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GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative created by Be Oakley [1] that seeks to encourage projects from an intersectional, queer perspective. [2] Many projects are tied together by the slogan "Radical Softness as a Boundless Form of Resistance". [3] [4] [5] The press is currently based out of Brooklyn, New York. [6] In an April 16, 2020 article "Our Favorite New Yorkers on the Best Things in All Five Boroughs" in Conde Nast Traveler , curator Legacy Russell mentioned GenderFail as one of their favorite things in New York. [6]
GenderFail has been a part of exhibitions, programs and events at A.I.R. Gallery (Feminist & Queer Art Book Fair, 2020), [7] [8] MoMA PS1 (Past and Future Fictions, 2018), [9] The International Center of Photography (Queering the Collection, 2018), [10] The Williams College Museum of Art (Queer Zines: A Conversation and Workshop 2019) [11] Sediment Arts (GenderFail Archive Project, 2018), [12] [13] EFA Project Space (Endless Editions Biennial, 2018) [14] and The Contemporary Artists' Books Conference at Book Culture (2018). [1] [15] GenderFail was featured in the January 2020 Issue of Vogue Italia with an article titled "Failure E Un Po' Rinascere" by journalist Laura Taccari. [16] GenderFail created a reading room at the Center for Book Arts in 2021 titled Imperfect Archiving/Archiving as Practice. [17]
GenderFail's publications "uses appropriation as a strategy to 'pervert' the canon, contaminate it, but also to give visibility to under-represented and othered forms of being." [18] Lyne Lucian of The Daily Beast noted GenderFail as "an innovative platform representing queer and trans people, and people of color who want to voice their opinions through art". [19]
In October 2018, GenderFail released An Anthology of Failure, which includes essays by Manuel Arturo Abreu, American Artist, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Demian Dinéyazhi', Johanna Hedva, Nicole Killian, Andrea Liu, Be Oakley, Nate Pyper, Sable Elyse Smith, Alok Vaid-Menon and Agustine Zegers. [20] Printed Matter has dedicated a shelf in their bookshop to displaying GenderFail titles. [21] Some of GenderFail's projects take on a digital form, such as Remember Their Name, a page memorializing every trans person who was murdered since 2016. [19]
In 2019 GenderFail published Consciousness by artist Lex Brown. [22] Their book GenderFail Reader 1 was named one of OutTV's 19 best reads of 2019. [23]
Scott Treleaven is a Canadian artist whose work employs a variety of media including painting, collage, film, video, drawing, photography and installation.
ABC No Rio is a collectively-run non-profit arts organization on New York City's Lower East Side. It was founded in 1980 in a squat at 156 Rivington Street, following the eviction of the 1979–80 Real Estate Show. The centre featured an art gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab. In addition, it played host to a number of radical projects including weekly hardcore punk matinees and the city Food Not Bombs collective.
Rick Castro is an American photographer, motion picture director, stylist, curator and writer whose work focuses on BDSM, fetish, and desire.
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist working in photography, video, and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality with a body of work that dates back to the early 2000s, documenting and celebrating the lives of South Africa's Black lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex communities. Muholi is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, explaining that "I'm just human".
The NY Art Book Fair is Printed Matter, Inc's annual event, historically held in September or October. The NY Art Book Fair is the world's largest book fair for artists’ books and related publications, featuring over 370 exhibitors from 30 countries, and attended by over 39,000 visitors annually. Originally free, the now ticketed fair presents an active program of exhibitions, talks, workshops, book launches and performances, as well as many off-schedule events hosted by individual publishers.
Mark Cagaanan Aguhar was an American activist, writer and multimedia fine artist known for her multidisciplinary work about gender, beauty and existing as a racial minority, while being body positive and transgender femme-identified. Aguhar was made famous by her Tumblr blog that questioned the mainstream representation of the "glossy glorification of the gay white male body".
Leah DeVun is an American contemporary artist and historian who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA and PhD from Columbia University and is an associate professor at Rutgers University, where she teaches women's and gender history.
Nicole Marie Killian is a new media artist and design educator based in Richmond, Virginia.
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.
Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.
Edie Fake is an American artist, illustrator, author, and transgender activist. Fake is known for their comics/zines, gouache and ink paintings, and murals. Fake has an award winning comic-zine series about Gaylord Phoenix, a bird-like man that travels to different environments and has various lovers. He is currently based in Joshua Tree, California, after previously residing in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Aay Preston-Myint is a visual artist and art educator. He is based in Oakland, California.
Demian DinéYazhi' is a Native American artist and activist. Their work and advocacy focuses on indigenous and LGBTQ+ people and "consists of photography, sculpture, text, sound, video, land art performance, installation, street art and fabrics art."
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a queer black American artist and photographer. In 2019 they received an Emerging Visual Arts Grant by The Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
8-Ball Community is a New York City-based artist collective that operates a zine library, online radio station, and online public-access television station.
Marc Vallée is a British documentary photographer who has photographed youth culture, in Paris, Berlin, and London where he lives. He has made work about the tension between public and private space in the context of graffiti, skateboarding and queer cultures. Vallée has self-published many zines and shown in group exhibitions at the Museum of London and Somerset House.
Anaïs Duplan is a queer and trans Haitian writer now based in the U.S., with three book publications from Action Books, Black Ocean Press, and Brooklyn Arts Press, along with a chapbook from Monster House Press. His work has been honored by a Whiting Award and a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International. He is a Professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, of which he is also an alum.
Balam is an independent annual magazine based in Buenos Aires, Argentina that is focused on Latin American contemporary photography, with special emphasis on queer artists and the particularities of their regional context. Originally established as an online magazine in 2015, it became a print publication from its fifth publication in early 2018 onwards. Balam has had ten issues, six of which were released in print form. Although presented as a magazine, Balam's concept is closer to that of a photobook or an art object: each issue starts with a unique theme, selected contributors and specific printing features for that particular issue. The most recent, tenth anniversary edition of the magazine, focusing on the theme of "La Boheme", was launched in 2024.
Bryn Kelly (1980–2016) was an American writer, artist, performer, and community organizer. Kelly has shown work at New Museum and performed in conjunction with Visual AIDS and in Art in the Age of Aquarius at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was a member of the Femme Collective, participated in Baltimore's 2012 Femme Conference, and was a cofounder of Theater Transgression, a transgender multimedia performance collective. Her writing and writing performances have appeared in Original Plumbing, Manic D Press, the National Queer Arts Festival, PrettyQueer.com, and EOAGH, A Journal of the Arts, amongst others.
Lee Mary Manning is an American photographer and artist living and working in New York City. They are represented by Canada Gallery. They work with a range of digital and film cameras, often using point-and-shoots and 35mm film. Manning's photos typically represent everyday objects and encounters, and are often exhibited alongside found objects including restaurant napkins, plastic bags, or pharmacy receipts.