Art has long been a cornerstone for revolution. Whereas there are many narratives about artistic interventions in the established norms and systems of oppression within society, there has been less investigation of how the values held within artistic spaces inspire revolutionary change. Artistic spaces produce different modes for thinking about art, its function, and how to create space for its production by all people. I researched these norms within the context of Dutch art cooperatives that emerged from squatting movements in the 1960s and 70s. My research gave me an understanding of Dutch anarchist frameworks and their implications for creating new forms of working environments that prioritize community over capital. In Seattle, I constructed an ethnography to find different values in artistic communities through interviews and experiences in those spaces. I used my research in artistic spaces to map the values held and record how those values implicate different structural frameworks. My main question is how artistic spaces produce different structures that allow for interventions into systems of oppression and to what extent they open opportunities for revolutionary change and individual growth. I measured these through qualitative findings through interviews to find the varying values held within a community and how those are associated with organizational structure. As I continue my research throughout the winter and spring, I anticipate finding the level of collectivity and revolutionary modes of thinking to be based on the organization’s histories within the arts. These findings will implicate how artistic communities vary based on geographic location and the historical norms of that community. The findings will further provide a basis for future understandings of how the arts can create spaces that allow for revolutionary questioning of norms within Seattle and beyond through a historical narrative. 

Dialogue/ loving yourself as you would love another recontextualizes the queer coming-of-age narrative by using poetry, drag, and video to embrace abstraction and fragmentation as radical philosophies of self-love. Focused on the ‘girl fag,’ Dialogue/ critiques identity-based systems of queer understanding, examines how the ‘shocking/misplaced’ femininity central to the ‘girl fag’ position separates her from both transness and gayness. The suspension created by this undefinability and the obligation the ‘girl fag’ has to queer abstraction and non-identity performativity is explored through ‘dialogue’ with a dragged-up-self and typical coming-of-age motifs - love, sexuality, physical growth, and discovering passions. The Dialogue/ project consists of a short (20-30min) video poem, the accompanying poetry collection, and a short essay succinctly exploring the mission of the work in academic writing. Visuals of the project celebrate drag traditions and dance as ways to connect with queer ancestry while the sound and writing explore vocal layering, abstract sounds, historical queer languages like Polari, and ‘fag-cent’ inflection. The planned display for this event would include short sections of video, stills, and conversation about project focus and methods. This project is a process of thinking, an of-age-reflection rooted in celebrating the resistance and experience of undefinition.