The Long Table is a dinner party structured by etiquette, where conversation is the only course.
The project combines theatricality and models for public engagement. It is at once a stylised appropriation and an open-ended, non-hierarchical format for participation. Both of these elements – theatrical craft and political commitment – are mutually supporting in this widely and internationally toured work. The (often-feminised) domestic realm here becomes a stage for public thought.
Everyone in the room has the power (and imperative, with the communal interest for a more satisfying discussion) to shift the direction of conversation, to mediate moments of tension and to make space for voices less easily heard. This format was named and organized as “the long table” by Lois Weaver.
More informaiton below about some of the participants of the long table discussions held at the Stamps Gally on Nov. 1st:
Tony WhitfieldTony Whitfield is a multi-media artist, designer, writer and educator whose theater work has been shown by La MaMa, ETC. His artworks have been shown in solo shows at HOWL! Happening in NYC, the Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano in Lima, Centre LGBTQ and NUIT BLANCHE 2017 in Paris, and group exhibitions in galleries and museums including Village in Berlin, NYC’s Museum of Art and Design, Leslie Lohman Museum, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History. and published in the US and abroad. His video installation, Paris, 1938, was featured in Paris’ NUIT BLANCHE 2017. Whitfield also writes about art, new media, film, performance and design, and is an Emeritus Professor at The New School where he taught at Parsons School of Design between 1993 and 2020. Since 1976 he has also been an influential member of the public and non-profit sectors in NYC’s arts community.
Nicole MarroquinNicole Marroquin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and teacher educator whose current research looks at Chicago school uprisings between 1967-74. She has recently been an artist in-residence at the Chicago Cultural Center, with the Propeller Fund at Mana Contemporary, at Watershed, Ragdale, ACRE and Oxbow. In 2017 she presented her art and research at the Hull House Museum, Northwestern University and the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2015, Marroquin was invited to present research at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the exhibit The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980 and at the Art Institute of Chicago for the symposium The Wall of Respect and People’s Art Since 1967. Her essays are included in the Chicago Social Practice History Series, Revista Contratiempo and AREA Chicago Magazine, and her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Mexican Art. In 2012 her work was featured in the 1ro Bienial Continental de Arte Indigenas Contemporaria at the Museo Nacional De Culturas Populares in Mexico City. She was a Joan Mitchell Fellow at the Center for Racial Justice Innovation in 2014, and she received the Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz Women of Excellence Award in 2011 for her work in her community. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2008 and she is Associate Professor in the Department of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Allyson MitchellAllyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. These articulations have resulted in a coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters, a room-sized Vagina Dentata, an army of super genius Holly Hobbies and a woodland utopic library complete with a wishing well of forbidden political knowledge.
Joey QuiñonesJoey Quiñones is a fiber and ceramic artist. Their work focuses on African American and Caribbean history, as well as the intricacies of Afro-Latinx identity. They were selected as an Emerging Artist of 2020 by Ceramics Monthly, an Augusta Savage Grant recipient by the National Sculpture Society, and an Annual Prize Finalist by Manifest Gallery. Their work has been shown at venues such as the Belger Arts Center, Manifest Gallery, the Akron Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center, the Crocker Museum, the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, and the Winterthur Museum. In the 2024-2025 academic year they will serve as the McAndless Distinguished Professor Chair at Eastern Michigan University. They have an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. They have had residencies at Vermont Studio Center, the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and the Arts/Industry residency in Foundry at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. They are currently the Artist-in-Residence/Head of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI.
Chris E. VargasChris E. Vargas is a video maker & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Bellingham, WA whose work deploys humor and performance in conjunction with mainstream idioms to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical & institutional memory and popular culture. He earned his MFA in the department of Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011 and his BA in the Film & Digital Media department from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2006. He is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital award and a 2020 John S. Guggenheim fellowship. From 2008-2013, he made, in collaboration with Greg Youmans, the web-based trans/cisgender sitcom Falling In Love...with Chris and Greg. Episodes of the series have screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including MIX NYC, SF Camerawork, and the Tate Modern. With Eric Stanley, Vargas co-directed the movie Homotopia (2006) and its feature-length sequel Criminal Queers (2015) which have been screened at Palais de Tokyo, LACE, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, and the New Museum among other venues. Vargas is also the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, a critical and conceptual arts & hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the cultural and political landscape.Deirdre LogueFor the past 20 years, the film and video work of Canadian artist Deirdre Logue has focused on the self as subject. Using 'performance for the camera' as a primary mode of production, her compelling self-portraits investigate what it means to be a queer body in the age of anxiety.
Logue has been prolific and steadfast in her engagement with the moving image and has subsequently produced upwards of 60 short films and videos as well as some of this country's most celebrated video art installations including Enlightened Nonsense (1997-2000), ten hand- processed performance-based works about childhood worries; Why Always Instead of Just Sometimes (2003-2007), twelve works that are reflections on aging, breaking down and reparation; Id's Its (2012), an ambitious suite of thirteen installations exploring the richness of our malfunctions and Euphoria's Hiccups (2013) an intentionally intense, site specific work incorporating upwards of 20 small video screens, still imagery, sound and psychoactive plants; cross-pollinating Logue's tendencies towards obsession and addiction with contemporary thinking on healing, landscape and mindfulness.
Andrea BolivarDr. Andrea Bolivar is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Latinx studies, Transgender Studies, and Feminist Studies. Her book manuscript, “We Are a Fantasy:” Trans Latina Ways of Knowing, Being, and Loving (New York University Press, under contract), ethnographically examines the experiences of sex working transgender Latinas in the Chicago metropolitan area. It centers sex working trans Latinas’ epistemologies and ontologies, especially concerning five interrelated themes: fantasía, life/death, the body, immigration, and race--particularly Blackness and anti-Blackness. Further, We Are a Fantasy demonstrates how sex working trans Latina ways of being and knowing not only defy racist-cisgenderism more broadly, but also offer potentialities beyond transnormativity and normative Latinidad. Dr. Bolivar’s work is published in journals such as Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Feminist Anthropology, Latinx Talk and edited volumes on queer nightlife and Latinx ethnography. Dr. Bolivar obtained her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, and held an LSA Collegiate Fellowship at the University of Michigan. She has received the Junior Faculty Outstanding Scholarship and Engagement Award from ALLA (Association of Latina/Latino/Latinx Anthropologists), and the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. As the first in her family to graduate high school, Professor Bolivar is committed to supporting diversity in academia.
Larry LaFountainMy main research interests are theater and performance studies, queer/LGBT Hispanic Caribbean (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican) studies, and U.S. Latina/o/x and Latin American literary and cultural studies. In my first book, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), I analyze portrayals of migration, sexual diversity, and gender nonconformity in Puerto Rican cultural productions (such as cartoons, dance theater, film, literature, and performance art) both on the island and in the United States, focusing on the lives and work of artists such as Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika López, Arthur Avilés, and Elizabeth Marrero.
In my more recent book, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), I focus on migration, transvestism, and performance and argue that drag can serve not only to question gender and sexuality but also to explore commodification, cyberspace, diasporic displacements and reenactments of home, ethnicity, the human/animal divide, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and racial passing. Here I discuss the lives and work of artists and activists such as Javier Cardona, Lady Catiria, Kevin Fret, Monica Beverly Hillz, Erika Lopez, Freddie Mercado, Jorge Merced, Sylvia Rivera, and Holly Woodlawn, as well as the recent phenomenon of Puerto Rican participation in RuPaul’s Drag Race. I also look at documentary films such as Paris Is Burning (1990), The Salt Mines (1990), Mala Mala (2014, dir. Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles), and at the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret.
Esther Newton Esther Newton is a founder of and leading scholar in LGBTQ studies. She has taught at Purchase College of the State University of New York, the University of Paris VII, Paris, France and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She was active in Second Wave Feminism, Gay Liberation and the Lesbian/Feminist movements. Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Hebrew, Polish and Slovak.Ksenia SobolevaDr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled "Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States." Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, as well as various monographs and exhibition catalogues. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum, where she assisted in organizing the Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks exhibition. She is the recipient of the Baxter St. Camera Club of New York 2022 Guest Curatorial Initiative, where she will be opening an exhibition of photographs by Rachel Stern, titled “One Must Not Look At Anything.” She is also co-editing (together with Svetlana Kitto) the first monograph on TRIAL BALLOON, the lesbian 1990s gallery and project space founded by Nicola Tyson. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society.
Clare CroftClare Croft is a dance historian and theorist, as well as a dramaturg and curator. She is the author of Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford, 2015), a study of the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. She is also the editor of the book and website Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), a collection of essays by scholars and artists. In connection to this volume, Croft also curates the EXPLODE: queer dance project, which began in Ann Arbor (2012-15), toured to New York (2015), and will tour nationally in 2019.
Croft is the founder and curator of Daring Dances, a curatorial initiative based in southeast Michigan dedicated to making space for dance and the pleasurably difficult conversations dance invites.
An active dramaturg, Croft frequently collaborates with artists including Thomas DeFrantz and Jennifer Harge, and leads community engagement work with arts presenters including Ann Arbor’s UMS; the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon’s TBA Festival.
Croft’s academic writing has appeared in numerous journals including QED: Journal of LGBTQ Worldmaking, Dance Research Journal, and Theatre Journal. Her writing has been recognized widely: Dancers as Diplomats received the Congress on Research in Dance’s Outstanding Publication Prize in 2016, and the article “Ballet Nations” received the American Society of Theatre Research’s Sally Banes Publication Prize in 2010. Croft is also the editor of the series Studies in Dance History, the book series of the Dance Studies Association. In all her work, Croft seeks to cross the divide between academia and the arts world, and she has written for venues like The Brooklyn Rail and The Washington Post.
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