For Rita Hester–her life legacy, her blood family, her chosen community, saying her name is where we all should begin each Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR). A year after the announcement of the Rita Hester/TDOR Mural Project, almost 23 years after Rita’s passing in Allston, MA, we bring together community members to discuss what it means to honor Black trans people in life & in memoriam. From Allston to Dorchester, to the Greater Boston Area & all of Massachusetts, how do we show up for Black trans communities today? What do we, internally & collectively, need to imagine, teach, and be willing to give up to fight for Black trans liberation?
GOLDEN (they/them) is a black gender-nonconforming trans-femme photographer,
poet, & community organizer raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, MA (Massachusett people land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books, 2022) and the photographic self-portraiture series On Learning How to Live, documenting black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States.
Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets 2019), a Best of the Net Award (2020), a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-
2021), a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography (2021), & a Women Photograph Project Grant (2021). Their published & collaborative work can be found on Instagram (@goldenthem_) or through their website goldengoldengolden.com.
bashezo was born and raised in South Philadelphia, PA and currently lives in West Medford, MA. Ze is a non-binary transdisciplinary installation and movement performance creative that blends race and queer theory with African diaspora spiritual traditions and aesthetics. Soil, textiles, audio/video elements, clay, mesh, and wood are common materials in zir’s work. These materials are aggregated as a means to create immersive ephemeral 3rd spaces that centralize queer and trans Black Indigenous People of Color (QTBIPoC) bodies, narratives, and experiences. The core of zir’s work centers on spiritual explorations into/around Blackness, anti-Blackness, gender, sexuality, trauma, and healing.
In addition to bashezo’s own creative practice, ze co-founded the UnBound Bodies Collective (UBB). The core objective of this collaborative, curatorial, and community building project is to shape and hold generative creative spaces that center and amplify the works of QTBIPoC visual and performance creatives. The UBB collective is currently working on a multi-year project called Roots + Futures: We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For * (June Jordan) that artistically honors and celebrates the experiences of Black Queer and Trans Elders and contemporaries while folx are ALIVE and recently designed and installed another large public interactive living altar, Waterways, for QTBIPoC folx in Downtown Crossing as a part of ds4si’s 2021 InPublic event. Pre-pandemic, the UBB collective collaborated with artists in Philly and Baltimore to curate and host Boston’s QTBIPoC only HotBits, an annual DIY Queer and Trans Porn film|performance festival. HotBits Boston will return in 2022.
Cristela Guerra is an award-winning journalist and senior arts and culture reporter at WBUR. Before switching to public radio, she was a print reporter, working nearly four years at The Boston Globe covering communities across New England. She began her journalism career at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. She's driven to understand people, committed to local journalism, and hopes to use arts and culture as a lens to delve deeper into issues of race, equity, and social justice.
Lala Novali Shanks (She/He/They) is a biracial Black and white, gender-abundant and disabled, community-engaged visionary based in unceded Massachusett territory. Their work explores radically imagined possibilities of sustainable community care and storytelling through practices such as interdisciplinary arts, expressive healing, abolitionist education, research, consultancy and direct aid organizing. The expansiveness of Lala’s work honors the interconnected nature of creative expression and collective liberation work, with art as the catalyst that drives, the nourishment that sustains and the fruit that results from our movements.
Zenaida, is a mystic, an organizer, a gardener and a Black non-binary poet from the south currently thriving in Boston, Massachusetts. They are the founding director of Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam (FEMS), an all ages radical poetry slam centering marginalized people and celebrating the feminine who is currently focusing on rest. They are the Equity and Empowerment Director of Quaker Voluntary Service. You can find their work at Pizza Pi Press, Button Poetry and Wusgood Black.
In response to the COVID19 pandemic, WE BEEN HERE serves as a virtual artist share-out & Kickback series centering trans artists who are engaging with, influenced by, or in conversation with poetry. As an ode to trans pasts & futures, WE BEEN HERE holds space where trans artists can converse, share our work, and be.
To honor & celebrate Trans Awareness Week/Trans Day of Remembrance, supported by the New England Foundation for the Arts Public Art for Spatial Justice program, with funding from the Barr Foundation, WE BEEN HERE: Trans Day of Remembrance features Kemi Alabi, Aurielle Marie, Venus Selenite, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas.
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