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

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,

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

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

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

Week 2 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Fiona Apple makes albums that don’t ask for your attention so much as they require it. The Idler Wheel… is a record that pulls inward. It doesn’t perform emotion—it examines it. Where Ani DiFranco invites you into a room full of people, Fiona Apple asks you to sit alone with your thoughts and stay there a while. Released in 2012, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You Mor

Week 1 of A Year with Queer Women’s Art, Film, and Music Ani DiFranco has always asked listeners to meet her in motion. Living in Clip doesn’t open with a statement so much as an atmosphere. The first track is instrumental, but her voice appears as sound rather than message—woven into rhythm, texture, breath. It’s a quiet signal that this album isn’t about polish or distance. It’s about presence. Like a lot of people, my entry point to Ani was through film—the movie Better Th