Join us Sunday, July 9 from 1–3pm in YBCA’s Screening Room for an opportunity to hear from interdisciplinary social practice artists Sean Fader and Maureen Towey. In this dynamic conversation, Fader and Towey will unveil the design for their new project, Queer American Memorials.
Queer American Memorials is an evolution of Fader’s Insufficient Memory—an interactive Google Earth map which allows you to engage with a digital memorial to LGBTQ+ lives—which was installed in YBCA’s Grand Lobby during Pride month. In 2018, Fader began combing through historical archives—including old issues of queer publications, many of which have never been digitized and are therefore hard to find—to compile a database of every LGBTQ+ person who was murdered in a hate crime in the United States while the Hate Crimes Prevention Act was being debated from 1999 to 2000. Inspired by the Stumbling Stones in Germany and the Stonewall riots, Queer American Memorials is a nationwide project that aims to unearth erased queer histories and reclaim queer spaces that were lost to hate.
While at YBCA, you will have an opportunity to interact with the digital edition of Insufficient Memory. A digital and print installation of Insufficient Memory will also be on view in the exhibition Difference Machines—which addresses the complex relationship between the technologies we use and the identities we inhabit—at Gray Area in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood from July 7 through August 31.