The Fae Richards Photo Archive
Video (1:01:01): The Fae Richards Photo Archive: A Panel with Garrett Bradley, Huey Copeland, Lanka Tattersall, and Rebecca Matalon held in 2019. Video by The Museum of Contemporary Art, USA, 2019. The panel discusses the artwork by Cheryl Duney and Zoe Leonard.
[The copyright of the video above remains with the original holder and it is used here for the purpose of education, comparison and criticism only.]
The Fae Richards Photo Archive Panel Debate
The panel was held on the occasion of The Fae Richards Photo Archive being featured as part of Zoe Leonard: Survey and on view as part of Outliers and American Vanguard Art at LACMA (2019). It addressed and reflected on the artwork’s history, form, and content, and its poignant and urgent relevance today. The speakers, Garrett Bradley, Huey Copeland, Lanka Tattersall, and Rebecca Matalon, touched upon the erasure of black women, racism and black history and the queer artists Cheryl Dunye and Zoe Leonard’s collaboration to create the artwork, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–1996), a queer archive/ installation about the fictive black blues singer Fay Richards. The photographs were taken by Zoe Leonard, based on a character conceived by Cheryl Dunye, and they are used in Cherly Dunye’s film “The Watermelon Woman” (1996).
The Fay Richards Photo Archive
The Fae Richard Pshoto Archive is an emblematic of “queer archive reconstruction”. In this photographic project, presented as an installation and published in book form, the two authors, queer artists Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye have built a fine but totally fake story of Fae Richards, an African-American actress and blues singer. The eighty-two images mis-en-scene photographs used as documentation for the film “The Watermelon Woman” (1996) can be viewed in the art installations as an intimate photo album . An album consisting of old photographs: snapshots, film stills, publicity photos, and a few brief captions, the archive invites speculation about about the life of an imaginary black woman, Fay Richards. In glimpses of her personal life, we see a passionate lesbian who consistently breaks out of the social restrictions of her era. For viewers who have rarely seen themselves represented in official histories or mainstream media, this is an important artwork.
The Fae Richards Photo Archive
by Zoe Leonard, Cheryl Dunye
Publisher: Artspace Books, San Francisco, 1996.
ISBN: 9780963109583| 0963109588
cm 16,5×21; BW ills.; hardcover.