Join us for a screening of Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018), a fictional short film by Sasha Wortzel and Tourmaline, that imagines transgender rights pioneers Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in the hours leading to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Johnson and Rivera co-founded STAR (Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries), a radical political organization that advocated for homeless drag queens and trans women of color, providing housing and social services for some of the most underrepresented and vulnerable within the queer community. 

The screening will be followed by two short presentations exploring genderqueer archival research. The first presentation will be from art historian David Getsy, which will include a short clip from Stephen Varble's Journey to the Sun and a discussion of his archival process.  Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Tuesday Smillie will give a short presentation on the FREE OUR SIBLINGS series, which will include images from the LGBT Center's Archive in New York City.  A discussion will follow on the lineage of trans history and archives within the historical context explored in the presentations.

The program is presented in conjunction with Tuesday Smillie’s first solo museum exhibition To build another world, on view thru December 9, 2018.

David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010), and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (MIT 2016). He is the curator of the retrospective exhibition Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, on view through 27 January 2019 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York.

Tuesday Smillie is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. At the core of her practice is a questioning of the porous membrane between “I” and “We,” an anchoring of identity in the shifting relationship between self and group. She is the 2018-2019 Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence. 

Directions to the Wasserman Cinematheque:

Sachar International Building
Brandeis University
415 South Street, MS 036
Waltham, MA 02453