#qio

JOIN US JULY 24th & JULY 25th for the 3rd Annual QUEER, ILL, & OKAY: http://bit.ly/1IO8JLA

FEATURING:

OLI RODRIGUEZ AMIR RABIYAH JOAN GIROUX SKY CUBACUB ALLIE SHYER SCOTT ARTLEY IREASHIA MONÉT DONNELL WILLIAMS

QUEER, ILL, & OKAY in partnership with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), The Inconvenience, and Links Hall is back with 8 brilliant artists who confront and engage the challenges of being queer and living with HIV, other forms of mental chronic illness, and differently abled bodies through work that is not afraid to share, show, and celebrate our lives.

JOIN US JULY 24th & JULY 25th for the 3rd Annual QUEER, ILL, & OKAY: http://bit.ly/1IO8JLA

QUEER, ILL, & OKAY in partnership with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), The Inconvenience, and Links Hall is back with 8 brilliant artists who confront and engage the challenges of being queer and living with HIV, other forms of mental chronic illness, and differently abled bodies through work that is not afraid to share, show, and celebrate our lives.

JOIN US JULY 24th & JULY 25th for the 3rd Annual QUEER, ILL, & OKAY: http://bit.ly/1IO8JLA

QUEER, ILL, & OKAY in partnership with the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), The Inconvenience, and,Links Hall is back with 8 brilliant artists who confront and engage the challenges of being queer and living with HIV, other forms of mental chronic illness, and differently abled bodies through work that is not afraid to share, show, and celebrate our lives.

QUEER, ILL, & OKAY (July 24th & 25th, 2015) FEATURING: SCOTT ARTLEY Get your tickets today: http://bit.ly/1IO8JLA

Scott Artley is a multi-disciplinary artist and cultural producer whose practice spans visual art, performance, curation, and entrepreneurism. As an arts administrator he has worked with the Walker Art Center, Minnesota Fringe Festival, The Southern Theater, Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Z Puppets Rosenschnoz, and Mixed Precipitation's Picnic Operetta, among others. Since 2012, his independent consulting practice Collective Creation has assisted community-based arts and civic organizations with fundraising, communications, evaluation, and developing community engagement programming. An activist for the inclusion of artists and audiences with disabilities, he consults with organizations on accessibility strategies. As an artist he’s shown visual and theatrical work with Artists in Storefronts, 20% Theater, and the Soo Visual Arts Center. He is a core collaborator with the DIY queer community arts center Madame of the Arts, where he has created, hosted, performed in, and cleaned-up after dozens of social arts events since its founding in 2010--from pop-up thrift stores to immersive theatrical productions to radical art parties to casual film viewings. He serves as the Performing Arts Curator for Patrick's Cabaret, a long-standing Minneapolis grassroots community arts organization with a history of provocative and inclusive work.

QUEER, ILL, & OKAY (July 24th & 25th, 2015) FEATURING: JOAN GIROUX Get your tickets today: http://bit.ly/1IO8JLA

Joan Giroux is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and educator. Her work ranges from discrete handmade objects, digital photomontage, kinetic sculpture and installation to full-scale theatrical productions, community interventions and social practice, reflecting strong interests in language, history, game theory and social conditioning. Giroux follows in traditions of Dada and Surrealism, American Pop and process-oriented work of the 1960s. Recently, the work has moved steadily towards relational aesthetics and art of social intervention. In works such as one sandpile, within hearing distance, Giroux translates aspects of caregiving in domestic and institutional settings to frame reflections on diminishment, frailty, vulnerability, loss and death.

Giroux’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ace Gallery and Artist’s Space in New York, Amerika Haus Berlin and Künstlerhaus Hamburg. Her performances have been staged at the University of Michigan, Berliner Volksbühne’s Roter Salon, and BACA Downtown, Brooklyn. She has received a The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation / The Space Program studio residency, Pollock-Krasner and Berlin Cultural Council grants, and commissions from Illinois’ The Morton Arboretum, the South Korean collective YATOO, and Lehniner Kulturinstitut, Germany. Curatorial projects include “drawing from lives” and “Capricious and Mercurial Systems.”

QUEER, ILL, & OKAY (July 24th & 25th, 2015) FEATURING: IREASHIA MONÉT Get your tickets today: http://bit.ly/1IO8JLA

I began thinking of myself as an “artist” when I was 19-years old when I began to take a series of self-portraits as a way to deal with depression, anxiety, and self-mutilation. The anxiety that Black women go through, that I continue to go through, is something that I wanted to give a voice to through my own experiences. In a largely hetero-normative, white, patriarchal society, my body, queerness, gender-fluid identity, and fatness was not easily welcomed. Through photography, I found power in visibility. I began to play with themes of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and nudism as it related to my sexuality and personal growth.