EXILE Gallery needs your help.
Each donation will help liberate experimental art from the cages of time, space, tradition, and market-governed taste. The walls of entire cities are ripe for exhibits. A few bucks puts a poster on the street or a couple of stickers. A hundred dollars helps stage a video screening in a Laundromat in Paris, on a bus, or under the eaves of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The internet gives access to all.
Our first big project is a show of work by and about the neo-minimalist B-Ville group.
With your help, EXILE will roam the cities exploding in concerts and performances. First in Paris, then New York where passersby will surely declare, "What on earth is that? That's not art. My kid could do that." And somebody else will say, "Cool. Keep it up."
Activities will be tweeted from EXILE.
What we need: cash for a sturdy portable DVD player, stickers, posters, postcards, a small run of DVDs, and of course, catalogs. Tiny ones. Even virtual galleries must have them.
Any surplus funds will help us do more and more quickly. We can double our video screens, plaster Paris with B-Ville Manifestos. And maybe get drunk. Just once.
Open the cages. Support free range art! It just tastes better.
Thanks to Harriet Hirshorn for the chicken footage.
3 complete minutes of gratitude, plus invitations to special events.
A thank you card sent from EXILE, invitations to special events, and your name posted on our site.
The above, plus an EXILE tattoo -temporary- like our installations.
All the above plus a DVD of selected shorts by B-Ville's infamous Geneviève de Parnier, and your name in a list of contributors in the gallery catalog.
The above, plus a tiny gallery catalog where your name will appear.
The above, plus a thank you on the DVD.
The above, only your name really really big.
The above, plus Kelly shaves her head. In New York in the spring.
We rename a street in Belleville, Paris for you. Or at least we hold the ceremony, film it, put it on YouTube, and monitor how long the new street sign lasts. B-Ville artists promise to immortalize the street name somewhere in their work.
We reveal the secret handshake.
New York, NY
Kelly Cogswell is a long-time lesbian activist, and independent journalist and VJ specializing in politics and culture.
As an activist, she worked briefly with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, then three intense years as a founding member of the Lesbian Avengers (1992-95).
She later co-founded and edited The Gully online magazine and The Gully en español (2000-2006) offering "queer views on everything" and a series of activist tools to get readers involved.
She currently has a regular column in Gay City News in New York where she's been recognized for her work by the New York Press Association.
In 2008, irritated by how history erased not only the accomplishments of the Lesbian Avengers, but the dyke activists themselves, she launched http://www.lesbianavengers.com where she posted the flyers and press releases stored in her basement and began to bug her friends for photos, interviews and temporary tattoos.