Conversations, Presentations, Screenings, and Performance Highlight Diverse Ways Queer Identities, Communities are Celebrated

Two-day event features Nayland Blake, Liz Collins, Jon Davies, Colleen Doyle, Jarrett Earnest, Evan Garza, Lyle Ashton Harris, Tom Kalin, Matthew Leifheit, Siobhan Liddell, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, and Brian Lawson, Aaron Loux, and Hub New Music

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (March 25, 2025) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College is pleased to announce the Queer Archives Symposium, a two-day program of conversations, presentations, and screenings on April 4–5, culminating with a special dance and music performance.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition a field of bloom and hum—which features work from more than 150 queer artists from the past 100 years—the symposium brings together a vibrant group of artists, scholars, archivists, dancers, and musicians to explore the complexities and power of queer art to assert a place for queer identities and communities.

In one session, art history students will create new oral histories in a public interview with exhibiting artists Siobhan Liddell and Liz Collins. Other sessions feature scholars and artists discussing the legacy of Steven Arnold, David Armstrong, and Sheyla Baykal, and the continuing work of artists Nayland Blake, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Matthew Leifheit. Another session is dedicated to screenings of experimental film and video made in the wake of the AIDS crisis, followed by a discussion with film scholars and the filmmaker Tom Kalin. The culminating event will be a performance of music and dance, featuring Hub New Music and the five-part What If We’re Beautiful, composed by Daniel Thomas Davis. For the first time, the dancers Brian Lawson and Aaron Loux will perform their choreography with live music by Hub New Music. A public reception follows the performance.

The largest exhibition ever organized by the Tang, a field of bloom and hum spans both floors of the museum. On the first floor, four rooms present artists in intergenerational dialogues. One, for example, features work by Oliver Herring, Don Herron, and Nan Goldin, along with a new commission of a mural by Edie Fake. Another first-floor gallery sets work by Dyke Action Machine! and Donald Moffett besides the Queer Ecology Hanky Project, including work recently made in collaboration with students.

The second-floor gallery features two purpose-built stages; a salon-style wall of work by more than 140 artists that spans the early twentieth century to today; monumental works by Camila Falquez, Joel Otterson, and Joan Snyder; and seating and a rug by Liz Collins paired with Nayland Blake’s Ruins of a Sensibility, turntables and the artist’s album collection. Taken together, the gallery forms a listening room, performance space, lecture hall, and classroom beneath a tapestry of identity, memory, and community.

The exhibition is organized by Dayton Director Ian Berry, in collaboration with artists and Skidmore College faculty. It is supported by the Friends of the Tang, The Alfred Z. Solomon Residency Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The performance by Hub New Music is the second annual performance in the Adirondack Trust New Works Series at the Tang Museum.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit tang.skidmore.edu.

Queer Archive Symposium Schedule

Note: Participant bios are below

FRIDAY, APRIL 4

12:30 pm: Session 1
Siobhan Liddell and Liz Collins interviewed by Sana Arif ’26 and Alexandra Hanson ’27
The exhibiting artists engage in a conversation with two students, who will be creating new oral histories as part of the art history course “The Artist Interview.”

3 pm: Session 2
Jarrett Earnest, Steven Arnold – Cocktails in Heaven
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, Sheyla Baykal 1944–1997
After the two presentations on late artists Steven Arnold and Sheyla Baykal, the artist Nayland Blake will give a response and engage in a conversation with Earnest and Yáñez, followed by an audience Q&A

SATURDAY, APRIL 5

10 am: Session 3
Matthew Leifheit, Gay Archive
Colleen Doyle, David Armstrong archive
Lyle Ashton Harris in dialogue with Evan Garza
After the three individual presentations, all four panelists will engage in a conversation, followed by an audience Q&A

12:30 pm: Break

2 pm: Session 4
Jon Davies, introduction, a field of bloom and hum on film: Eternal Homes of the Transient Heart

The advent of AIDS demanded we imagine queer community as embracing both the living and the dead. Six films and videos span from elegy to resurrection.

• David Wojnarowicz Unfinished film (sequence in memory of Peter Hujar) (dir. David Wojnarowicz, US, 1987–88, 15 min., digital)
  
• finally destroy us (dir. Tom Kalin, US, 1991, 4 min., digital)
  
• Nomads (dir. Tom Kalin, US, 1993, 5 min., digital)
  
• The Attendant (dir. Isaac Julien, UK, 1993, 9 min., digital)
  
• The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique (dir. Steven Arnold, US, 1967, 15 min., 16mm)
  
• The Dark, Krystle (dir. Michael Robinson, US, 2013, 10 min., digital)
  

Q&A with Jon Davies and Tom Kalin, moderated by Jamie Parra

5 pm: Special Performance
What If We’re Beautiful, dance performance by Brian Lawson and Aaron Loux, the finale to a program of live music by Hub New Music:
Julius Eastman, Joy Boy
Angélica Negrón, Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado
Nico Muhly, Drown
Daniel Thomas Davis, What If We’re Beautiful
   I. Song for L.H.
   II. Prelude for J.W. & K.H.
   III. Anthem for M.M.
   IV. Arietta for M.A.
   V. Verses for A.I. and H.R.

6 pm: Reception
Public opening reception for a field of bloom and hum

About the Participants

Nayland Blake is an artist, writer, educator, and curator. Born in New York City in 1960, they attended Bard College and then California Institute of the Arts. After receiving their MFA, they moved to San Francisco in 1984. They have had one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; University Art Museum, Berkeley; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the Tang Museum. Their retrospective No Wrong Holes – 30 years of Nayland Blake opened in 2019 at the ICALA and closed in 2021 at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. They are currently the co-director of the studio art program at Bard College.

Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design, with emphasis and expertise in textile media. She earned a BFA and MFA in Textiles at RISD, and has exhibited and taught widely, including ten years as Textiles faculty at RISD, and will present a major mid-career survey of her work later this year at the RISD Museum. Recent and current exhibitions include Foreigners Everywhere at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Queer Histories at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil, and Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, which opens at MoMA this April. The Tang Museum published her first monograph, Liz Collins: Energy Field, in 2020.

Jon Davies is a curator, writer, and scholar focusing on film, video, and contemporary art. He worked as Assistant Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and Associate Curator at Oakville Galleries, both in Toronto, before earning his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2023 with a dissertation titled “The Fountain: Art, Sex and Queer Pedagogy in San Francisco, 1945–1995.” He is the 2024–25 General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Ottawa, Canada.

Colleen Doyle has been working in film preservation since studying filmmaking at Rhode Island School of Design. She worked as the archivist in the Brown University Film Archive restoring the celluloid holdings for many years before moving to New York. She received an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons. For the past nine years she has worked stabilizing, categorizing, and digitizing David Armstrong’s estate. Doyle has been a key collaborator on posthumous exhibitions and publications on Armstrong, including a major retrospective at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2024.

Jarrett Earnest is a writer, curator, and art critic specializing in queer art history. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), and Valid Until Sunset (MATTE Editions, 2023), and the host of Angelic Transmissions, an art talk show on East Village Radio.

Evan Garza is a global contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, and is Curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Garza was the 2021-2022 Fulbright Scholar at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and simultaneously served as Visiting Research Fellow in History of Art & Architecture at Trinity College Dublin. Garza was cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency, a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQIA+ artists.

Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. Harris has exhibited and performed widely at institutions around the world, and his work is in numerous permanent collections. Born in the Bronx and raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New York, Harris obtained a BFA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is a Professor of Art at New York University and lives in New York.

Hub New Music actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers on projects that traverse a rich musical landscape. Founded in 2013, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinctive ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello, played by Michael Avitabile (flutes), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Magnolia Rohrer (violin/viola), and Jesse Christeson (cello). Currently based in Detroit, the ensemble’s name is inspired by its founding city of Boston’s reputation as a hub of innovation.

Tom Kalin is a filmmaker, writer, activist, and prominent figure in the New Queer Cinema. In addition to his features Swoon and Savage Grace, his award-winning, critically acclaimed work traverses diverse forms and genres. He is known for narrative features, mixed-media installations and short experimental films and videos. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, Kalin’s work is in the collection of the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Kalin was also a member of ACT UP and a founding member of AIDS activist collective Gran Fury, known for its provocative public art projects.

Brian Lawson is an assistant professor of dance at Skidmore College. A dance performer and educator who began dancing in Toronto, Canada, Lawson spent a year at Codarts in Rotterdam before earning his BFA in dance performance from SUNY Purchase and touring internationally with the Mark Morris Dance Group. He earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 2020. His artistic research focuses on queering the ballet canon (with Adele Nickel) and exploring queer masculinities (with Aaron Loux.) He also engages in pedagogical research with regards to contemporary balletic practices. Brian is currently a member of Pam Tanowitz Dance and continues to dance as a guest artist with MMDG.

Matthew Leifheit is a photographer, magazine editor, and professor based in Brooklyn whose “Gay Archive” project documents ephemera from archives and historic sites across the United States. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art, Leifheit is Editor-in-Chief of MATTE Magazine, the journal of emerging photography he has published since 2010, and full-time faculty at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

Siobhan Liddell is a painter and sculptor whose work has been exhibited widely in the US, Europe, and Japan. Born in England and living in New York, Liddell deals with the space between knowing and unknowing, the mystery in the everyday, history and the continuum of desire to record and create our unique worlds in her work. Her paintings and sculptures are in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Dallas Museum of Art, and numerous private collections. She is an Artist in Residence in the MFA Multidisciplinary program at MICA, Baltimore.

Aaron Loux is a dance artist and educator living in New York City. From 2010 to 2022, he was a member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, and he has also performed with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Christopher Williams, Charlotte Bydwell, Arc Dance Company, and Cornfield Dance. He is working towards a BA in America Studies from Columbia University’s School of General Studies, holds a BFA from The Juilliard School, and teaches ballet at Marymount Manhattan College. In 2023, Aaron was the inaugural CBA-Juilliard Fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU.

Jamie Parra is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore, where he teaches courses in 19th-century American literature and culture. Before joining Skidmore’s faculty, he received a PhD from Columbia University and taught in the American Studies Department at Williams College as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2007 to 2016, he wrote about contemporary art and design for Whitewall magazine, and he has written book reviews for Time Out New York and Public Books. His recent academic writing includes essays on vision, fictionality, and ethics in Huckleberry Finn; theories of literary character and personhood; and mystical encounters with paintings in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative. He is working on a book about slavery and aesthetics in the middle of the 19th century.

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez is a photographer and art historian living in New York between Washington Heights and an intentional community in Rockland County. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, currently at work on a dissertation titled The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1983.

About Skidmore College

Founded in 1903, Skidmore College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college of about 2,700 students located in the dynamic town of Saratoga Springs, New York. Consistently ranked as a top liberal arts college by U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, Forbes, and more, Skidmore has also been recognized for its innovation, value, and sustainability efforts. Skidmore fosters academic and personal excellence — all driven by a belief that Creative Thought Matters. Its comprehensive array of opportunities encompasses more than 40 bachelor’s degree programs, including popular offerings in business, psychology, and the creative and performing arts; competitive NCAA Division III athletics; world-class facilities; and hands-on civic engagement and career development resources.

About the Tang Teaching Museum

The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for college and university art museums across the country—with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas. The Museum is open to the public Tuesday–Sunday, noon–5 pm, with extended hours until 9 pm Thursday. https://tang.skidmore.edu