Exhibition artists Rebecca Baldwin and Gwen Shockey, along with Jamie Magyar from the NYC Trans Oral History Project, will discuss their projects recording queer oral histories, as well as the necessity, joys and challenges of preserving LGBTQ+ experiences. Led by curator Emily Colucci.
Rebecca Baldwin makes work across media and aims to render the unseen forces around us with humor and criticism. She attended Skowhegan in 2004 and after a period of not making art Baldwin learned there are many ways to be an artist. She received an MFA from Hunter College in 2019 and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. Rebecca lives in Brooklyn and works at The New York Public Library.
Gwen Shockey is an artist and educator born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1988. Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous venues including The Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.. She was a 2018-19 recipient of The Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Art Fellowship, a 2018 resident at the Wassaic Project and was the first recipient of the Pratt MFA Ox-Bow Award in 2016. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in 2017. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Huffington Post and Hyperallergic. She works at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and frequently serves as a Visiting Artist, most recently at Connecticut College and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work also appears in several collections throughout the U.S. including The Leslie-Lohman Museum permanent collection and the Connecticut College collection.
The NYC Trans Oral History Project is a collective community archive working to document transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. The project works to confront the erasure of trans lives and to record diverse histories of gender as intersecting with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis. Currently, the archive consists of more than 150 interviews recorded by trained volunteer interviewers. More information about the project can be found on the TOHP website, and the entire archive is publicly available online via the NYPL website. Jamie Magyar has been involved with the project since summer 2017 and is currently a member of the organizing collective, where his interests include working with the archive’s transcripts and tags and helping plan events.
Featured image: Gwen Shockey, Lee Zevy (detail), 2019, graphite, paint and collage on paper, vinyl wallpaper and audio. Courtesy of the artist.