Artist
Robert Alexander, Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jean Weisinger, Dagmar Schultz, Jennifer Abod, JEB
Curator
Victoria Munro
Audre reviews the final draft of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, her biomythography in her Staten Island study. Photo by JEB 1981.
Powerful and Dangerous explores the intersection between language, activism and photographic messaging. The exhibition holds up a lens to the contemporary women’s, LGBTQ+, and Black Lives Matter movements and considers how Lorde’s words resonate today. Due to COVID-19 the exhibition has been extended with online programs until 2021. A series of public programs, including scholars talks, readings, outdoor film screenings and artist-led photo walks in the Staten Island neighborhood of Stapleton where Lorde’s home, now an LGBTQ Historic landmark, will take place through 2021.
This exhibition is curated by Victoria Munro with contributions by Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jean Weisinger, Dagmar Shultz, Jennifer Abod and JEB.
Scholars talks will include: Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jewelle Gomez, Cheryl Clark, Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, M.D. and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
Film presentations by Dagmar Schultz and Jennifer Abod with audio interview by Jennifer Abod.
About Audre Lorde
A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was a native New Yorker and daughter of immigrants. Both her activism and her published work speak to the importance of struggle for liberation among oppressed peoples and of organizing in coalition across differences of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age and ability. An internationally recognized activist and artist, Lorde was the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, which conferred the mantle of New York State poet for 1991–93. In designating her New York State’s Poet Laureate, Governor Mario Cuomo observed: “Her imagination is charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice…She cries out against it as the voice of indignant humanity. Audre Lorde is the voice of the eloquent outsider who speaks in a language that can reach and touch people everywhere.”
A Harlem native, Lorde was a resident of the North Shore of Staten Island for 17 years, from 1972 to 1987, raising her two children there with her partner Frances Clayton. She and Clayton, a white psychology professor, were together for 21 years. In a 1980s interview with Louise Chawla, Lorde noted that their Staten Island home, with its garden, trees, and proximity to the water, provided a balance between her desire for a bond with nature and her commitment to raise her children in New York City.
Of her numerous honors, she was named Staten Island Community College’s “Woman of the Year” in 1975, given the Borough of Manhattan President’s Award for Literary Excellence in 1987, and named Poet Laureate of New York State in 1991.
The Alice Austen House was proud to testify in support of the LGBTQ+ historic site designation for Lorde’s former residence, which became a New York City Landmark in June 2019. This designation followed recommendations by the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project and honors Lorde’s vital contributions to literature and activism. That same year, “Audre Lorde Way” was unveiled at the corner of St. Paul’s Avenue and Victory Boulevard, near her former home.
