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Fine Art - Harmony Hammond: Making as resistance, abstraction as survival
Week 4 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Harmony Hammond has spent her career doing something deceptively simple: making work anyway. Long before queer art was welcomed by institutions—or even named safely—Hammond was building a visual language rooted in feminism, materiality, and refusal. Her work doesn’t announce itself loudly, but it doesn’t yield either. Hammond emerged from the feminist art movement of the 1970s, but her practice quickly moved beyond cate
Lisa Smith
Jan 312 min read


Music - Choose Your Weapon — Hiatus Kaiyote - Refusing legibility, choosing complexity
Week 4 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Fronted by Nai Palm, Hiatus Kaiyote make music that doesn’t settle down. Choose Your Weapon isn’t interested in being easily categorized, quickly consumed, or neatly summarized—and that’s precisely its power. At first listen, the album Choose Your Weapon — Hiatus Kaiyote can feel disorienting. Songs stretch and fold in on themselves. Time signatures shift. Melodies arrive sideways. Genres blur into one another—neo-soul,
Lisa Smith
Jan 312 min read
Fine Art - Mickalene Thomas: Desire, power, and the right to take up space
Week 3 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Mickalene Thomas makes work that refuses to shrink. Her paintings, collages, and installations are lush, saturated, and unapologetically bold. They glitter—sometimes literally—but the surface beauty is never the point on its own. Thomas uses excess with intention. She understands adornment as power. Her work centers Black women—often queer women—in poses that recall art history while firmly rejecting its exclusions. Rec
Lisa Smith
Jan 242 min read


Music - Honey — Robyn
Week 3 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Honey is Robyn at her quietest—and maybe her bravest. After the maximal heartbreak of Body Talk, this album pulls the lights down. It’s still dance music, but it’s slower, softer, and more inward-facing. If Body Talk was about surviving in public, Honey is about feeling in private and choosing when (and how) to let that be seen. Sonically, it’s minimal and tactile. The beats are warm and rounded rather than sharp; synth
Lisa Smith
Jan 232 min read
Fine Art - Catherine Opie: Looking honestly, without asking permission
Week 2 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Catherine Opie makes work that doesn’t rush you. Her photographs ask for time, and they reward it. Like Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel…, Opie’s practice is about staying with things that are often smoothed over—identity, intimacy, discomfort, domesticity—and refusing to tidy them up for someone else’s ease. Opie emerged in the early 1990s, at a moment when queer communities were under intense pressure: politically, medic
Lisa Smith
Jan 172 min read
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