EXHIBITION ABSTRACT
“Vanguard Social: Visions of Southern Queer Resistance,” highlights the works of Southern QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color) artists as a means of empowering and uplifting their lived experience. This exhibition places emphasis on the pivotal role of QTBIPOC creatives in the push for liberation, while also highlighting the need for solidarity throughout communities that are unequivocally marginalized by way of systemic oppression.
This exhibition was modeled in tandem with a multimedia arts-based initiative (of the same name), which serves the purpose of providing QTBIPOC communities and their allies with the resources and tools needed to generate creative practices that are grounded in decolonized and queer-normative frameworks. This initiative offers an intersectional and intergenerational approach to dismantling various forms of oppression that exist within our communities, and seeks to empower transformative solutions that call for our collective liberation, all through creative means.
Vanguard Social, both as an exhibition and an initiative, recognizes the increasing need to generate creative spaces for communities that have been historically marginalized and disempowered; this comes from a basic understanding that creativity can not only be used as a means of exploring the intersections of identity, but also as a catalyst to affect substantial change within society.
Viewers are encouraged to thoroughly consider the role they personally assume in relation to movements that call for the decolonization of our social structures and the empowerment of underserved communities.
