Aesthetics of Mobility is a conversation series between artist/partners Najja Moon and GeoVanna Gonzalez taking place in their mobile project space “Living life as practice”. Part time exhibition space for “Supplement Projects”, full time living experiment, the artists will discuss visibility and the politics of living via their inspirations, annoyances, influences and goals in a dialogue meant to engage friends, strangers, and colleagues alike.www.gypsysocialite.com
Najja Moon is a Miami based artist and cultural practitioner, born and raised in North Carolina. Her practice is centered on the idea that art is utilitarian. An amalgamation of practicalities that improve her life; design and language, cultural responsibility and community, her visual arts practice uses drawing and text to explore the intersections of queer identity, the body and movement, black culture and familiar relations both personal and communal.
IG: najjak
www.Geo-vanna.com
GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Miami/Berlin-based artist and curator. Her work desires to connect private and public space through interventionist, participatory art with an emphasis on collaboration and collectivity. She builds installations that are designed for non-directive play in order to express the potential of our embodied cognition. She references architecture and design by reflecting on how the voids in the spaces we inhabit affect our everyday. Through her work she addresses the shifting notions of gender and identity, intimacy and proximity, and forms of communication and miscommunication in today’s technological and consumer culture. Her most recent work performs these possibilities by collaborating with movement and sound based artists. These improvisations are political acts, analyzing and critiquing what it means to share public space as womxn, queer folks and people of color.
IG: Vanna_Juanita
Helen Peña is a Dominican-American artist and organizer from Tequesta-Seminole Land, also known as Miami, FL. She uses photography, graphic design, video and zine-making to tell the stories of poor and dispossessed women in Miami, Latin-America and the Caribbean.
In 2017, Helen co-founded (F)empower, a collective of abolitionist feminist artist-activists. Throughout her years leading the collective, she has curated and produced several art shows, steered digital campaigns, led public art interventions, facilitated political education bootcamps, workshops, and panels, co-founded a community garden, a community bail fund, a Black queer diasporic party, and more. For 2 years, Helen worked in Digital Communications for racial and economic justice organization, the Dream Defenders. While there, she used art to amplify political organizing, by using photo, video and graphic design to breathe life to political campaigns, boosting their social media and digital presence. Currently, she is directing and producing her first short film and serves as the Digital Strategist for Voices, an international performance arts campaign grounded in Black women's stories.
IG: orange.mooon
http://withoutarchitecture.site/
The first brick thrown at Stonewall — what has become the origin myth for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement signals, by way of the brick — the essential tooled apparatus of architecture, a radical indigeneity in queer engagement with the built environment. Today, the “gayborhood,” as it exists under late capitalism, is a commodity fetish on display exhibiting and marketing queerness as state-oriented activism and testifying to the depoliticization of LGBTQ+ people under a neoliberal rubric of “gay rights.” Rainbow-packaged Oreos and other late capitalism tokens re-frame the Stonewall riots' initial obstruction into a sterilized history.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is a curatorially driven series of actions by a group of multidisciplinary artists whose practices are rooted in critiquing the convergence of politics and the built environment. The series draws from the unrecorded history of Mary’s Naturally, a legendary Houston gay bar and one of the oldest in Texas by the time of its permanent closing in November 2009. From Houston’s “Stonewall equivalent” to a “coffeehouse with gourmet, barista-made drinks, home-baked goods & light fare in an industrial space,” Mary’s redevelopment is a revealing allegory exposing the politics embedded within the built environment of the gay village. The exhibition series is set to occur every June at the former Mary’s outback, now a paved parking lot, running alongside the citywide and national gay pride month commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. The continual reactivation of the site also recalls and functions as a continuation of early AIDS mourning practices and works to materialize, if only briefly, the inscribed trauma of what we cannot see. The Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of GLBT History estimates that as many as 300 people were laid to rest or had their ashes scattered at the exhibition site.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is presented by Junior Fernandez and S Rodriguez with support from the Station Museum of Contemporary Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Event Venue
Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 1502 Alabama St, Houston, TX 77004, United States