W/O ARCHITECTURE, THERE WOULD BE NO STONEWALL; WITHOUT ARCHITECTURE THERE WOULD BE NO “BRICK”
June 04 - June 30,2021
For more information, go here. From the organizers: "GeoVanna Gonzalez Najja Moon Daniella Rascon Angel Garcia Terrell Villiers Connie Fu Jessica Carolina Gonzalez Veronica Gaona Erick Zambrano Angel Lartigue Alejandro Penagos Juan Betancurth Curated by: Junior Fernandez and S Rodriguez
The first brick thrown at Stonewall — what has become the origin myth for the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement signals, by way of the brick — the essential tooled apparatus of architecture, a radical indigeneity in queer engagement with the built environment. Today, the “gayborhood,” as it exists under late capitalism, is a commodity fetish on display exhibiting and marketing queerness as state-oriented activism and testifying to the depoliticization of LGBTQ+ people under a neoliberal rubric of “gay rights.” Rainbow-packaged Oreos and other tokens of late capitalism re-frame the initial obstruction of the Stonewall riots into a sterilized history.
without architecture, there would be no stonewall; without architecture, there would be no “brick” is a curatorially driven series of actions by a group of multidisciplinary artists whose practices are rooted in critiquing the convergence of politics and the built environment. The series draws from the unrecorded history of Mary’s Naturally, a legendary Houston gay bar and one of the oldest in Texas by the time of its permanent closing in November 2009. From Houston’s “Stonewall equivalent” to a “coffeehouse with gourmet, barista-made drinks, home-baked goods & light fare in an industrial space,” Mary’s redevelopment is a revealing allegory exposing the politics embedded within the built environment of the gay village. The exhibition series is set to occur every June at the former Mary’s outback, now a paved parking lot, running alongside the citywide and national gay pride month commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. The continual reactivation of the site also recalls and functions as a continuation of early AIDS mourning practices and works to materialize, if only briefly, the inscribed trauma of what we cannot see. The Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of GLBT History estimates that as many as 300 people were laid to rest or had their ashes scattered at the exhibition site."
