andrea geyer’s a promise of lightning takes inspiration from the network of connections made among trees in a forest. Gathered together, trees can form vast, evolving webs of visible and invisible layers in which resources, distress signals, and memories are in continual exchange. Intergenerational communication is key to their survival. Taking its title from Audre Lorde’s 1973 poem “Movement Song,” which explores both loss and hope, the exhibition asks: How might we consider queerness as a form of multi-temporal relations to and within wider hegemonic cultures? How might under-known frameworks of the natural world conceptually and emotionally expand our capacity for resilience?
 
Within the gallery are two new bodies of work: a promise of lightning, a group of quilted and embroidered multilayered silkscreens; and breathturns, a multi-screen video installation. The imagery for both works is taken from the Black Forest in southern Germany, where the artist grew up and experienced her own queer formation. The works are interspersed with images of activist organizing and protests culled from the collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and are accompanied by a newsprint publication and newly released online database. The Future is Now: An Impossible Archive of Queer Advocacy and Resistance brings together information on more than one thousand LGBTQIA+ historic and contemporary organizations in the United States gathered from online and offline archives, books, research papers, primary sources, and oral histories. These organizations engage(d) in community building and education; social, cultural, and political advocacy; and direct action. Conceived as an urgent and timely response to the current repressive political environment and the renewed violent culture wars waged on the LGBTQIA+ community, The Future is Now projects a resilient landscape of possibility, accomplishments, and community within which we can organize, advocate, and resist today. The archive can only ever be incomplete, holding both that which we can remember or research, and that which lies as intangible sustenance below a queer collective consciousness. Viewers will be able to take home a newsprint first-edition of The Future is Now, and are invited through an open submission form to contribute to this collective project of recording queer histories.

geyer’s exhibition is the second project in the Museum's Interventions series, which invites LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural producers to engage with the Museum’s expansive collection and creatively present their research, building new narratives and interpretations from diverse subjectivities.

works selected from Leslie Lohman's permanent collection are by:

Ellen Bedoz (Ellen Shumsky)
Robin Chaia Mide
Bruce Crastley
Diana Davies
George Dudley
Donna Gottschalk
Peter Hujar
JEB (Joan E. Biren)
Thomas McGovern
Ann P. Meredith
Rink Foto
Diana Solis
Sara Swaty

Works in the exhibition:

a promise of lightning
works on paper

Breathturns
video installation

The Future Is Now: An Impossible Archive of Queer Advocacy and Resilance
newsprint & archive

Exhibition page: