Our Patch: LGBTQ+ Life from Cradle to Grave
LGBT Center Galleries
09/29/24-10/31/24
Co-curated with Jessica Carolina González and Robert Brady
Presented by Circa: Queer Histories Festival / One Institute
Our Patch: LGBTQ+ Life from Cradle to Grave
How do people live, love, and die in Los Angeles? In considering historically marginalized LGBTQ+ communities, the answers to such questions are never easy.
Assembling a patchwork of art, photographs, documents, and video culled from a variety of collections housed at ONE Archives at USC Libraries–the largest repository of LGBTQ+ materials in the world–this exhibition seeks to illuminate aspects of personal and political life in Southern California. Beginning with the 1968 “flower power” protest, a response to a police raid on The Patch, a South Bay bar owned by Lee Glaze (aka Leona, The Blonde Darling), the items on display illuminate underappreciated moments of our shared histories and give a sense of the breadth and depth of ONE’s collections.
Here you will find zines created by musician, poet, and artist Gerardo Velázquez; the publishing efforts of Clothespin Fever Press (Carolyn Weathers and Jenny Wrenn); and ephemera from a host of multiracial social and political organizations that took root in Los Angeles in the early 1980s including, but not limited to, Black and White Men Together, Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays, and the Multi-Ethnic Gay/Lesbian Exchange.
Putting these histories alongside contemporary interventions by artist Jessica Carolina González and a new student “Bill of Rights” devised by alumni of ONE Institute’s youth programs (inspired by a similar document created by the founder of Project 10, Virgina Uribe, a Fairfax High School counselor and science teacher), Our Patch proposes history as alive and ever-present.
Our Patch: LGBTQ+ Life from Cradle to Grave is organized by One Institute and co-presented with the Los Angeles LGBT Center as part of the Circa: Queer Histories Festival 2024, presented by One Institute. The exhibition is co-curated by Andy Campbell, Robert Brady, and Jessica Carolina González. Loans and digitized exhibition copies courtesy ONE Archives at USC Libraries. New “Bill of Rights” created by alumni of One Institute’s Youth Ambassador and Youspeak Radio programs.
https://circafestival.org/exhibition/our-patch-lgbtq-life-from-cradle-to-grave/