VCU news

By Brian McNeill

At The Kitchen, a nonprofit, interdisciplinary arts institution in New York City, Virginia Commonwealth University professor madison moore, Ph.D., is currently serving in the organization’s first “nightlife-in-residency,” curating a series of public programs centered around queer nightlife and club culture.  

moore, a cultural critic, DJ and assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies in the College of Humanities and Sciences, is author of the 2018 book “Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric,” and is an artist-scholar focused on Black queer studies, performance studies, fashion, contemporary art and popular music.

At The Kitchen, moore’s residency “invites audiences to enter the imagination of a collectively crafted rave environment layered with video projections, fog, club lighting, DJ sets and lectures that explore the significance of queer [people] of color world making, and the impetus to dance as a radical act of somatic pedagogy.”

The programming is presented in connection to an installation by artist Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” which is a reimagining of the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. The bar was established by the artist’s father, Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party, and provided a safe space for the multiracial queer community who were marginalized in other spaces throughout the city.

“The nightlife residency entails conducting my own research interviews on queer nightlife and creating community with nightlife figures in New York while also curating a series of public programs in response to Sadie Barnette’s ‘The New Eagle Creek Saloon,’” moore said.

“Through Barnette’s piece and my nightlife residency, my hope is that audiences will be reminded of the importance of feeling,” they added. “Capitalism works tirelessly, even relentlessly, to control our sense of time, pleasure and fun — capitalism as a kind of numbing agent. So my hope is that this project, which is so focused on feeling, sensation, lingering and community, reminds people to feel. I also hope that people come away with a sense of the urgency, emergency and necessity of Black queer nightlife spaces.”

Among the programming organized by moore will be a series of Saturday Sessions, DJ sets held within the “The New Eagle Creek Saloon.”

“Each Saturday Session, a new DJ that madison has invited will engage histories old and new via Barnette’s bar as a queered architectural and conceptual framework, and on the dance floor,” according to The Kitchen. “moore's hope is to get everyone dancing, paying homage to the groundbreaking contributions of queer nightlife to performance practice.”

moore’s nightlife residency got underway Jan. 18 and runs until March 6. For more information, visit https://thekitchen.org/event/madison-moore-nightlife-in-residence.