February 10-18, 2023

Special Edition: Pamela Sneed

For one week only, purchase a limited edition print by Pamela Sneed in honor of her practice as a whole, but most specifically to bring direct support to Sneed’s upcoming tribute performance to rock’n’roll founding figure Big Mama Thornton. The performance will take place in March at the Triangle Theater and The Park Avenue Armory.

New-York based poet, performer, and visual artist Pamela Sneed’s genre defiant work is rooted in her commitment to activism and intersectional modes of thinking, from the 1990s AIDS crisis to the Black lesbian working class experience. Her upcoming performance project, Juke Joint, which will premiere at the Triangle Theater and The Park Avenue Armory this March, pays tribute to singer and songwriter Big Mama Thornton, an unsung pioneer of Rock and Roll. Sneed positions the underrecognized legacy of Big Mama Thornton within the queer canon through an examination of her presence as a Black and transgender performer. 

Juke Joint was commissioned by Denniston Hill through the Exodus Project in collaboration with Triangle Arts, Dumbo. The performance will premiere at The Triangle Theater in Dumbo on March 2nd. Juke Joint will then perform at The Park Avenue Armory on March 31st, accompanied by a salon on April 1 featuring a roundtable discussion on the legacy of Juke Joint and performance by singer-songwriter and playwright, Stew. A group of musicians will accompany Sneed in her ground-breaking performance, on both dates. 

“Like Big Mama Thornton, I too was raised in the church. My grandfather was a baptist preacher. My grandmother sang spirituals. I credit the Black church for my love and introduction to poetry, the music and art I was surrounded by, and through the lyricism of preachers and women’s testimonies I learned poetry. Through this upbringing I identified with Big Mama Thornton and how she came to music.” – Pamela Sneed, On Gentefied

100% of proceeds from this sale will go directly to the artist for the production of her upcoming performance.

About the artists

Pamela Sneed (b. Boston, MA) is a New York based artist, poet, performer, and teacher as well as a longstanding leader in the activist community. Her memoir in poetry and prose Funeral Diva, documents her experiences during the AIDS crisis both as a caregiver and a queer Black woman, and was awarded the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for poetry. She has published numerous books of poetry, and her work has been widely published in journals including Artforum, Frieze, and The Paris Review. Sneed has performed her work internationally at institutions including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the ICA London, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, Joe's Pub and the Toronto Biennale. As a visual artist, her work has been included in exhibitions at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York and Ortega y Gasset Projects and Motherbox, Brooklyn. Recently Sneed was an organizer of The Last Address Tribute Walk with Visual Aids and the Studio Museum in Harlem and is the narrator of Coco Fusco's much lauded film Your Eyes Will be an Empty World in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as it's Kept.