Private Collections / (Cruising) Communal Nostalgia

throughout my time in my wandering MFA experience, I have been engaging with aspects of personal and public memory. in my academic paper from september 2024, i theorized about forms of reflexive nostalgia for the queer community that center cruising cultures of the 1970s. that research, or its implicit drives, feels radically altered by the results of the 2024 election and the renewed era of rapid authoritarianism. fascism is inherently a project of political nostalgia: “make america great again, again” attests to the way that this notion of time and memory is encroaching both faster and closer.

heavily indebted to early oughts era of queer theory that prioritized concepts of queer time, chrono-normativity, and “time binds,” the multi-media work i have created since the spring of 2025 questions why it is that queer people are so obsessed with archives. are we seeking lineages of the self to orient our present? is it simply that “the future” looks too bleak? is nostalgia a seductive balm from the overbearing present?

I. PRIVATE COLLECTIONS utilizes two archives: one an informal collection from the late owner of Faubourg Books in the Marigny New Orleans, Mr. Otis (some artifacts presented below); and the Mario Dipietrantonio Collection from the The Historic New Orleans Collection, highting The Golden Lantern Bar in the French Quarter.

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artists a.r. havel and Amos Distefano will recreate images from these archives. part ethnography/documentary photography project, we will whenever possible photograph the original subjects who can be identified and found today. others will be with community members who fit the aesthetic and represent haunted-contemporary figures.

II. COMMUNAL NOSTALGIA is a series of performance and contemporary dance works that investigates reflexive nostalgia, story-telling, and identity formation through choreographic devising structures concieved by Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Pina Bausch, and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. The first full-length piece was presented on September 20, 2025 at Catapult Studio in the Marigny, New Orleans, Louisiana. It was first developed at Shoestring Dance Residency at Dancing Grounds in August 2025.

watch documentation here

III. CRUISING NOSTALGIA, the first iteration of this research, is a curatorial framework for a series of visual art exhibitions with artists responding to the concepts of queer cruising in a given region. The first was in February of 2025 with Gulf South artists, presented in New Orleans Arabi neighborhood at Mehle Gallery.