BGSQDBureau of General Services—Queer Division
BGSQD
A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore‘s interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do. For this event, she will be joined in conversation by McKenzie Wark.
Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda’s work as “vulgar” and a “waste of talent” once it became unapologetically queer.
As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys’s paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys’s place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.
Sycamore writes, “Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over and back, over and back, welcome.”
Refusing easy answers in search of an embodied truth, Sycamore upends propriety to touch the art and feel everything that comes through.
This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.
Registration is not required. Seating is first come, first served.
Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:
Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.
All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.
We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or on Venmo @bgsqd
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the award-winning author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, she’s the author of three novels and three nonfiction titles, and the editor of six nonfiction anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis. Sycamore lives in Seattle, and her new book is Touching the Art, out now from Soft Skull Press.
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso), Raving (Duke) and Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte).