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Sep 20, 2024 - 7–9pm(Doors open at 6pm)
Dance party to follow
Gallery Art Bar (119 W Main Street, Urbana, IL 61801)
What do you want from queer nightlife? Combining music, storytelling, gossip, and dance, this sweaty performance lecture is also an invitation for you to catch the beat.
Presented as part of PYGMALION 2024 and held at Gallery Art Bar in Downtown Urbana. Free and open to the public.
Schedule:
6pm Doors Open feat. Black Liberation Sound System
7pm Main event: madison moore's Lecture-Performance
8pm-9pm Dance Party featuring madison moore & DJ lovenloops
9pm - Interlude
10pm Drag Show Pop-up
Black queer dance floors have always thrived at the edge of imagination, a place we invent other ways of gathering, of imagining new ways to bend space and time, to exist at the edge of feeling. This performance manifesto underscores nightlife as a method of living in and through the five-alarm fire of Black queer life that is about more than resistance, surviving, or getting by but about chasing the edge in pursuit of a dream for a more beautiful life.
...and then we twirled.
About the Artists:
madison moore (any pronouns) is an artist-scholar, DJ, and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. madison is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic, and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the five alarm fire of everyday life. His first book, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. madison has performed internationally at a broad range of art institutions and nightclubs, including The Kitchen, BASEMENT (NY), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, SFMOMA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Somerset House Studios London, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and beyond. In 2022, madison held a nightlife residency at The Kitchen in New York in concert with the artist Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an ode to the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. In February 2023, he guest co-edited a special issue of the arts journal e-flux on Black Rave with McKenzie Wark. Currently, he is working on a second book project, How to Get Your (Night) Life (under contract, Yale University Press), focused on Black queer nightlife as a method of living.
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Blair Ebony Smith, also known as lovenloops, is a practicing multimodal artist-scholar and lover from southside Richmond, Virginia. As a sound artist, DJ, and homegirl with Black girl celebratory collective/band Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), Blair deepened her love for Black sound, music, and making space for Black girlhood celebration with Black girls. Her art and scholarship explore themes of memory, loops, home, coalition, everlasting love, and sound/listening. She uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to engage Black (girlhood) study. Smith is the author of solo and co-written works in Wish to Live: Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader, An Outkast Reader: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South, and American Quarterly. She teaches classes focused on Black queer and feminist art, sound, pedagogy, play, and listening. She is currently at work on a multi-modal book project, part vinyl LP, tentatively titled Love and Loops: Memory, Time, Sound & Black Girlhood. Blair is currently an Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and co-curator of the exhibition Jen Everett: Could you dim the lights?
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The Black Liberation Sound System is the rhythm-driven DJ duo of artists Norman Hernandez & Matthew Clayton (DOMINIC). Focused on a genre-spanning exploration of Black music, the pair blends influences from house, jazz, reggae, spoken word and more.
As individuals, both Matthew & Norman boast their own creative music projects. Explore more of their work:
Matthew (DOMINIC & All The People I Love):
@dominicishome
@maathewclayton
https://on.soundcloud.com/jwBMdWgy56UKfLYz9
Norman (Kuumba Radio):
@normanhernandezii
@kuumbaradio
https://on.soundcloud.com/N3c5m8LMiotkRNhE6
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Gallery.artbar, 121 W Main St, Urbana, IL 61801-2714, United States,Urbana, Illinois
