Andrea Geyer / a promise of lightning
Press release and image courtesy Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and the artist
Image Credit: Andrea Geyer, a promise of lightning, 2024. Work in progress with photographs by JEB (Joan E. Biren), Sara Swaty, Ann P.Meredith, Ellen Shumsky, and George Dudley, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Andrea Geyer / a promise of lightning
Sep 04, 2024 – Jan 12, 2025
at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York
Opening: September 3, 2024
Andrea Geyer / a promise of lightning takes inspiration from the network of connections made among trees in the 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, and intergenerational communication is key to 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?
Andrea Geyer shares, “I see my role as an artist to create spaces in which we can connect to the many temporal layers of multifaceted knowledge accumulated through the tireless labor of others active before us. I want my work to offer time for this important intergenerational and intersectional thinking and feeling, not as a lingering in nostalgia but as dedicated fostering of new forms of imagination and forward-thinking right now.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a newsprint publication and online database titled The Future Is Now: An Impossible Archive Of Queer Advocacy And Resistance. This newly released archive, here seen in its first iteration, brings together information on more than 1000 historic and contemporary LGBTQIA+ organizations in the US gathered from online and offline archives, books, research papers, primary sources and oral histories.
Geyer’s exhibition is the second project in the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s Interventions series curated by Stamatina Gregory, LLMA’s Head Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections. Interventions invites LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural producers to engage the Museum’s collection and creatively present their research, building new narratives and interpretations from diverse subjectivities. The Interventions series offers a unique platform for public access to the Museum’s artworks, establishing a new avenue for showcasing the expansive and historical collection that Leslie-Lohman has acquired over five decades.
Gregory states, “Within the exhibition, Geyer’s layered methods of research, synthesis and accumulation become analogous to the understory—the ground-level forest layer characterized by rich diversity and adaptation in a space of suppressed resources. Histories of activism, organizing, and representation become a place to ground us within an ongoing moment of repressive, deadly anti-queer and trans legislation.”
Public programming for Andrea Geyer / a promise of lightning includes Come out with joy, speak out for justice: A Queer Salon — a series of gatherings that offer an urgent organizing space at a moment in which election politics has targeted the lives of communities all across the country.
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and the New York State Council for the Arts.