Wendy's Subway: The Ways We Need Each Other: On Trans Infrastructures of Care, 10/27
Edited, graphic version of a 1971 archival poster by STAR, reproduced on pg. 73 of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. The original poster is housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the NYPL. [Image description: On a mauve background is a pen drawing of a house with a star on top and the text “SISTERS AND BROTHERS, PLEASE COME TO OUR OPEN HOUSE CAKE SALE.'“]
Artists and organizers Jamie Lee of Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective and Ianne Fields Stewart of The Okra Project in Conversation
Thu, October 29, from 6:00 to 7:30 PM EDT
You can register for this event here.
About this Event
This is an online event and will take place on Zoom.
Organized as part of the NYC Trans Oral History Project’s residency at Wendy’s Subway, this panel works to document the vital mutual aid work of Black trans activists who must create their own structures of community support. In this conversation, artists and organizers Jamie Lee of Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective and Ianne Fields Stewart of The Okra Project will discuss their experience cultivating care networks, their relations to the history and genealogy of trans mutual aid projects, and the world-making artistry at the center of organizing work.
About the speakers
Jamie Lee is a Black Trans* women/femme who hails from the Bay Area. The exigency of her work looks to the ways Black Trans* literature, visual & performance art, and healing justice generates new theoretical and material forms of gathering, assembly, and congregating at the end of the world. Furthermore, Jamie is currently in graduate school studying to become a licensed Drama Therapist, where she will use theatre and performances based healing modalities to aid her community through exploring ways to reengage a multitude of scenes and moments in trans histories and everyday life that impact the collective well-being of Black women and femmes. Moreover Jamie believes these practices can curate new forms of collective and communal living in our lives. Jamie comes from a rich history of black feminist organizing, she is currently a board member of Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, where there work is devoted to the beautiful art that black Trans* worlds offer for the liberation for all black peoples across the diaspora.
Ianne Fields Stewart (pronouns: she/her/they/them) is a Black, queer, lesbian, and nonbinary transfeminine New York-based storyteller working at the intersection of theatre and activism. Their work and she are dedicated to interrupting the exclusivity of luxury by making things like entertainment, nourishment, and self-care accessible to the most marginalized in their community. In a world that is constantly traumatizing Black bodies she believes that Black queer and trans people should have the space and time to center collective emotional, physical, and sensual pleasure. In the summer of 2017, Ianne was selected out of over 500 applicants to be one of the 15 US Fellows for Humanity in Action's 2017 John Lewis Fellowship. During this fellowship, Ianne studied and organized with contemporary and historic civil rights leaders in Atlanta, GA exploring the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and its roots in present day social justice movements. Since then, Ianne has developed a cultural competency consulting and teaching artist practice which spans from talkback facilitation to teaching artistry to community outreach and organizing. Spaces that have benefited from Ianne’s practice include: The Alliance of Resident Theatres, Lincoln Center Theater, MCC Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Music Theatre Factory, NYC charter schools, and the Rose M. Singer Center on Riker's Island.
Ianne is also the founder of The Okra Project which seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People wherever they can reach them. The Okra Project gained immense prominence in June 2020 when the project announced the Nina Pop and Tony McDade Mental Health Recovery Funds which supplies Black Trans People with free therapy with Black therapists. Ianne’s platform also substantially grew when she co-organized Brooklyn Liberation: A Rally for Black Trans Lives and delivered a speech in front of 15,000 people who gathered to march for Black lives.
About the New York City Trans Oral History Project
The NYC Trans Oral History Project is a collective, community archive working to document transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. They work 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. They privilege the insights of vulnerable trans communities fighting the structural dismantling of public benefits, housing insecurity and homelessness, policing, and surveillance.
Support
The Wendy’s Subway Residency Program is made possible through a Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation Art and Social Justice Grant, and through public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, administered in Kings County by the Brooklyn Arts Council.