Dr De Veaux has been selected to receive this year’s Pamela Sneed award for Black Queer Art Mentorship Arts and Organizers through the Queer Arts project. The award ceremony took place at the Whitney Museum on 10th November, 2022.
The Pamela Sneed Award for Black Queer|Art| Mentorship Artists and Organizers is a $10K prize acknowledging Black Mentors and Fellows from the QAM community who uplift critical histories of Black queer mentorship and uphold guiding principles like intergenerational exchange, collective care, preservation of Black queer legacies.
Judges Justin Allen, Pamela Sneed, and Stephen Winter remark, “Alexis De Veaux is a pioneering force within the LGBTQIA community. Her expansive practice is wide-ranging: from poetry and journalism to children’s literature… As a writer, educator, and public speaker, Alexis’s longstanding dedication to mentorship is clear across fields and generations. To be in the presence of her generous wisdom and infectious spirit is to be inspired.”Queer Arts
Writing New Worlds a conversation between Alexis De Veaux, Walidah Imarisha and Alexis Pauline Gumbs on legacy, possibility, and the role of writers in making the future we deserve intriguing, imaginable and irresistible. This conversation was a plenary event at the Allied Media Conference, July 23rd to July 26th 2020.
“The conversation between countergenerational artists was an extraordinary defining moment during this time of global pandemics. I was deeply honored to share it with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Walidah Imarisha”
“On June 25th, 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri, actor Alfre Woodard, playwright Charles Busch, writer/poet Alexis De Veaux, singer/songwriter Sophie B. Hawkins join a list of over 30 LGBTQI writers, playwrights, activists and artists joined us on camera reading passages from their favorite and influential works of queer literature and poetry for the first marathon”
The Afterlife of Slavery: Visual, Textual, Sonic Arts and Archives of Catastrophic Memory featured presentations by Alexis De Veaux, University of Buffalo, Professor Emerita and Independent Scholar, Cheryl Clarke, Poet and Jenna Wortham, The New York Times Magazine
The panel, “‘The Afterlife of Slavery:’ Visual, Textual, Sonic Arts and Archives of Catastrophic Memory” is set against the backdrop of Saidiya Hartman’s articulation of “the afterlife of slavery” as the enduring calculus imperiling present-day black life. This focus is nourished by Kara Walker’s visual and sonic reading of domestic slavery in the United States as indicative of “a Catastrophe for millions.” Thus the panel forwards critical discussions of visual, textual, and sonic works by black artists engaged, across time, with the practice of re-rendering and re-imagining the impact of transatlantic enslavement as a catastrophic archive of persistent black memory.
Alexis De Veaux, Professor Emerita/ Independent Scholar will offer a critical reading of visual artist Valerie Maynard’s “un-named” spectral series of visual renderings of the Middle Passage as a “lost” archive of both catastrophic memory and catastrophic belonging, ‘Lost Found: Catastrophe and Memory in the Work of Valerie Maynard’. This paper offers a critical reading of the iconic visual artist Valerie Maynard’s “un-named” spectral series of visual renderings of the Middle Passage as a “lost” archive of both catastrophic memory and catastrophic belonging.
In “One,” the artist draws our attention to a barrier, a gate like structure, that symbolizes this ancestral enslavement. And she draws attention to three figures foregrounded against it. With them, she informs our memory of what enslavement did. Enslavement turned captured Africans, humans, into hybrid creatures. It denied and brutalized their humanity, without question. It deformed and dismembered them. Maynard narrates this hybridity, framed by abject brutalization, in two small figures, especially.
Cheryl Clarke will explore the poetry of Natasha Tretheway as Tretheway’s work memorializes slavery by historicizing its “everlasting” effects on black culture and subjectivity. “there to here” Natasha Tretheway’s poem, “Theories of Time and Space,” from her celebrated Native Guard (2006), exposes the poet’s approach to poeticizing historical portraits and paintings (ekphrastic) of black people, specifically mixed race black women, in captivity or various forms of oppressive servitude, including prostitution. In Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) and Thrall (2012), Tretheway’s getting from “here” (author stance) to “there” (subject/ “Participant”) is historical and personal distance, i.e.; it is the interstices of space, “the space of space.” The cover art of both works utilize reproductions of photographs and “Casta” paintings; and images of prostitutes, metstizos, and mulattoes, pose themselves (and us) for her narrative portraiture. Tretheway sees the camera, photography, and portraiture as one of history’s tricks, with its pandering to our willingness to be fooled, its fixing of the past in the present, and its fragility. “This past week I splurged, spent a little of my savings on a Kodak . . . .” (Bellocq’s Ophelia, 28), says the speaker, Ophelia, marking the democratization of the archive. This paper hopes to travel the poet’s distance from “there to here” in the space of slavery’s afterlife.
Jenna Wortham will make a case for examining the processes inherent to black archives primarily as opportunities to resist the ephemerality of social media and digital transactions, in order to preserve and create a blueprint for engaging the black “present” in a “future” situated in the black “past.”