Queer Cultural Center's 
Queer Conversations on Culture & the Arts

Artist/ illustrator Maia Kobabe and art historian/ curator Richard Meyer will individually present works affected by censorship, and then join in a conversation moderated by Việt Lê and Ajuan Mance.

DETAILS: 

Maia Kobabe will discuss the creation of eir critically-acclaimed debut graphic novel, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR, and how art school prepared em for a creative career. 

Richard Meyer will demonstrate how censors project their own fantasies of pornography, gender trouble, and sexual extravagance onto art they seek to suppress.

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Maia Kobabe is a graduate of the first ever class in the MFA in Comics program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Eir first full length book, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR, came out from Lion Forge Comics/Oni Press in May 2019. GENDER QUEER was a winner of an Alex Award and Stonewall Honor in 2020, and nominated for an Ignatz Award and the Best Graphic Novels for Teens List from YALSA in 2019. It was also the most challenged book in the United States in 2021. It recently received a new hardcover edition and has been translated into Spanish, Polish, Czech, French, and Italian with Norwegian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Japanese and Korean forthcoming.

Maia's short comics have been published in The Nib, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and included in the anthologies ALPHABET (2015), TABULA IDEM (2017), MINE! (2018), GOTHIC TALES OF HAUNTED LOVE (2018), THE SECRET LOVES OF GEEKS (2018), FASTER THAN LIGHT Y’ALL (2018), ADVANCED DEATH SAVES (2019), HOW TO WAIT (2019), SHOUT OUT (2019), ROLLED AND TOLD (2019), THEATER OF TERROR (2019), BE GAY, DO COMICS (2020) and THE MOST IMPORTANT COMIC BOOK ON EARTH: STORIES TO SAVE THE WORLD (2021). E has also illustrated the YA prose novel WE ARE THE FIRE, WE ARE THE ASHES written by Joy McCullough (2021). Maia's next book is SAACHI'S STORIES, a graphic novel co-written with Lucky Srikumar, due out from Scholastic Graphix in spring 2025. Before setting out to work freelance full-time, Maia worked for over ten years in libraries. E has been self-publishing comics and zines since 2010, and has attended over fifty comic conventions in that time. Eir work focuses on gender, sexuality, queerness, and pop culture fandom.

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Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on modern and contemporary art, curatorial history, and feminist and queer studies. He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art and What was Contemporary Art? With Catherine Lord, he cowrote Art and Queer Culture, a survey of art and alternative sexuality since 1885.

Meyer’s most recent book Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered ) tells the story of a Brooklyn tailor and slipper-maker who, against all odds, achieved international recognition as a self-taught artist in the 1940s.  Coinciding with the book’s publication, a Hirshfield retrospective curated by Meyer was mounted at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and later travelled to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. The book received the Dedalus Foundation Award for outstanding exhibition catalogue.

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Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts brings together locally and nationally renowned artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars for a series of conversations to discuss a broad range of LGBTQ+ topics in the humanities, architecture, design, and the arts. QCCA is an on-going collaboration between the Queer Cultural Center, and California College of the Arts.