Image: Installation view, Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
LIVE PRIDEFULLY: Love and Resilience within Pandemics - The Exhibition
Exhibition Reception: Saturday, February 19th at 2 pm
Queens Museum: New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368
Due to COVID-19 protocols, space is limited. RSVP here: https://bit.ly/34hGeLO
On view until March 6, 2022
As part of the Queens Museum’s Year of Uncertainty, the Caribbean Equality Project is proud to present Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrates queer and trans Caribbean resilience through a racial justice lens, while fostering critical conversations related to pride, migration, surviving colliding pandemics, and coming out narratives. Caribbean diasporic immigrant rights, gender justice, and trans rights advocates live at the intersections of outdated immigration policies, anti-black violence, racism, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based violence, xenophobia, and misogyny in the United States and throughout the Caribbean region.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, queer and trans immigrants of color have lived in a constant state of fear and isolation, from food insecurity, a lack of access to equitable healthcare, and rising rates of anti-Asian violence and police brutality against Black bodies. In a year of uncertainty, Live Pridefully reimagines and affirms undocumented Black and Brown LGBTQ+ immigrants and asylum seekers as essential workers, creatives, and contributors to the cultural diversity of New York City.
Featured Community Members:
Rajiv Mohabir | Qween Jean | Rohan Zhou-Lee | Darren J. Glenn | Tannuja Rozario | Theo Brown | Tiffany Jade Munroe
Curated by Mohamed Q. Amin, portraits of Caribbean LGBTQ+ immigrants anchor the exhibition, with oral Afro and Indo-Caribbean migrant histories and stories driven to construct healing through storytelling, embodied resilience, and intersectional dialogue on postcolonial belonging, anti-Asian hate violence, and Black trans liberation.
Queering the Moko Jumbie, 2021
The exhibition features a 10-foot-high Moko Jumbie installation designed by Mohamed Q. Amin, Founder and Executive Director of the Caribbean Equality Project, and Charles Watts of Tropical Fete, as a reimagined Caribbean carnival symbol of queer Caribbean emancipation.
Creatives and Contributors:
Curator and Director: Mohamed Q. Amin
Videographer and Visual Director: Richard Ramsundar
Photographer: Christian Thane
Ryan Persadie: Moko Jumbie History
Moko Jumbie Designers: Mohamed Q. Amin and Charles Watts
Moko Jumbie Creators: Charles Watts, Anoop H. Pandohie, Detoxx Bústi-ae, and Mohamed Q. Amin
Make Artist: The King Ivy
Production Assistant: Detoxx Bústi-ae
About the Year of Uncertainty (YoU):
In 2021, the Queens Museum embarked on a Year of Uncertainty (YoU), a framework for strengthening connections among the Museum, our communities, and constituents, focused on creating new possibilities for culture, kinship, and mutual support. Centered around themes of Care, Repair, Play, Justice, and the Future, this program responds to hyperlocal and international states of precarity that have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the crises of inaction and unaccountability toward racial justice and xenophobia, climate reparations, and income disparity.
The Caribbean Equality Project is one of nine Community Partners from across the borough of Queens included in the YoU cohort of advocacy community-based organizations. The exhibitions of the nine Community Partners are tackling issues such as gender-justice, mental health, environmental justice, youth enrichment, gun violence prevention and intervention, LGBTQ+ activism, and civil rights for transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) people and sex workers.
The Year of Uncertainty artist residencies and community partnerships are made possible by generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Lambent Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.
Presenters and partners
