Flagging the Circle—on view June 11 - 20, 2024 at Sargent's Daughters (370 Broadway, NYC)—inaugurates a new tradition of connection, an activating signal for the Queer|Art|Mentorship community.

For thirteen years, Queer|Art|Mentorship has brought together artists across generations in the fields of Film, Literature, Performance, and Visual Art, building bridges in the face of cultural repression, career marginalization, and pandemic loss (the AIDS Crisis and COVID-19, both ongoing). Every year, more artists are brought into our Mentorship community; every year, the circle expands.

Following an art historical lineage from Surrealism to Mail Art, Flagging the Circle ties together artists across time and space in the making of collaborative artworks. Queer|Art|Mentorship artists were invited to make Exquisite Corpse drawings—a Surrealist parlor game in which one player draws on a sheet of paper, folds it to conceal their contribution, and (in this case) mails it to the next player to complete. Narrowly surviving postal service mixups and rain damage, the 38 pieces included in this show apply multidisciplinary stylings and a range of formal methods to the constraints of the small-format work on paper. Together they make a chorus of the QAM community, each split work its own descant. Many of the participating artists are working outside of their traditional medium, engaging through experimentation and play. A line becomes a body becomes a word; a paper is torn apart; a flag figures a spiral; a story turns in on itself.

The "flagging” in the exhibition title refers to the hanky code, a queer art of signaling our desires to one another. In the flagging of this circle, our Mentorship community, we can ask: what is conjured through these coded exchanges? As each collaboration figures a distinct creative relationship, the works seen together challenge preconceived notions of what queer embodiment looks like.

The works in this show were created with a generous spirit, each artist donating their contribution to a benefit auction to sustain the future of Queer|Art|Mentorship. A bid on an object—or outright purchase of a mystery artwork—makes you, too, a contributor to this expanding intergenerational community.

Welcome to the circle <3

*Special thanks to Legion Paper, Framebridge, and Sargent's Daughters.*

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen x Xandra Nur Clark