KATIE GILMARTIN
Teaching Artist for Queer Ancestors Project Prints!
Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a buoyant union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She attended Oberlin College and Yale Graduate School, and for over a decade taught cultural studies classes with an emphasis on the histories of gender and sexuality. On an urgent quest to relocate pleasure, Katie took a printmaking class and become utterly smitten with the medium. She now runs Chrysalis Print Studio at SOMArts, where she teaches linocut and monotype classes. Along the way she founded City Art Cooperative Gallery, a still-thriving artspace on Valencia Street, and the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young Queer and Trans artists and their ancestors.
Katie’s prints consistently interweave the visual and the verbal. The “Queer Words” series explores the multiple meanings of Queer slang – retooled epithets, secret codes, and camp – as a record of creative resistance. Her “Pulps” are faux pulp fiction covers: art for novels she’s invented that are set in 1950s San Francisco and celebrate the city’s history. In writing blurbs for these fabricated novels, Katie engaged deeply with the aesthetics of pulp fiction and noir. Gradually, the text outgrew the prints and became an actual novel: Blackmail, My Love, a noir mystery that explores real and imagined Queer ancestors in early 1950s San Francisco. Published by Cleis Press in 2014, the illustrated novel won both Lambda Literary and Indiefab Book of the Year Gold awards. Her short story, “White Horse,” appears in the just-published collection Oakland Noir, edited by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller.
Katie is the current recipient, along with Openhouse, of a Creative Work Fund grant to honor and preserve LGBT elders’ memories of tavern culture and bar raids through interviews, walking tours, and her next novel: Vice Academy, a fictional account of factual taverns and raids in mid-1950s San Francisco. Amid a nation-wide crackdown on LGBT bars, San Francisco law enforcement mounted a “drive on sex deviates” that drew attention and involvement from legislators, media, the local PTA, and a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Gilmartin is currently interviewing LGBT elders about their experiences in bar culture and raids during the 1950s and early 1960s, in the Bay Area and across the U.S. Find out more at katiegilmartin.com or email Katie at katie@katiegilmartin.com.
TRINIDAD ESCOBAR
Teaching Artist for Queer Ancestors Project Comix
Trinidad Escobar is a cartoonist and arts educator. Her journalism, funnies, and poetry have been featured in NPR, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Nib, and collections published by Abrams, Scholastic Books, IDW, and more. She is the artist and author of CRUSHED, a comic book about adoption, autism, and spirituality. Trinidad's collection of erotic lesbian poetry comics, Arrive In My Hands, was nominated for the Ignatz and her work on race and friendship in Jamila Rowser's Ode to Keisha landed the book on several Best Comics lists including The Nerdist and Broken Frontier. Her comics on sexual violence were shown at The Society of Illustators in New York, as well as museums in Italy, Belgium, the UK, the Netherlands, and the Philippines. She is a popular education teacher (Freire, Baldwin, Said) who provides radical arts workshops to her community within their homes and neighborhoods. Using comics as a transgressive medium she emphasizes the importance of art as a critical part of the collective resistance against imperialism and colonization.
Kaleidoscope
Teaching Artists!
Tina Bartolome (lead Teaching Artist) was born and raised in San Francisco, the queer daughter of working class immigrants from the Philippines and Switzerland. Somewhere between coming out, facing eviction, writing on walls, and fighting racist propositions, she joined the movement and never looked back. She is a storyteller and social justice educator striving to continue the legacies of Paulo Freire, June Jordan and Yuri Kochyama. She would not be the artist she is without local organizations like Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, Bindlestiff Studio, KulArts, Kreatibo, Kearny Street Workshop, and Intersection for the Arts. Her writing can be found in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (Haymarket Books, 2020) and Still Here: An Anthology of Queer and Trans People Raised in San Francisco (Foglifter Press, 2019). She currently lives in South City with her partner and three cats.
Mason J. is a Blaxican-Indigenous visual, literary, & performing artist, public speaker, history lover, youth, and elder worker raised gender creative by their family in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are a coeditor of the anthology Still Here San Francisco and author of a 2022 Lambda Literary trans poetry finalist chapbook, Crossbones on My Life. They have taught art-ivism to youth ages 3-24 of many genders and orientations in elementary, middle, and high schools, art camps, lgbt centers, and community spaces.
tanea lunsford lynx is a fourth-generation Black San Franciscan on both sides. tanea is a writer, educator, and cultural worker. She leads the Spoken Arts Department at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and teaches Social justice and Ethnic Studies classes at City College of San Francisco. She is at work on her second book, a work of creative nonfiction. You can find her work online at tanealunsfordlynx.com.
Tina Valentin Aguirre (genderqueer, they/them pronouns) makes movies, writes poetry and prose, and produces art shows and artistic performances. Tina holds a BA in Communication from Stanford University, has worked in grantwriting for decades, served as Chair of the Board of Directors for the GLBT Historical Society for four years, and works as the District Manager of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District. Movies include a 30 minute documentary made with Augie Robles, ¡Viva 16! (1994, english/spanish) to mark the loss and struggles of the queer Latinx community in San Francisco. In 2019, selections of Tina’s poetry were published (Still Here San Francisco Anthology, Foglifter Press). Tina produced a multimedia night of performances (¡Aplauso!) and curated the Chosen Familias exhibition on LGBTQ Latinx family photo albums (June 7-October 20, 2019) at the GLBT Historical Society Museum. The Juana opera (composed by Carla Lucero) that Tina produced in 2007 was given a full production at UCLA in November 2019. In 2020, Tina collaborated with Win Mixter to produce two posters on their queer mother, Teresita, La Campesina, a transLatinx ranchera singer, sex worker, and activist who died of AIDS in 2002.
Vero Majano is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in San Francisco's Mission District. Her work creates space to acknowledge and remember the queer Latinx communities that have shaped one of San Francisco's most iconic yet contested neighborhoods. As a storyteller and curator, Majano's practice includes live cinema, archival film, performance, collage, which preserve stories and work towards a collective goal of including untold narratives in a greater San Francisco history, like the flowers on hippies on Haight Street. Her work has shown at the Guggenheim Museum in NewYork, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the deYoung Museum, Oakland Museum of California and Galeria de la Raza. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Media Fellowship, the Puffin Foundation, SF Arts Commission, and the Free History Project, and was a resident at the HeadlandsCenter for the Arts and Djerassi Resident Artist program.