LGBT Artist Panel at the Barnes
Join us at The Barnes Foundation where Leeway grantees will be featured on a panel discussing “Identity and Artistic Expression”. This special panel includes filmmaker tiona.m. (ATR '12, LTA '09, ACG '09), visual artist Laureen Griffin (LTA '07, ACG '05), and poet Denice Frohman (LTA '13). The panel will be moderated by First Person Arts Program Manager James Claiborne and takes place on June 2 from 2:00pm-3:30pm at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The panel is free with admission to the museum. Admission to the Barnes is free on first Sundays but tickets are limited.
About The Panelists
Denice Frohman
Denice is an award-winning poet, lyricist, and educator, whose work explores the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and the “in-betweeness” that exists in us all. She is the 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, a 2012 Leeway Transformation Award recipient, and was named Top 20 Emerging LGBT Leader by the Philadelphia Gay Newspaper. She has performed and taught poetry across the country and internationally in arts venues, rallies, K-12 schools, colleges, conferences, and detention centers. She is currently the Program Director at The Philly Youth Poetry Movement.
Laureen Griffin
Laureen began to incorporate portrait photography into her artwork in 2007 when she started the Gender Portraiture Project. The project began as a set of self-portraits then progressed into a collection of female personalities and has since opened to a more inclusive interpretation of gender. As her subject inclusivity expands, so has her medium. First existing as elaborately framed portraits her photographs are now set into new and imaginary places. Human-scale digitally re-constructed settings where fantasy is heightened and beauty exalted.
Laureen exhibits in places that encourage diverse representations of art and art makers including a family home. For the 2012 Philly Fringe Festival she was invited, along with several visual and performing artists, to occupy a residence in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Here she created a site-specific installation in the family’s living room merging family portraits, a once deserted Venetian style ballroom, and gender portraits. November 2011, Laureen was invited to live and study at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL and the Venetian style mansion Ca d’Zan. Here she was able to look at how an arts collection and Venetian style mansion form subjective context for performers and owners of the famous American circus.
Laureen’s route into fine art is rather circuitous. After years of working in architectural design, she left NYC to study craft and decorative arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art. 1997, she moved to Philadelphia where she initially took a hiatus from her own work to concentrate on community based projects with youth and adults developing media arts programs in schools and community centers. As art trends shifted and funds became scarce, Laureen and her partner took up residence in the loghouse of historic Stenton Museum as site managers. In 2005 she began to include herself and her community into personal artistic narrative. More info at laureengriffin.com.
Tiona McClodden
Tiona McClodden aka tiona.m. is Executive Producer/Director of Harriet’s Gun Media whose mission is to produce and distribute works of art across a range of media platforms that examine, explore, and critique issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Her feature-length documentary film, black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent, provides a platform for Black lesbians to speak for themselves and to confront the hyper-sexualized image of the Black lesbian. black./womyn. was awarded the Audience Award for Best Documentary by the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (now QFest) in 2008. Tiona currently in production with her next feature length documentary The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project, and recently completed a short narrative film Bumming Cigarettes. She is currently in residence as the first recipient of the Leeway Art+Technology Residency, a collaboration with Breadboard and NextFab Studio to further the production on her experimental short film series called Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, which is an magical realism themed take on the Black American experience. Tiona lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
About James Claiborne
James currently serves as Program Manager at First Person Arts. A native Philadelphian, self taught multidisciplinary artist and arts advocate, James has spent well over a decade immersed in the many facets of Philadelphia’s vibrant and rich creative scene. As a visual artist, James has exhibited his artwork at a number of local venues. For eight years he served as the Community Engagement Manager at the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. James also writes for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation’s Philly 360° campaign, which highlights Philadelphia’s African American creative scene. He also serves on the board of directors for Art Sanctuary and the Philly Youth Poetry Movement.
About the Barnes Foundation
The mission of the Barnes Foundation, which dates back to its founding in 1922, is “the promotion of the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts.” In furtherance of its mission, the Barnes Foundation promotes appreciation of the arts and horticultural science, through the preservation, presentation, and interpretation of the collections of Albert C. and Laura L. Barnes. The Foundation will engage diverse audiences through its exceptional collections and related high-quality programs that reflect a broad range of periods and cultures and build on the founders’ innovative educational vision of transforming lives through the arts and horticulture.
