Julie Tolentino and SPACES are one of the five winners of the 2023 Joyce Awards, which lift up collaborations between artists of color and arts and community organizations throughout the Great Lakes region.
“We will work together to co-create and explore impactful methods that ground longevity and commitments to long-held collective change that have been informed by refusal, interdependency, and connection. _UNTITLED_ (Queer Futures) centers intergenerational bonds, strategy, and movements that continue to unfold, shift, and reshape lives as we both recognize and rely upon Others as the baseline in art, advocacy, and activist contexts. As partners in this experiment, exploring queer time unlocks lifetimes of untold yet felt bonds, expressive language, and desire to acknowledge and celebrate the impacts of another’s life—as essential to the making of one’s own.” –Julie Tolentino
Interdisciplinary artist Julie Tolentino will build connections with a diverse group of LGBTQ+ community members in Cleveland to develop _UNTITLED_ (Queer Futures), an experimental performance installation exploring the possibilities of collectivity and intergenerational exchange. Presented by the alternative art venue SPACES, this project proposes processes that include local oral history interviews, archival research, and intimate group conversations, including community movement, artmaking, and writing workshops. Participants will share past, present, and future recollections, illuminating the necessarily multiple approaches to advocacy, resistance, consistency, and renewal to bridge experiences amongst folks of varying generations, experiences, and backgrounds. _UNTITLED_ (Queer Futures) unfolds as community participants join Tolentino in conversation, creation, and reflection to inspire a vital series of artworks to take shape around their shared vision, dialogues, and values, working together to celebrate visionary queer life.
About Julie Tolentino
Julie Tolentino (b. 1964, she/they interchangeably) is an interdisciplinary artist who works across durational performance, installation, objects, collaboration, sound, scent, and texts. Their work has been featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial (with Ivy Kwan Arce), The New Museum, The Kitchen, Participant, Inc., Performance Space New York, Aspen Art Museum, Thessaloniki Biennial, Pact Zollverein, House of World Cultures-Berlin, Theaterworks-Singapore, Manila Contemporary and Papaya Arts-Manila, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions-LACE, The Lab, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts among others. Projects include a Visual AIDS Duet book with Kia LaBeija; Movements in Blue with the What Would An HIV Doula Do? Collective; the 1991 Women’s Safer Sex Handbook with Cynthia Madansky for the Lesbian AIDS Project and Gay Men’s Health Project (GMHC); the ongoing Archive in Dirt, 2018+, and The Sky Remains The Same—a lifetime archival work proposing the body as an (aging) archive and container of record.
About SPACES
SPACES is a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, OH with a mission to serve as the resource and public forum for artists who explore and experiment. Operating for over 40 years as a residency, exhibition space, and re-granting organization, SPACES commissions and presents major projects by artists-in-residence working in all media, provides resources to cultural producers, and serves as a welcoming access point for audiences to experience experimental concepts. Supported artists include Chloë Bass, Pope.L, Michael Rakowitz, Cooking Sections, and more. SPACES complements the exhibition and residency programs with creative engagement supporting their surrounding communities in Cleveland, hosting workshops, lectures, group tours, and skill-sharing events. Beyond programming, they provide nearly $150,000 in re-granted awards to artists and cultural producers around Cuyahoga County, infusing the region with unparalleled resources for creative work. SPACES was selected to commission and curate the United States Pavilion for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, organizing the exhibition Everlasting Plastics which will run from May 20 to November 26, 2023.
