November 7, 2023
7:00pm doors / 7:30pm show
Free / Suggested Donation
RSVP

In Funeral Diva, poet, performer and visual artist Pamela Sneed laments surviving the AIDS crisis in New York City as a Black lesbian. While grieving the friends she lost, Sneed also mourns the erasure of Black women and their labor and asks: “Who takes care of the caretakers?”

San Francisco based mixed-media artist Alexander Hernandez creates textile works, prints and other mixed media art exploring the intersectional identities of the immigrant experience, queer sensibilities, gender expectations, and HIV+ survival.

The pandemic fueled both artists to explore their grief in new aesthetic forms. Hernandez nurtured a heartbreak by listening to the romantic Mexican songs his mom used to listen to. Resonating with his mother’s romance and loss in a new way, while also reshaping his relationship to Spanish, Hernandez created textile installations with embroidered expressions. Sneed started experimenting with visual work, meeting up with a friend in a NYC park for painting lessons. Her paintings and collages picture anti-black violence and words of resistance and complaint. In her upcoming book, Sneed engages the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter uprisings and her father’s death, happening all at the same time. This combustion of events described by Sneed, resonates Hernandez’ practice of stitching, creating an intricate tapestry of the intersecting identities he embodies: immigrant experiences, gender expectations, HIV+ status, acculturation anxieties, queer sensibilities, and body dysmorphia.

Invited by author and curator Simon(e) van Saarloos, Pamela Sneed and Alexander Hernandez will share their words and visual work at The Lab, followed by a conversation.