News
Writer and Curator Jeanne Vaccaro visits GVSU
February 05, 2017
For its final lecture, this year's "Art and The Radical" series welcomes Jeanne Vaccaro to the Department of Art and Design. Vaccaro's lecture is scheduled for Monday, February 6th, 2017, 5:00 p.m., in room 1718 Calder Arts Center, in the Allendale Campus. The Visiting Artist Committee worked this past year on developing a series of talks featuring creative workers whose projects deepen our understanding of the world by revealing alternate histories, highlighting marginalized communities, and challenging widely held beliefs and traditions. Aside from Vaccaro, the Department hosted Jen DeLosReyes, Nicolas Lampert and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz for a series of activities with students in the Department of Art and Design and the broader GVSU community.
Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer and curator and she works in the intersection of performance and aesthetics, feminist art and archives, histories of the body, and queer politics. She is the curator of Bring Your Own Body: Transgender Between Archives and Aesthetics, organized for the Cooper Union (one of ArtNet's most memorable museum shows of 2015) and editor of "The Transbiological Body" (Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory) on transgender reproductive ecologies. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, explores the felt labor of identity in soft sculpture, fiber art, dance, and film; it was awarded a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2016. With Reina Gossett and A.J. Lewis she co-organizes the New York City Transgender Oral History Project for the New York Public Library.
Jeanne is a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and postdoctoral fellow in Gender Studies at Indiana University (2014-17). She earned a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University (2012) and held an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2012-14). In fall 2016 she is teaching a queer methods laboratory in Bring Your Own Body at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College and organizing the symposium Queer Genealogies.