movements worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Essex Hemphill</span> American writer

Essex Hemphill was an openly gay American poet and activist. He is known for his contributions to the Washington, D.C. art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jade Esteban Estrada</span> American singer, actor, stand-up comedian, and journalist

Jade Esteban Estrada is an American singer, actor, stand-up comedian, journalist and human rights activist. Out Magazine called him "the first gay Latin star."

Victor Bumbalo is an American actor and playwright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Mixner</span> American political activist and author (born 1946)

David Benjamin Mixner is an American political activist and author. He is best known for his work in anti-war and gay rights advocacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jorge Merced</span> Puerto Rican actor

Jorge B. Merced is a New York-based Puerto Rican actor, theatre director, and gay activist. He is associate artistic director of Pregones Theater, a bilingual (Spanish/English) Puerto Rican/Latino theater company located near Hostos Community College in the Bronx, New York City. He is best known for his role as Loca la de la locura [The Queen of Madness] in Pregones's play El bolero fue mi ruina [The Bolero Was My Downfall].

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Kearns (actor)</span> American dramatist

Michael Kearns is an American actor, writer, director, teacher, producer, and activist. He is noted for being one of the first openly gay actors, and after an announcement on Entertainment Tonight in 1991, the first openly HIV-positive actor in Hollywood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pamela Sneed</span> American poet and artist

Pamela Sneed is an American poet, performance artist, actress, activist, and teacher. Her book, Funeral Diva, is a memoir in poetry and prose about growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry.

Sharon Bridgforth is an American writer working in theater.

Larry Mitchell was an American author and publisher. He was the founder of Calamus Books - an early small press devoted to gay male literature - and the author of fiction dealing with the gay male experience in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.

Assotto Saint was a Haitian-born American poet, publisher and performance artist, who was a key figure in LGBT and African-American art and literary culture of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The African-American LGBT community, otherwise referred to as the Black LGBT community, is part of the overall LGBT culture and overall African-American culture. The initialism LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. A landmark event for the LGBT community, and the Black LGBT community in particular, was the Stonewall uprising in 1969, in New York City's Greenwich Village, where Black activists including Stormé DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson played key roles in the events.

Austin, Texas has one of the most prominent and active LGBT populations in the United States. Austin was acclaimed by The Advocate in 2012 as part of its Gayest Cities in America, and was recognized by Travel and Leisure as one of America's Best Cities for Gay Travel. Much of Austin's gay nightlife scene is clustered around 4th Street. LGBT activism groups Atticus Circle and Equality Texas are headquartered in Austin.

Henry M. Tavera was an AIDS activist, artistic director, and archivist based in the Mission District of San Francisco, California; his 1979 move to the region put him at the forefront of the AIDS epidemic via his involvement in various HIV/AIDS service organizations as well as AIDS theatre. He also did work around Chicano Gay Activism and teaching/advising. Tavera died on February 27, 2000 at 56 years old from kidney cancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dom Orejudos</span> American artist, dancer, and choreographer

Domingo Francisco Juan Esteban "Dom" Orejudos, Secundo, also widely known by the pen names Etienne and Stephen, was an openly gay artist, ballet dancer, and choreographer, best known for his ground-breaking masculine gay male erotica beginning in the 1950s. Along with artists George Quaintance and Touko Laaksonen – with whom he became friends – Orejudos' leather-themed art promoted an image of gay men as strong and masculine, as an alternative to the then-dominant stereotype as weak and effeminate. With his first lover and business partner Chuck Renslow, Orejudos established many landmarks of late-20th-century gay male culture, including the Gold Coast bar, Man's Country Baths, the International Mr. Leather competition, Chicago's August White Party, and the magazines Triumph, Rawhide, and Mars. He was also active and influential in the Chicago ballet community.

Sean Dorsey is a transgender and queer choreographer, dancer, writer and trans rights activist. He is widely recognized as the United States' first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer. Dorsey founded his San Francisco-based dance company Sean Dorsey Dance, which incorporates transgender and LGBTQ+ themes into all of their works and has toured to 30 cities internationally. Along with creating a dance company, Dorsey is also the founder and artistic director of Fresh Meat Productions. Founded in 2002, Fresh Meat Productions is a non-profit organization that invests in the creative expression and cultural leadership of transgender and gender-nonconforming communities. Fresh Meat Productions creates and commissions new work, presents performing arts programs, conducts education and engagement, and advocates for justice and equity in the Arts. The organization is well known for its annual Fresh Meat Festival in San Francisco, an annual festival of transgender and queer performance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LGBT culture in Baltimore</span>

LGBT culture in Baltimore, Maryland is an important part of the culture of Baltimore, as well as being a focal point for the wider LGBT community in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Mount Vernon, known as Baltimore's gay village, is the central hub of the city's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Kellum</span> American film director

Ron Kellum is an American producer, director, artist and choreographer known for being a Broadway veteran and the first African-American artistic director for the award-winning Cirque du Soleil. He was the artistic director for the productions of Koozå from 2015 through 2016 and Volta from 2018 through 2020.

References

  1. 1 2 van Ryzin, Jeanne Claire (2005-04-10). "BOYD VANCE: 1957-2005". austin360.com. Austin American-Statesman. Retrieved 2008-05-04. Star of Austin stage nurtured arts for African Americans
  2. Faires, Robert (2005-04-15). "In Memoriam: Boyd Vance". The Austin Chronicle. Retrieved 2008-05-04.
  3. "O Pioneers!". The Austin Chronicle. 2004-06-04. Retrieved 2008-05-04.
  4. "Payne Pleasures 2004". The Austin Chronicle. 2004-10-08. Retrieved 2008-05-04. Pro Arts Collective founder and longtime actor, director, educator, and arts activist Boyd Vance was given the annual Special Recognition Award for Outstanding Achievement in Austin Theatre
  5. "City of Austin celebrates Boyd Vance Theater dedication". City of Austin Press Release. 2006-02-13. Retrieved 2008-05-04. Actor, vocalist, theater pioneer, and African American community leader Boyd Vance appeared in dozens of Austin theater productions and performed with Esther’s Follies and Project Interact.
  6. "Boyd Vance Theatre". Austin City Connection. City of Austin, Texas. Retrieved 2008-05-05. The Boyd Vance Theatre is a proscenium stage with stadium seating to fit 134 patrons, including seating for those who are mobility impaired.
  7. "Boyd Vance '75". sstx.org. 2005. Archived from the original on 2008-04-19. Retrieved 2008-05-04. Born in Houston in 1957, Vance came to Austin in 1973 to attend St. Stephen's Episcopal School.
  8. "Actions and Events 1987-1997. Action: March on Austin" (1989) [Manuscript]. ACT UP Los Angeles Records, Box: 5, File: 16, ID: AA89.0430 1989, p. 50. Los Angeles: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.
  9. "Events, 1987-1995. Conferences and Meetings, Gay Men of Color AIDS Institute" (1993) [Manuscript]. Asian/Pacific AIDS Coalition (APAC) Records, Series: 9, Box: 3, File: 3, pp. 3, 12, 47. San Francisco: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society.