What makes a community and how can an arts organization support it? These are questions at the heart of Wallace's Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative, a broad ranging effort that is supporting scores of arts organizations across the country that are rooted in communities of color. Among other supports, the initiative places research fellows with several of those organizations to document the organizations' histories, their practices, and other aspects the organizations may wish to explore.
One of those organizations is the San Francisco-based Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP,) which is closing a year of celebration for its 25th anniversary. Silvia Rodriguez Vega, the fellow paired with QWOCMAP, compiled an academic history of that quarter century. She also led the creation of a graphic zine, which depicts the organization's leading figures—founder Madeleine "Mad" Lim and Managing Director Kebo Drew—as time travelers looking back at their legacy from the year 2075.
We sat down with Kebo Drew and Silvia Rodriguez Vega to discuss QWOCMAP's work, Vega's research, and prospects for the organization's future. A transcript of our conversation follows. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The Wallace Foundation: Could you tell us how QWOCMAP defines its community and how you came to that definition?
Kebo Drew: A lot of who we serve, how we serve them, and why, comes out of queer feminist of color organizing. It's leadership of the most vulnerable and the most impacted, which is a Black feminist principle and a queer feminist of color principle. It's a disability justice principle. Who we serve is inseparable from who we are.
We are a sentinel population as well as a keystone population. We're sentinels because, if you want to see how a policy is going to affect people, look at how queer and trans and folks of color are affected by it. You'll see how that policy is going to play out.
For example, back when Obama was first elected, Jennicet Gutierrez, a transgender Latina woman was, warning about the conditions for trans Latinas in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. People got upset, saying, 'No, you don't need to say that now, we’re celebrating this win. But she knew what would happen. What happened then was basically a model for what was going to happen to everyone else. The sexual abuse, the bad conditions, the lack of healthcare, all of that. She was sounding the alarm. That's being a sentinel population. Canaries in the coal mine.
Being a keystone population has to do with the fact that we embody so many intersections between issues and identities, so our community members are very important to other movements overall. One of the key architects of the 1963 March on Washington was Bayard Rustin, who was a Black gay man. You also see that in Black Lives Matter. Two of the three folks who started it are queer Black women.
In all these different movements, we are right there in the center of it. We are key to pushing our political understandings forward. That acknowledgement of the brilliance of our community is how we look at those definitions.
WF: Has that definition changed over the last 25 years?
Drew: As our community changes, we change. For example, in the early days, we had a number of transmasculine folks, folks on the butch to female-to-male trans spectrum. Over the years, we've made that inclusion much more explicit. We made it more explicit that trans people are part of how we understand feminism.
We also work to understand different, culturally specific forms of identification. Fa'afafine or Mahu, for example, are Pacific Islander terms. We're using multicultural terms so that people can define themselves.
Younger people define themselves differently than older generations. We're trying to create space as the community expands its understanding.
Younger people define themselves differently than older generations. We're trying to create space as the community expands its understanding.
— Kebo Drew, managing director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
WF: And what benefit do you try to provide that community?
Drew: Narrative power is at the core of it. Who controls the narrative ends up controlling policy. The value is building that narrative muscle, building narrative power. The larger piece is having another avenue into activism and change.
WF: Moving on to the study, can you tell me about your goals for the research and how you determined them?
Silvia Vega: I came in extremely flexible and open to what the organization wanted and needed. It's part of my perspective and practice as a researcher and as a community member. To not come in with my own plan, but to work with the organization and participants to see what they want.
I came in with this practice of participatory action research, in which we decide what we want to talk about, how we want to address it, where we want it to go, and what we want to accomplish. The major things we wanted to talk about were the values, the ethos, the motivators, the core, the heart of QWOCMAP.
When Kebo and I first met, it was going to be the organization's 25th anniversary. It inspired me to think about how to visualize where they want to go, to think about QWOCMAP's importance, not just in the last 25 years, but in the next 20, 25 years.
That gave us the zine idea. The main goal of the zine was to make sure that whoever read it was able to come away with the values that QWOCMAP is guided by. To center the voices of queer and trans people of color, their lives, their interests, their Ideas, and anything that is of importance to the community.
Silvia Rodriguez Vega led the creation of a graphic zine, which depicts the organization's leading figures—founder Madeleine "Mad" Lim and Managing Director Kebo Drew—as time travelers looking back at their legacy from the year 2075.
Drew: The zine is also a companion piece to our strategic framework. It lays out very, very clearly what got us here. A lot of people tend to view our values as add-ons. But it's core to us. Our success is because of these values.That's how the organization has survived as long as it has.
We're part of this coalition of film and media arts organizations that are run by people of color. The research piece and the zine have stabilized our place in that constellation. It makes it easier for folks to navigate to QWOCMAP. When they do the history of people of color in film and media arts, QWOCMAP is right there in that constellation.
Before this, the importance of QWOCMAP wasn't necessarily recognized in the same way. But it's one of those key anchor organizations, like Latino Public Broadcasting, or Black Public Media, or Vision Maker Media, or Center for Asian American Media. It's one of those key organizations that not only anchors our community, but anchors us in the film space within our discipline. And I think that the zine went a long way to clarifying that for us.
Vega: People I talked to really wanted to celebrate Kebo and Mad for building QWOCMAP and for sustaining it all these years.
I'm somebody who is queer, and we don't have a lot of queer elders. It's really special to have folks in our community learning about Kebo and Mad's legacy, when Mad started QWOCMAP, and all the work that Kebo has done to build it out into this really amazing organization.
It was important to center Kebo and Mad as future time travelers. It's in this practice and tradition of Black futurism and Black lesbians of color, like Octavia Butler, thinking about the future and how we exist in it. The work that QWOCMAP has done is now part of the archive. It's a part not just of academia, but also of this long community practice of zine making.
Drew: We once gave somebody the zine and our strategic framework, and then showcased all of the filmmakers that were in the program. That person said, "I see that we have a past, so I know that we have a future."
That so perfectly encapsulated the zine. It's making it very clear to other people when they experience QWOCMAP, that they're okay. That they can be in that space and have a life that is full of art and creativity.
We don't have a lot of queer elders. It's really special to have folks in our community learning about Kebo and Mad's legacy.
— Silvia Rodriguez Vega, research fellow studying the work of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
WF: Silvia, can you tell me why participatory action research was important and how that approach may have taken you in different directions than traditional methods?
Vega: Research has a purpose. It's not just for the sake of it existing. It can guide discussions we're having on policy, on funding, on visibility, on history. The narratives that endure can come from academic spaces.
Participatory action research came up as a field because of the harm that researchers have done in communities of color. The traditional method is to parachute in with my questionnaire and say, 'This is what I think is important, this is the story I want to tell, these are the important research questions I want to answer.'
Participatory action research takes more time. You have to build rapport, you have to build trust and community with folks.It was important to me to come into QWOCMAP and say, 'I am not part of QWOCMAP, but I'm part of this greater community of QWOCMAP as a queer creative person of color. What are the things that are important to you all?'
I wanted the challenges, the beauty, the things that QWOCMAP has experienced to come through. I just asked open-ended questions and looked at the narratives that came up through my interviews.
My goal was to elevate the voices of QWOCMAP folks and provide a platform so folks can hear those stories through the academic article and through the zine. There were 15 to 20 people that were part of the zine. Writing the storyline, doing the audio, doing translations, doing the visual part of it. To me, that's beautiful, because we all created it together and it has a little piece of all of us.
I'm really proud of that, because I think it sometimes is easier to be a traditional researcher, come in, do the project, and leave. But I think there's a lot of beauty in working together as we did.
Drew: Our community is so used to being harmed by research. QWOCMAP gets requests from researchers at least once a month, if not more, for access to our database, even though we have a data safety policy about not letting folks into our database to protect our community.
Silvia's focus on participatory action research and activist research was a good match for us because we wouldn't have gone for a traditional process. What Silvia has done is added to our ability to build narrative power, added to our ability to help change and direct the narrative.
WF: Silvia, do you feel you learned anything about QWOCMAP or the larger community that you think you may have missed if you were doing traditional research?
Vega: Yes. One example of how my method lent itself to capture the nuances of the work was when we had almost completed the zine. It took months and months, because any collaborative project takes a long time. I was eager to get it out there, because QWOCMAP's film festival was coming up. I wanted the zine to be done for the film festival so people can see it and celebrate in community.
I had to put a big stop on the project because, through my research and my findings, I felt this weight of the importance of accessibility as a value for QWOCMAP’s commitment to disability justice.
I had to do a little U-turn and say, 'This zine isn't as accessible as it could be. We have to think about ways that the zine could be experienced by folks who have different abilities and experience the world in different ways.' It meant I had to think of a way to make the zine available for folks who can't see.
We had the idea of Ash, a QWOCMAP participant–a poet who reads beautifully and has a gorgeous voice–guide people through the zine.I met with her, mobilized resources to get her paid, and she read the whole zine, describing the visuals. It set us back weeks; maybe a month or more. But I'm so happy that that part was included, because otherwise it would not have represented QWOCMAP fairly or accurately.
That is a prime example of the work QWOCMAP does. If folks who are most impacted cannot be a part of the room or the conversation or the activity, then it isn't part of the work QWOCMAP is doing.
If folks who are most impacted cannot be a part of the room or the conversation or the activity, then it isn't part of the work QWOCMAP is doing.
— Silvia Rodriguez Vega, research fellow studying the work of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
WF: Fundraising challenges played a major role in the study, especially in the organization's early years. Have those challenges changed over time?
Drew: We've never gotten money from big film funders. Part of that has to do with how our community is perceived, how the importance of the work is perceived, how our values are feminized and seen as somehow in contradiction to quality or artistic rigor. Because we focus on care and community, somehow that means our art isn't as good. That's been a perennial challenge.
We also had a funder say to us, 'It's not like you're saving lives.' That was really difficult because of QWOCMAP's history of care. I spend time with participants doing safety planning. I've had participants come to me with bruises and cuts from homophobic violence. We're doing that work, but somehow we're not saving lives. Finding funders who get us, who respect the work we do, who respect our community, is always a challenge.
QWOCMAP has done the best that we can possibly do despite all that. We've had big periods of growth. Then something will happen with the economy, everybody's about austerity, and the first thing they cut is the arts. We know, based on our experience, that these things are coming.
So we do what we can to shore ourselves up and, as always, we lean deeply into our community. After we lost some critical city funding, we sent emails to our community, and they really showed up. We didn't restore all the funding, but, in 8 weeks, we were able to raise almost $120,000. That community support is why we've lasted this long. That relationship with community and those resources is why we've gotten as far as we've gotten. The community being okay and being okay are hand-in-hand.
WF: Are there elements of the media environment beyond funding that have been affecting your work?
Drew: Content related to queer and trans folks of color has been disappearing from different platforms. The way that a lot of people of color got staffed on TV shows or on films is because companies would pay for their positions. That was part of how things became more diverse. There was a pipeline.
Companies are no longer funding those positions. So people went back to what they were always doing, which was hiring cisgender heterosexual white men. Because the industry doesn’t want to pay creatives, it is leaning heavily on AI, so there are also fewer jobs in the industry. And when there's this much competition, the pipeline starts shutting down.
People and community become more important. Community organizations like QWOCMAP, that have a sustained commitment to our community, are the ones that make it possible for people to get in. It's what the coalitions we're a part of are all about. How can we create our own pathways, how can we create our own platforms, so that we can keep making the content our people want to see? That's also why QWOCMAP persists.
How can we create our own pathways, how can we create our own platforms, so that we can keep making the content our people want to see? That's also why QWOCMAP persists.
— Kebo Drew, managing director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
WF: Silvia quotes Mad saying that funders are often reluctant to fund QWOCMAP because they see its audience as a niche within a niche within a niche. Has QWOCMAP worked to try to change that perception?
Drew: That's a perception born of a lot of bias. The reality is something that queer Black feminists from the Combahee River Collective say. They said, as Black lesbians, if we're free, that means we're dismantling all systems of oppression, which means everybody is free.
One of the films at our film festival was Standing Above the Clouds, which is about the telescopes on Mauna Kea. Another was Can't Stop, Won't Stop, which is about climate change in Puerto Rico and Florida and the queers of color who are fighting it. All the issues from incarceration, to deportation to all of that, those are all queer and trans issues.
It's about people being able to come into what QWOCMAP does, feel a sense of belonging, feel a sense of community, and feel they're in a place that is safe, comfortable, and respectful. That's what goes into changing people. Sometimes when people hear queer of color, they think one thing. But once they're in the space with us, it becomes a whole different conversation that's about people.
The niche bias doesn't have anything to do with us. It has to be what people have in their head.
I've been around devout Christians in the South that, when we tell them about our work, they say, 'Oh, you're doing soul work.' People can see it, but are they there to listen? Are they open to it? Because if they're open, once they're in it, they say, 'This is awesome!'
WF: Are there compromises you must make to meet your commitment to inclusion and accessibility? Resources are tight and accessibility is expensive. Are there trade-offs you sometimes have to make?
Drew: Accessibility is not something we compromise on. That's a core value. Take audio description. We have a commitment to having all films at the film festival audio described. It's a permanent cost, and it can be pretty expensive, especially if you've got films from other languages. But this year, one of our staff members got an audio description house to donate their services, which is worth about $15,000.
People's participation isn't an option, and it's not fair to leave people out. We cut back in other ways ... but we don't compromise on those values,
— Kebo Drew, managing director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project
We'd rather cut stuff than people. We'd rather cut anything other than accessibility. That is something that we prioritize.
This year we decided only to do one workshop because of funding losses, because we didn't have the same amount of wiggle room we usually have. But with that one workshop, we made sure that it was accessible. Those are our commitments.
When people's values are an afterthought, then those commitments become an afterthought. Because accessibility is core to what we do, it has to do with our operations, our financing, our financial management, our resource mobilization. Everything that we do is to honor those commitments and those values. People's participation isn't an option, and it's not fair to leave people out. We cut back in other ways, and move our money around in other ways and other resources. But we don't compromise on those values, It would probably be a lot easier if we did.
WF: What do you hope that this research report and the zine can contribute to QWOCMAP?
Drew: QWOCMAP needs people that value us and get us.I think this goes a long way to having people understand us, value us, value our community, and get it. Part of the success of this project is that people who are not necessarily part of our community feel included. That's the beauty of QWOCMAP. We're queer and trans people of color, but we also have families who are not. They are our community. No one's left out as we move towards liberation.
