Stonewall Museum Presents a Conversation with Artist Michelle Handelman

Presented in conversation with SNMA Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian, they will discuss the 25-year anniversary of her documentary film BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES AND SADOMASOCHISM (1995), and her work with the drag legend Mother Flawless Sabrina.

About Michelle Handelman:

Michelle Handelman is a New York-based artist who creates large-scale moving image installations about the dark and uncomfortable spaces of queer desire. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars, Michelle has built a body of work that confronts the things we collectively fear and deny: sexuality, death, chaos. She is a John Simon Guggenheim fellow (2011); a Creative Capital awardee (2019); a NYFA fellow, and recipient of many other grants and awards including a residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captive Island, Florida (2020). Her installation and performance project HUSTLERS & EMPIRES (2018) was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and her films have screened at festivals throughout the world. Michelle’s solo exhibitions and installations have been shown at The Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, PARTICIPANT, INC (NYC), signs and symbols (NYC), PERFORMA Biennial; The New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC (2015); The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), AMP (Provincetown, MA), Guangzhou 53 Art Museum (China); and The Pompidou Centre (Paris) among others. During the 1990s, Handelman was based in San Francisco where she collaborated with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene; directed the feature doc BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES AND SADOMASOCHISM (1995), and performed in several films by Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Her work has been widely reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Filmmaker Magazine, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and her work is in many collections including the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Kadist Art Foundation, Pigozzi Collection, di Rosa Foundation and Preserve; Zabludowicz Art Trust. She is a Professor in the Film, Media, and Performing Arts department at Fashion Institute of Technology. Learn more at michellehandelman.com

Photo Credits:

Portrait of Michelle: “Photo of Michelle Handelman by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project.”

Still from BloodSisters: “Michelle Handelman, still from BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism, 1995. Courtesy of the artist.”