Scott Herring, “Queer Senior Living with Charles Henri Ford and Indra Tamang”

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 2, 2019 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
William L. Harkness Hall (WLH ), 309 See map
100 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

This presentation explores how American surrealist Charles Henri Ford and his Nepalese collaborator
Indra Tamang together initiated a sustained experiment in queer senior living at the Dakota
apartment building from the mid-1970s up to Ford’s death in 2002. Examining archival holdings from The Beinecke Library as well as the Getty Research Institute, I discuss how these two artists transformed shared life at the Dakota into a surrealist senior apartment via late-late modernist haiku and collage. While their decades-long bond was rife with racialized and socioeconomic asymmetries, theirs was nevertheless a long-term relationship resulting in a co-produced avant-garde made years after US modernism’s usual timeline. Assessing the intricate aesthetics of this Upper West Side elderscape has much to teach us about cross-generational contact, creative aging within domestic intimacies, and the possibilities of queer longevity.

Open to: 
Graduate and Professional

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