SPARK TO A FLAME: CELEBRATING THE ARTISTS OF $PREAD MAGAZINE
About This Show
Ten years ago, $pread hit the market as the first U.S. magazine by and for sex workers and their allies. After five years it closed shop, but left in its wake a community more inspired than ever to continue its mission of illuminating the sex industry and insisting that sex workers speak for themselves. Original drawings, photographs, and graphic design brought the words in the magazine to life. Now, the artists of $pread, and others inspired by them, present a collection of art from the magazine alongside new work from the vibrant sex worker rights community.
Damien Luxe (Co-Curator) is a self-described “queer femme liberationist artist, digital -technologist, and community organizer” living in New York. She is the Cultural Organizer and Performing Arts Curator for a project she co-founded, Heels on Wheels, which curates both the working-class-led, multi-racial queer-femme performance art traveling show, ‘Glitter Roadshow,’ as well as the NYC-based monthly event, Opentoe Peepshow, which has produced radical, punk community-driven events across the country. With Heels on Wheels she has also organized many singular special events of queer and feminist curated performance art. As an artist, her recent major performance works include: Not By Bread Alone, playing with mermaids and powdered milk to explore thriving past poverty and trauma; Exorcize, a satirical and serious healing aerobics program for all bodies; Hot Pink Mass, a church service that invokes the deity Trisha; and Femmes Fight Back, an interactive installation honoring queer herstories. Damien was $pread’s Art Director from 2007-2009.
Audacia Ray (Co-Curator) is the founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit organization Red Umbrella Project, a peer-led NYC-based organization that “amplifies the voices of people in the sex trades.” She is also the editor of RedUP’s literary journal ‘Prose & Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work,’ and leads media, memoir, and advocacy trainings and workshops. Audacia was co-Executive Editor of $pread Magazine from 2006-2009. She was also the curator behind $pread’s two visual art shows, ‘Sex Worker Visions’ (2006) and ‘Visions II: One Nation Under Dildo’ (2007). Audacia worked as in-house curator at Arena Studios from 2007-2008, and produced two noteworthy shows, ‘Demimonde: The Art of Molly Crabapple,’ and ‘Modified Eros: A Photographic Exploration of Body Modification.’ From 2001-2003 she worked as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Sex. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology ‘$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution’ (Feminist Press, 2015).
Eliyanna Kaiser (Art Director ) is a stay-at-home mom ruled by rambunctious toddler twins. She has worked with the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center and the Red Umbrella Project in the development and facilitation of various workshops and trainings for sex workers. She is also a fiction writer whose work has been featured in various short fiction genre magazines and anthologies. Eliyanna was co-Executive Editor of $pread Magazine from 2006-2010. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology ‘$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution’ (Feminist Press, 2015).
Spark to a Flame is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
About Artists
Fly Orr is a painter, illustrator, art teacher, writer and punk musician. Current favorite activities are working on a new series of comic style paintings, cutting new stencils and teaching comics classes at the Lower Eastside Girls Club. Fly has self-published many zines and comics since the mid 80s; a collection of these entitled CHRON!IC!RIOTS!PA!SM! was published in 1998 by Autonomedia. PEOPs (portraits & stories of people) was published in 2003 by Soft Skull Press. Fly continues to work on the ever-expanding PEOPs Project as well as multi-media project called UnReal Estate; A Late Twentieth Century History of Squatting in the Lower East Side. Fly was a recipient of a 2013 Acker Award for “excellence within the avant-garde”. Her squatcore band Zero Content is still residing in the gutter since 1994 www.flyspage.com
Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American artist and writer. Blending punk rock, queer counterculture, mental inadequacies, social justice, and occasional perverted bathroom humor- Road thrives to testify the beauty of the imperfect. Her obsession with making art [and her emotions] publicly accessible began when publishing GREEN’ZINE in 1997- a fanzine which was originally devoted to the punk rock group, Green Day. Today Road works as a freelance illustrator, aside from her personal goals in publishing. Cristy contributed many original works of art to $pread throughout its publishing years. www.croadcore.org
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. Called “an emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery” by the New Republic, she has drawn in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and with rebels in Syria. Molly is a columnist for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. Her illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood, will be published by Harper Collins in 2015. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Molly contributed many original works of art to $pread throughout its publishing years. www.mollycrabapple.com
Hawk Kinkaid demonstrates a lifelong commitment not just to advancing understanding for men in the sex industry but also for many other social and political movements. He connects individual tales (his own and others’) to a larger framework of stories, both through personal and professional writing. On the page and the screen, his work articulates insights and experiences of men in the sex industry, as well as across many other political, social and playful topics. Live and onstage, his performances have met with wide recognition and praise. Hawk was an Art Director of $pread, and shares work from a series called “Las Vegas Stripped” www.hawkkinkaid.com
Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. La Chica Boom is a performance art project that uses hyper-raciality/sexuality/gender as an experience based mode of inquiry into her relationship with coloniality, compulsory whiteness and Mexicanidad. Ibarra uses video, objects, photography and sex acts to evoke comedic and melancholic racial and sexual expectation. Her aim is to amplify gendered and racialized iconography and make such problematic constructions via spectacle more transparent to the spectator‚—what she calls spictacles—camp spectacles of degeneracy and power. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within immigrant, anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She currently organizes with FUSE, a national grassroots collective founded by sex workers of color. She lectures Ethnic Studies courses at San Francisco State University and presents her academic and performance work at various Universities and institutions. Ibarra’s work has been featured at Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), and The Burlesque Hall of Fame (Las Vegas) to name a few. She is currently an Affiliate Artist at Headland Center for the Arts and recent residencies include National Performance Network, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and CounterPulse. She was awarded the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Away Award, ReGen Artist Fund, Theater Bay Area Grant, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. www.lachicaboom.com
The Incredible, Edible, Akynos or MF Akynos, has been entertaining for over 20 years in NYC. She’s an international multifaceted performer and curator setting stages on fire since she started performing with the All-Stars Talent Show Network when she was just 14 years old. Since then she has seen stages from Jamaica to Europe. She’s performed and headlined in places such as Toronto, Stockholm, Ohio, her hometown of Jamaica and even Boston and her 2nd home New York. She’s been the feature in different publications from Europe to the West Indies. A very outspoken and daring entertainer, her current and most popular works include the art of burlesque, storytelling and speaking on human rights. She is currently venturing in visual arts organizing a video project that engages audiences on man on man cat-calling. And on photography project on the objectifying of women in social media with violence, while simultaneously objecting to female sexuality as dangerous and lewd. She’s a graduate of individualized studies from Goddard College where she focused on Sex and performance history. She currently serves on the board of WOW Cafe Theater. The oldest woman and transwoman theater collective in the world.
Morgan M Page / Odofemi is a transsexual, former sex working, artist in Montréal. Her video work has screened around the world, and she performs regularly in Canada and the United States. She was a 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow, and has been involved in various local, national, and international sex workers’ projects for the past decade. www.Odofemi.com.
Ofelia del Corazón is a mixed-race queer femme writer, performer, and sex educator. Her writing has appeared in XO Jane, LA Art Resource, Queer Mental Health, and The New Gay. She is a founding member of the Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival and co-editor of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. She lives in LA with a cat who is old enough to buy her own cigarettes. www.mommyfiercest.com
Erin Siegal McIntyre is a photographer and photojournalist who also writes narrative nonfiction, produces for TV and web, and reports for radio. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, O Magazine, Playboy, Newsweek, and various other magazines and media outlets. Erin is a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, and was a 2012-13 Soros Media Justice Fellow. Her award-winning book “Finding Fernanda” (Beacon Press) was the basis for an hour-long CBS special. Erin was $pread’s Art Director from 2005 to 2007 and frequently contributed photography to the magazine.
www.erin-mcintyre.com