B Dukes headshot

B DUKES HONORED AS WINNER; FOUR FINALISTS RECOGNIZED

Queer|Art, Latest York City’s home for the creative and skilled development of LGBTQ+ artists, is pleased to announce the 2023 winner of The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers: multidisciplinary artist and healer B Dukes. The Oakland-based artist will receive $10,000, and 4 distinguished finalists may even receive awards. 2023 Finalists Kenzi Crash, Elijah Ndoumbe, Zula Rabikowska, and Chad Unger will each receive a grant of $1,250. 

The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers supports and promotes self-taught, early profession or otherwise emerging LGBTQ+ artists, awarded on a yearly basis. This support is significant for emerging artists, who may lack the financial resources or institutional support available to more established artists. The grant was organized in partnership with The Robert Giard Foundation from 2020 until 2022 when the Foundation ceased operations. Queer|Art gratefully acknowledges the Robert Giard Foundation’s generous support in fully funding the 2023 Giard Grant cycle.

This yr’s awarded projects foreground collective healing, intimacy and pleasure inside queer communities, and the politics of visibility. The Southern-raised, Oakland-based artist B Dukes will receive a $10,000 money grant to support the event of their series Scarred and Liberated. For this forthcoming body of labor, the artist will travel to their hometown within the backwoods of South Carolina to take self portraits that document their self-harm scars. Lots of these portraits shall be staged on the land during which Dukes was raised—the photos capture the terrain that surrounds the house that their great grandmother built and passed all the way down to generations to return. For Dukes, the ritual of returning house is crucial to their healing journey: it’s an embodied practice of reclamation which uplifts the sites during which they’ve felt “each at home and alone.” Scarred and Liberated may even include an assortment of collages that depict the artist’s top surgery and their recovery as they were cared for by their parents and siblings. Through the lens, Dukes sets out to document their personal survival and perseverance: across their deeply emotive practice, the camera is an instrument of catharsis, which reimagines the injuries of harrowing memories. 

“B Dukes takes photography to a different level, considered one of return and likewise release, to search out stories from scars, to bring spiritual connection to and from ancestors, and step right into a place of trans and non-binary gender euphoria centering Black and Brown queer life. I’m excited for B Duke’s work to return and people of us who shall be transformed by it,” writes 2023 Robert Giard Grant Judge, Ariel Goldberg.

2023 Giard Grant Judge Lola Flash adds, “I really like B’s work. Even though it is rooted in trauma, each personally and historically, there’s an everlasting hope and pushback against society within the work. In their very own words B says, ‘reclaiming peace and bodily autonomy is a healing vow,’ not just for themself but for our LGBTQ+ communities, as well.”

Upon receiving the award, Dukes writes:“Receiving this award and recognition expands the bounds of what is feasible with this project in addition to future visions which have been brewing in my heart space. As an artist originally from the backwoods of the Deep South, this grant shines a light-weight on the experience of Black, trans and non-binary people from small town South Carolina and the ways in which the landscapes encourage the paths forward.” 

193 applications were received for this award cycle. The 2023 judges included Lola Flash, Ariel Goldberg, Leandro Justen, Benjy Russell, and Logan MacDonald. 

About B Dukes, Winner
Inspired by the voices of the ancestors and plant medicines—big ma’s baby—Back Woods, Deep South raised, B Dukes (they/them) is a multidisciplinary non-binary artist, healer, medicine maker, spirit B who approaches their writing, sonic creations, dj mixes, visual art, filmmaking and ceremonies with the transformational healing of their Black & Brown queer kin in mind. Embracing the sacred art of fidgeting with nature, inquiry, pleasure and rest, B Dukes is currently exploring birthing sacred spaces, interactive art, movies and visual art that liberates, heals and grounds. B can also be the creator and lead facilitator of the When We Are Free artist residency, an area where Black and Brown, queer, trans creatives are given the space and time to attach with themselves, their practices and one another.

With regards to their winning project, Dukes reflects, “weaving the worlds of healing, transformation, spiritual connection, trans identity, Scarred and Liberated is a journey of gender euphoria and reconnecting with ancestral spirits while also reflecting on the once tainted perspective of self—falling in love with the renewed body.

About Kenzi Crash, Finalist
An east coaster through and thru, Kenzi Crash is a documentarian of their very own world and a fantasizer of different realities. She is a queer archivist, a sex and kink positive artist, a smut peddler, and a hopeful visionary of the long run.  Wielding a camera for the past twenty years she has contributed to the belief of countless other people’s fantasies, successfully experimented with moving images, and memorialized a whole bunch of members of her community. Eroticism and the unique fantastic thing about queerness proceed to be the heartbeat that pumps blood into the veins of her work, and in her recent series they take center stage.

About Elijah Ndoumbe, Finalist
Elijah Ndoumbe is a multidisciplinary artist, storyteller, dream-weaver, and collaborator. They engage lens-based work as a practice of care that’s capable of manufacturing a radical-care-politic in community, in collaboration, in collective production and intentionality. Feelings of breath, body, space, desire, music and movement are key elements to their means of image-making. Their work has screened on the Sundance Film Festival (2022) and won awards at NewFest (2021) and the Durban International Film Festival (2022). Ndoumbe was a 2021 artist in residence at Black Rock Senegal, and exhibited photographs paired with sonic soundscapes on the 2022 DAK’ART Biennale as a part of Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock 40 exhibit. They exhibited on the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennale (2022-2023), participated in CPH:LAB via CPH:DOX (2022-2023), and exhibited in a gaggle show as a winner of queer art prize Utopi·e on the Magasin Generaux in Paris, France (2023). They’re a recipient of the 2023 Bourse ADIAF Émergence, and are currently in development on a project with artists between France, Senegal, and the US.

About Zula Rabikowska, Finalist
Zula Rabikowska writes, “I’m a Polish queer photographer and visual artist currently based in London. I used to be born in Poland, grew up within the UK and my experience of migration influences my practice. My projects explore migration, gender and LGBTQI+ communities with a give attention to Central and Eastern Europe. My work unpicks the binary understanding related to the “West” and the “East”. I work with multimedia, film, and photography, and incorporate archival images and documents to challenge conventional visual story-telling norms. I’m occupied with the collapse of the Soviet Regime and the dismantling of European colonial structure, and my last documentary project explores gender identity in Central and Eastern Europe, which I carried out by travelling for five,000 miles along the previous “Iron Curtain”. I hold a MRes in French Postcolonial Literature from the University of Warwick and an MA in Documentary Photography from the University of the Arts London. I exhibited as a solo artist in London (England) and Belfast (Northern Ireland), and my group shows include Format Festival (UK), Brighton Photo Fringe (UK), Lahti Fringe Festival (Finland), Gothenburg Fringe Festival (Sweden) Urban Banks Berlin (Germany) and Enjoy Museum of Art Beijing (China). My work has been published internationally including Dazed and Confused, British Journal of Photography, the BCC, The Times. Guardian, The Calvert Journal (amongst others) I work as a photographer in Europe, and a photography lecturer in Kingston University London, and I’m also a co-founder of the Red Zenith Collective, a web-based platform for non-binary and feminine artists from Central and Eastern Europe.”

About Chad Unger, Finalist
Chad Unger (b. 1993) is a Deaf-Queer visual artist originally from Maryland, currently based in Los Angeles. Growing up with a deaf family, actively involved with the deaf community, and primarily communicating through American Sign Language, Chad’s experiences shaped him into an observer with deep appreciation of stories with strong visual elements. Chad began his profession by merging his passion of capturing stories and snowboarding in Utah. There, the landscape guided Chad’s creative aesthetic to capture the topic’s context and deepen the narrative. Being a traveler who lived in several states within the US, Chad met many people who empowered him to also live his authentic self. After coming out in 2018, Chad sought out Deaf Queer stories. His journey led him to fulfill several Deaf Queer elders who lived through the AIDS crisis and was shocked how little of it has been documented. With profound appreciation for the dwindling group of survivors, Chad was inspired to preserve their stories before they’re lost. He has been interviewing deaf queers, asking about how their disability background informed their experiences of being queer in America. His goal is to encourage each deaf and queer communities to not only appreciate these elders, but additionally the communities that they forged to sustain hope for future generations. This project will culminate in a photograph book and short film.

In regards to the 2023 Judges
Lola Flash challenges stereotypes and gender, sexual, and racial preconceptions across their work. As a photographer, Flash has worked on the forefront of genderqueer visual politics for greater than 4 many years. An lively member of ACT UP in the course of the time of the AIDS epidemic in Latest York City, Flash was notably featured within the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Their art and activism are profoundly connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color worldwide. Flash has work included in essential collections resembling the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA, the Whitney, the Museum of the African American of History and Culture and the Brooklyn Museum. They’re currently a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective, and on the Board of Queer Art. Flash received their bachelor’s degree from Maryland Institute and Masters’ from London College of Printing, within the UK. Flash works primarily in portraiture, engaging those that are sometimes deemed invisible. Flash’s practice is firmly rooted in social justice advocacy around sexual, racial, and cultural differences.

Ariel Goldberg is a author, curator, and photographer based in Latest York City. Goldberg’s books include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015), and their short-form writing has most recently appeared in Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image, Afterimage Journal, e-flux, Jewish Currents, Artforum, and Art in America. Their exhibition on photography’s relationship to spaces for learning, Images on which to construct, Nineteen Seventies-Nineteen Nineties is on view on the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as a part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial and travels to Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in March 2023. Goldberg has curated public programs for over ten years at venues including The Poetry Project and Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center. With Noam Parness they co-curated “Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection” (2020) at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Their work has been supported by the Latest Jewish Culture Fellowship, Latest York Public Library Research Rooms, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and SOMA in Mexico City. They were a 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for his or her book-in-progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late twentieth century. Goldberg has taught photography, writing, and contemporary art practices at Bard College, The Latest School, Pratt Institute, and Rutgers University.

Leandro Justen is a Brazilian-born queer photographer and documentarian. Leandro uses photography as a option to connect with and document the queer community in Latest York City, and as a tool for self-discovery and liberation. From 2019 through 2021, Leandro helped organize the Queer Liberation March, a grassroots-led march created to honor the history of protest and activism of the Stonewall Rebel of 1969. In 2021, he presented his first solo show “Into The Streets: Photographs of LGBTQ+ Activism. Latest York City, 2018-2021.” The exhibition highlighted key historic LGBTQ+ events and the work of BIPOC activists and community organizers.

Logan MacDonald is an artist, curator, author, educator and activist who focuses on queer, disability and Indigenous perspectives. He’s of mixed-European and Mi’kmaw ancestry, who identifies with each his Indigenous and settler roots. Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, his Mi’kmaw ancestry is connected to Elmastukwek, Ktaqamkuk. His artwork has been exhibited across North America, notably with exhibitions at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles) John Connelly Presents (Latest York), Dunlop Gallery (Regina), BACA (Montréal) and on the 2021 Bonavista Biennale.  In 2019, MacDonald was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award  and was honoured with a six-month residency on the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. He’s a graduate from Concordia University with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies, and a MFA in Studio Arts from York University. MacDonald is an Assistant Professor in Studio Arts and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Art at  University of Waterloo whereby his focus is on the creation of an Indigenous artist-residency program called The Longhouse Labs.

Benjy Russell is a Choctaw artist who grew up in rural Oklahoma, and for the last fourteen years has lived in rural Tennessee on stolen Euchee land. Living as a gay man in these rural landscapes can often feel inconceivable, yet here Russell has found a thriving and diverse community of queer and trans people to vision the brand new world together with him. As an artist, Russell is compelled by the conversation that happens on the intersection of philosophy, science, and art— a option to see the world prismatically and to unlearn harmful, antiquated social structures. He has at all times looked to science fiction as a model for a way we are able to shape the long run we wish. By making a fictionalized version of the long run we desire, we take step one towards its existence. Most of Russell’s work utilizes in-camera effects, using sculpture, studio lights, wires, and mirrors in lieu of photoshop to allude to magical realism. By making a physical moment of impossibility, you may hold it as much as the remainder of the world to indicate what else is feasible. His work points to a few of the joy inherent on this life, showing it to be as much of the current moment because it is of the long run.

About The Robert Giard Foundation
The Robert Giard Foundation (RGF) was a nonprofit charitable organization launched in 2002, following the death of the pioneering American photographer Robert Giard, to honor his legacy and give attention to the long run of LGBTQ+ photography. RGF promoted using Giard’s work for educational purposes and supported public programs specializing in queer photography and cultural/political movements, up until 2022 when the Foundation closed its doors.

RGF moreover provided annual support to self-taught, early profession, or otherwise emerging photographers who illuminate points of gender and sexuality of their work. Recipients of RGF grants empower and amplify queer voices while helping to construct a robust and self-reflective community. Established on the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of Latest York in 2008, and relocated to Queer|Art in 2019, the Giard Grant program has awarded over $125,000 in competitive prize money to 19 projects within the U.S. and all over the world. For inquiries about RGF, contact: jsilin@optonline.net.

About Robert Giard
Robert Giard (1939-2002) was a portrait, landscape, and figure photographer who got here to the practice of photography relatively late in life. In 1972, he began to take photographs, concentrating on landscapes of the South Fork of Long Island, portraits of friends, lots of them artists and writers within the region, and the nude figure. He’s best known for photographing over 500 LGBTQ+ writers and activists. A variety from his project, Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, was published in 1997 by MIT Press and led to a groundbreaking exhibit on the Latest York Public Library the next yr.

In 1985, after seeing a performance of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, because the AIDS crisis raged, Giard decided to show his camera towards the LGBTQ+ literary community to preserve a record of queer lives and histories. He began documenting LGBTQ+ literary figures, each established and emerging, in a series of unadorned, yet sometimes witty and playful portraits that might eventually number over 500 by the point of his death. 

Giard’s work could be present in the collections of The National Portrait Gallery, The Library of Congress, The Brooklyn Museum, the Art Museum on the University of Toronto, the San Francisco Public Library, the Latest York Public Library, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; his complete archive, including work books and ephemera, could be found at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. For inquiries about Robert Giard’s work, contact: jsilin@optonline.net.

About Queer|Art
Queer|Art connects and empowers LGBTQ+ artists across generations and artistic disciplines. Founded in 2009, we’re an artist-led and community-centered organization—united by shared values of collective care, creative resilience, and the preservation and advancement of queer legacies and queer futures. 

The devastating lack of a generation of artists to the continuing AIDS pandemic has created a profound eager for cross-generational connections, mentorship, and community. Queer|Art serves as a ballast against this loss, in search of to focus on and address a seamless fundamental lack of each economic and institutional support for our community. 

Ongoing programmatic initiatives include: our annual cornerstone program, the year-long Queer|Art|Mentorship and a big selection of awards, grants, and offerings that provide direct support to LGBTQ+ artists.

Website: www.queer-art.org
Instagram: @queerart