open call: my need for tender loving care
All Street Gallery is accepting submissions from self-identified femme artists for a group exhibition titled My Need For Tender Loving Care that will take place in July, 2024, at its East Village location (77 East Third Street, New York, NY, 10003). The exhibition will be on view from July 13 - August 3, 2024.
The group exhibition My Need For Tender Loving Care illuminates nurturing expressions of masculinity, as experienced by femmes in their various interpersonal relationships. In particular, the exhibition will investigate femmes’ relationships with men that allow them to feel like they are subverting gendered expectations. Relationships that are seemingly not sexual yet more intense than platonic, even familial – sometimes as specific as paternal or brotherly – are coveted and hard to verbalize. It's your father's best friend who would kill for you. It's your childhood best friend. It's the mentor who crafts your visions of a future.
Artworks under consideration will highlight moments of assessment in femmes’ relationships to masculine figures in their lives; specifically, the development of this type of relationship through time and how gut-wrenching it is to come to terms with its morally and emotionally violent implications. The turning point in these relationships is often when femmes are confronted with the idea that the men they've engaged with and trusted so deeply are no different than the men they've been warned about their whole lives. However, these relationships and ones similar are not easily ended. When the position of that man weighs so heavily on one's ability to go on, the complicated decision to continue in the relationship is often made. When that man is your husband, a pillar in your social circle, or a respected source of guidance, it can be hard not to engage in a convoluted continuation of the relationship, despite the veil of safety being pulled back.
When considering what drew back that veil for the femmes in my life in their dynamics with men, it became painfully apparent how easy it was for trust to be disrupted. An unexpected hand placement, misinterpreted affection, misdirected aggression, the perspective of romantic interests, other men, and other women as onlookers. It made me think, "Yet we stay," which puts into perspective how many women stay. How many women stay for survival, so they can maintain their family and social lives? How many women stay for peace, to keep their life as they know it stable, to avoid uprooting their normal at the expense of having to bear the pain of a man who's doing them wrong? Women who stay for children, for safety, for peace. Who understand what is wrong, but know they must go on.
The tediousness of this dynamic is most distressing to me: how difficult and repetitive it is to navigate relating in this social model. Every path taken to assessing this dynamic leads me back to the same question, how do you go on? How do you sit intentional hurt and unrequited effort down at the same table? How do you watch someone tear apart the life you dreamed for yourself then lay in bed with them? Occasionally, though the thought is unsatisfactory, perhaps it's needed. I think about all the women who swallowed the unbearable for me to know peace.
In a conversation between Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin about [heterosexual] romantic dynamics in the Black community, Giovanni says, "Because what the hell do I care about the truth? I care if you're there... Lie to me, smile...because I love you, I get least of you." Here, she explains what I believe is the state of many femmes who have assumed the strength to go on: to push forward, necessity must be prioritized over self-compassion. However, I find that understanding the violence of a situation yet accepting its necessity feels too large to digest. The fact that femmes have lived this way for generations to pave the way for the betterment of the next one, in hopes that they'd pushed their suffering down to plant peace for the future is even more incomprehensible. How has this happened so often, for so long? How do we go on?
– Essay by Bow Young, Co-Curator