Leeway Foundation

Joiri Minaya- Investigative

Joiri Minaya was born in New York, U.S, in 1990, growing up in Dominican Republic. She graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales (ENAV) in Santo Domingo, D. R., on 2009, to later receive an Associate’s degree in Fine Arts at the Altos de Chavón School of Design on 2011. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 2013 from Parsons The New School for Design and was subsequently an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2013.

“My work deals with identity, otherness, self-consciousness and displacement. I’ve made work parting from / inspired by women in my family, popular stories, historical investigations, periods of dislocation, psychology, myth, and symbols I grew up exposed to. I see many of my pieces as portraits.

I’m intrigued by the way in which historical hierarchies affect current identities and social spaces. I’m particularly interested in the body as a conditioned recipient and performer of these ideas.

Through a variety of media I question how my own experience objects or negotiates traditions and historical impositions. In my work I attempt to create several power positions, often contradictory but operating simultaneously; navigating binaries in search of in-between- ness.”

Larissa Sansour - Provocative

Born in 1973 in Jerusalem to a Palestinian father and a Russian mother, Sansour studied Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where she currently lives and works. Sansour borrows heavily from the language of film and pop culture. By approximating the nature, reality and complexity of life in Palestine and the Middle East to visual forms normally associated with entertainment and televised pastime, her grandiose and often humorous schemes clash with the gravity expected from works commenting on the region.

Check out her website.

Guernica: You’ve been using science fiction to describe your ideas. What made this genre attractive to you?

Larissa Sansour: I think I’m most comfortable when I function in a parallel space that’s not separate from political reality, but somehow comments on it from a different portal. The crisis in the Middle East has been ongoing and repetitive and I feel solutions on the ground have reached an impasse. It is somehow necessary to change the way we approach commentary on the subject. I do think that erecting a meta-space that functions according to its own autonomous abstractions and logic could be more effective in finding ways of dealing with the problem at hand, than using our standard tools of analysis.

I am also very fascinated by the idea of hyperbole in subject matter as well as production. I like the idea of going overboard in producing an art piece and I like the way it brings the work away from a meditative space of reflection to a more direct, impactful tool that can compete with the mainstream. I like all these power plays, which have a lot to do with contextualization. In turn, I’m interested in creating crossovers between creative disciplines and in a way in subverting the expected role of the artist in society.

Science fiction also provides a sense of nostalgia that is always present when it comes to Palestine, in that whenever we talk about Palestine, it is never in the present, but either remembering a past or imagining a better future. Submitting gritty Middle Eastern politics to high production sci-fi in this manner not only underlines the absurdity of the situation, but brings about a dystopian future scenario. While the fictional realm as such allows for the obstacles of present-day politics to be altered, neglected, and negotiated at will, sci-fi seems to embody ideals, expectations, and fears of the future that are quite adequate for describing the Palestinian predicament. Somehow managing to fuse nostalgia and hopes for a better and more efficient future, sci-fi seems to lend itself to capturing the decades of Palestinian yearning for a utopia that almost seems dated by now.

Roxane Gay - Provocative 

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is the co-editor ofPANK. She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016 - read more.

Srutika Sabu - Investigative 

Srutika Sabu is a generation 1.5 Indian-Canadian Malayali. She is a graduate of Rutgers University where she studied biotechnology and transnational feminism. She is currently a New York-based med student who spends her free time on creative projects, especially her artwork. Srutika is on a quest to explore the themes and issues of transnational feminism through her artwork, animation, and identity as an Indian-born diasporic child. She spoke with Sakhi about her passions, feminism, transnational background, and the artists that inspire her. You can check out more of her work here. 

DJ Lynnée Denise - Investigative

Bio: For the past decade, DJ Lynnée Denise has worked as an artist who incorporates self-directed project based research into interactive workshops, music events and public lectures that offer participants the opportunity to develop an intimate relationship with under-explored topics related to the cultural history of marginalized communities. She creates multi dimensional and multi sensory experiences that require audiences to apply critical thinking to how the arts can hold viable solutions to social inequality.

“I aim to produce work that validates and humanizes the varied experiences of those who come into contact with my creative process. I use technology and media to communicate my interests in ethnomusicology, the migration of cultural products, and identity. I curate events that uphold my vision and challenge existing paradigms of sound production and performance.  In these events, I incorporate literature and music history, which are nontraditional elements in the club/party/music scene; and that is how my work became grounded in the statement, “entertainment with a thesis.” - See more at: http://elixher.com/inspihered-by-dj-lynnee-denise/#sthash.CkMQe412.dpuf

Doreen Garner - Investigative

Bio: Doreen (b.1986) is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Philadelphia, PA. Her performance and sculptural work juxtaposes beautiful and grotesque imagery to complicate the viewer’s visual experience. Using her body as a site of investigation, Garner maps new meaning onto her flesh that complicates the iconography and consumption of Black women’s bodies within the American imagination.

Nomy Lamm - Connected

Bio: Nomy is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and performer and political activist. She is an advisory board member and performer with Sins Invalid, a project that centers voices of queers and people of color with disabilities, creating work on disability, sexuality, social justice and embodiment.

“Sitting in the audience the first time I got to see a Sins Invalid show, I witnessed some of the most radical work I’d ever seen or imagined. I watched Lateef McLeod, a beautiful black man with cerebral palsy, recite poetry through an electronic talker and get almost naked, crawling on the floor in front of a mirror under a giant full moon. I watched porn by Loree Erickson, a queer white femme wheelchair user, heard poetry by Latina wheelchair goddess Maria Palacios, and witnessed a performance by white genderqueer crip seeley quest, who did a lap dance while wearing a molded plastic back brace. Planted in my theater seat with my fake leg tucked under my chair, I felt a familiar but all-too-uncommon sensation: an urgency, a current in my body saying “This is the moment, step into it, this is where it’s happening.” I wanted in.” (www.nomylamm.com)

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Connected

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a NY-based (by way of Toronto and Oakland) queer disabled femme writer, performance artist and educator of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. She is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Love Cake and writes about femmes of color, Sri Lankan identities, survivorhood, healing, disability and transformative justice.

She is bold and speaks out for all people who are going through or have survived personal and group trauma. She brings communities together with the many unique things that define her.

After years of advocating for accessibility awareness Leah was rewarded for her efforts by performing for a crowd that was made up mostly of people with disabilities in a space that was fully accessible.  When she spoke of this experience she said,                            

“That crowd was the show. And more than that: that crowd was the movement and community I want to live in and make art for and with. It was the opposite of an inaccessible performance space filled with able bodied, non parenting, young queers. It was a cross-disability, parenting and mixed class community for three hours where I felt like all my parts could come home.” (Source: www.brownstargirl.org/blog)

Xenobia Bailey - Visionary

Xenobia Bailey studied ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, it was there that her interest in craftsmanship and fabric took full bloom. She worked as a costume designer for the renowned African-American community theater, Black Arts West, until her acceptance into Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1974. She received her BA in industrial design while she learned to crochet under needle artist, Bernadette Sonona, after which she began to create and sell colorful crocheted hats inspired by distinctly African-American patterns, themes and hairstyles.

Bailey is best known for her eclectic crochet hats and large scale crochet mandalas, consisting of colorful concentric circles and repeating patterns. Her pieces are often connected to her ongoing project "Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk". Her designs draw influences from in Africa, China, and Native American and Eastern philosophies, with undertones of the 1970's funk aesthetic.

Ana Mendieta – Investigative

Emerging in the early 1970s amid burgeoning new genres of art making including land art, performance art, film and video, and feminist practices, Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta developed a deeply personal, experimental, and largely ephemeral oeuvre consisting chiefly of performative actions that she described as “earth-body sculptures.” 

Born in Cuba, Mendieta came to the United States as a refugee in 1961 at the age of 12. The trauma of separation from her family, culture, and homeland became the bedrock of the artist’s practice, which was rooted in physical and spiritual connections between the body and the natural world. She wrote, “I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me. It is through my sculptures that I assert my emotional ties to the earth and conceptualize culture.” The Silueta series—hundreds of earth-body works and related photographs and films—constitutes the core of Mendieta’s project. Based initially on her own body and silhouette, the Siluetas developed into a panoply of archetypal goddess figures and eventually more universal human forms and incorporated a unique blend of ritual effects drawn from diverse religions. 

"I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source."

Joy Harjo - Connected

Bio: Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Muskoke Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Strongly influenced by her Muskoke (Creek) heritage, feminist and social concerns, and her background in the arts, Joy frequently incorporates Muskoke myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry inhabits the Southwest landscape and centers around the need for remembrance and transcendence. Joy is the first ever Native to win the prestigious Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, which bestows the honor annually “to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

Her statement on winning the award:

“I've learned that poetry could heal the broken heart.... It can assist in healing humans, creatures, plants and countries. It speaks unspeakable truths. Poetry is almost always present at those major transitions in our lives: birth, marriage, death, and.... love. It assists in healing my tribal nation. It's poetry being sung at the ceremonial grounds or in the Creek churches, and because of it we feel ourselves moving together into a greater understanding despite the struggles, the battles. It is one of the toughest teachers. It teaches us how to listen, to even the most difficult truths.

I will accept this honor on behalf of those who follow. My newest collection opens with the poetry of two granddaughters, Haleigh Sara Bush and Desiray Chee. Generations of young poets are following who fearlessly sing and speak that which we need to hear to keep moving into understandings that will grow the human soul.

And, by the way, don't worry about what a poem means. Do you ask what a song means before you listen? Just listen.”

Sara Shamma - Investigative

Bio: Born in Damascus in 1975 to a Syrian father and Lebanese mother. Encouraged by her family in her love of painting, by the age of 14 she had decided to become an artist. Sara focuses on the human figure as her chosen subject matter. She left behind her home and studio and currently lives and works in the country of her mother's birth; the Lebanon. 

Sara’s latest work, World Civil War Portraits can be viewed here.  World Civil War Portraits is informed by Sara's personal experience of the conflict. 

“Shamma’s disturbing paintings, described recently by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith as a “courageous reaction to what is happening now”, are not conventional depictions of war. Instead, they are instead personal studies of the faces of those who are living the ghosts of normal, safe existences and who have been deeply affected by violence. Sometimes the pictures play with time, presenting two images of the same subject. “Her recent paintings are not in any way journalistic,” said Lucie-Smith, “but they resonate with the tragedy of the current situation.” 

Simone Leigh - Investigative

Bio: Simone Leigh creates sculpture, video and installations informed by her interest in African art, ethnographic research, feminism and performance. She considers her practice an object-based exploration of black female subjectivity. Simone’s project “The Free People’s Medical Clinic” in 2014 transformed the Stuyvesant Mansion into a free clinic offering acupuncture, dance and yoga classes as well as HIV testing and OB/GYN services.

“The society of black nurses is called the United Order of Tents and the reason it uses the word tents is because they took care of people during the underground railroad in tents, and it has been in operation continuously since the Civil War.  I was really shocked that most people I know have never heard of them, which made me think about how many black histories we still don’t know.  A lot of black life, for practical reasons, happened in secret.  If you can’t be completely human in public, maybe you can do that privately.  It peeks out every now and then.  But in these private rooms, a lot of culture is developed.  All of this informs, I think, this project and the need, at times, for separatism.”

Mariam Ghani - Bridgebuilder

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker and teacher. Her research-based practice spans video, installation, photography, performance, and text. Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh since 2004 as Index of the Disappeared, an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions. Ghani currently teaches in the Social Practice MFA program at Queens College and is a Visiting Artist at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. “I don’t think that works of art produce concrete change. If anything, they are thin ends of a wedge where they just create a small opening in someone’s mind where something more direct and more concrete can enter in.”

Rommy Torrico - Investigative

Bio: Rommy Torrico is a queer, undocumented activist and artist born in Iquique, Chile and currently residing in Naples, Florida. Rommy is involved in the immigrant rights movement including the Collier County Neighborhood Stories Project. Rommy works with intersectionality in their practice, seeks to tell the story of their community.

“Having grown up in a homogenous Anglo community where heteronormativity, racism and binaries reigned supreme, it was difficult for me to find my place. Instead of speaking up, I would turn to drawing, poetry or music as a way of resisting the constant demand to conform and, as a result, allow myself to expel all the relentless microaggressions that would so carelessly be thrown around.”

dream hampton - Investigative

Bio: dream hampton is a cultural critic, filmmaker, organizer and writer from Detroit, MI. dream directed Treasure: From Tragedy to Transjustice, Mapping a Detroit Story, a film following the murder of transgender teen Shelly “Treasure” Hilliard, a documentary about Notorious B.I.G. and the music video “QueenS” for TheeSatisfaction. She serves on the boards of Young Nation, Detroit Summer and Write A House and is currently the 2015 Visiting Artist at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts where she teaches "From Moments to Movements" a course on 21st century activism, new media and new narratives.

“I made a decision really early on that I didn’t want Treasure to be strictly a crime story, strictly about Shelley’s death. I wanted also to have living trans people in the film who were advocating for themselves and for their sisters and their brothers. ... We call Detroit post-capitalist in a lot of ways but that means we’ve been inventive and creative in having to address some of our social needs and that includes the trans community."

Mya Taylor - Investigative

Bio: Mya Taylor is an actress born and raised in Houston, Texas. In addition to her starring role in Sundance breakout hit Tangerine, she also collaborated heavily with the director on everything from pre- to post-production, from the vernacular of the script to the arc of the plot. Mya plays Marsha Johnson in Happy Birthday Marsha! a highly anticipated film following legendary best friends, Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera the night of the Stonewall Riots.