LEARN MORE ABOUT CONNECTED CHEF

Q: Hi Liz! Before we dive into the incredible work that Connected Chef does in Queens, I want to learn a little more about you – tell us about yourself and how you got involved.

Liz: Hi there! My name is Liz Alvarez (she/they) and I’m the Director of Programs & Special Events at Connected Chef. I’m also the daughter of Cuban immigrants – I like to say Caribbean-rooted, Queens-grown.

I had been working in fine dining, trying to figure myself out. I realized pretty early on that my goal wasn’t to cook high-end – and only for the people that can afford to eat high-end. And then, COVID hit and like many I had a lot of time on my hands to figure out what kind of chef I wanted to be. I got really involved in the mutual aid scene, I was part of a digital cookbook ‘Astoria at Home’ – which collectively raised 10k for The Astoria Mutual Aid Network.

And that’s how I first got involved with Connected Chef. I started volunteering, doing outreach to Spanish-speaking folks who were on the waitlist for $0 produce delivery.

And the rest is history.

Q: From fine-dining to activist – love that trajectory. Tell me more about Connected Chef. What are the core tenets?

Liz: Connected Chef is a non-profit rooted in mutual aid tenets, building local sovereignty and community power using food as a medium. We are an organization of cooks and restaurant workers on a mission to build community power through a community-rooted food system that ensures every Queens household has consistent access to local, nutritious food; provides healthy eating education; and pathways to financial agency.

We work toward our vision through our sliding-scale Lifeline Grocery delivery, Community Fresh Market, programming and education programming. Through these efforts, Connected Chef delivers fresh, nutrient-dense groceries sourced from small, regional BIPOC farmers to all community members in Queens, NY, while creating job opportunities and deepening community participation.

Something I love is our organization actively works to flatten hierarchical structures and makes decisions collectively.

Q: It goes without saying COVID was the catalyst for many community movements, like this one. Can you speak to that?

Liz: Our co-Founders Kim Calichio and Omar Bravo-Pavia are both chefs experiencing the results of the challenges faced by the restaurant industry during the onset of COVID. In devastating irony, many folks within the industry were experiencing food insecurity due to the shut down and weren’t eligible for government assistance.

What began as 30 bags of fresh produce delivered to friends and neighbors quickly grew to 2,000 bags and boxes of groceries being delivered to families in need at the height of the pandemic. We began adding sliding scale payment, urban farm stands, educational programming and our Community Fresh Market. Our work evolved past relief to community sustainability and sovereignty.

Q: What’s the scale for this project?

Liz: Since March 2020, we’ve distributed 6 million pounds of produce to 50,000+ Queens residents annually. We’ve also invested over $1.5 million in local jobs, as well as $1+ million in local farms.

Q: Something I’ve been really interested in when talking with activists like you is thinking about the work we do as part of a larger tradition. How do you see your work at Connected Chef as a continuation of the activism that came before you?

Liz: I think we are threading together the learnings of the past activists and comrades, taking into account that we are in a different time and looking towards the future. The mutual aid we do at Connected Chef is all about resource sharing, community trust and neighbors helping neighbors is not new. Collaboration vs competition has been practiced extensively especially with marginalized groups (i.e. Black communities, immigrant communities, LGBTQ+ communities, working class communities and more). I think about the Black Panthers Free Food Program, Sou-Sou Savings Club (originating in Africa, seen in the Caribbean, Asian and Latino communities in America), Community Fridges and Community-led disaster relief.

I believe we at Connected Chef are bringing a mutual aid lens to steward an alternate food system that reconnects growers, neighbors, educators – restoring dignity and redistributing power.

Q: I like what you’re getting at. So, food has the potential to be a subversive tool?

Liz: I believe that food is subversive because its simplicity as a basic human need and right is a medium for change, liberation and joy. We are creating a system that advances food justice by organizing communities, farmers, and partners to build equitable, community-controlled food systems.

Q: What’s the dream? 10 years down the line, what do you envision for Connected Chef

Liz: So, Connected Chef envisions a future where community-led food systems shape neighborhood health, local economies, public policy and more. We want to shape policies that build local economic power and advocate for structural change. Our collective vision is a city where those impacted by food inequity lead the systems change that sustains their neighborhoods for generations.

Q: Ok, now time for some fun questions. At your dream table, who are you breaking bread with and why?

Liz: David Bowie - I love the constant re-imagination and rebirth as an musician, the makeup, fashion and theatricality. Donald Glover - the ultimate triple threat. The man has more talent in his little pinky than most in their whole bodies. I love his use of magic realism in Atlanta. Frida Kahlo - I love her fortitude to transform pain, personal tragedy into art. I also relate to a lot of the imagery in her artwork

The common thread for me are that they are amazing artists that are standing in their unique power. They make beautiful and insightful work that I find liberating.

Q: I can’t wait for your answer on this one – what’s the best place to eat in New York City? Why?

Liz: There are too many to name, plus I tend to play my favorites out and then have to regroup! My recommendation is for folks to experience the world by doing a 7 train tour through Queens - get off at each stop, hit up the Mom and Pops, the bodegas or pastry shops with a hidden speciality in the back, food trucks.

That said, here are some current quick faves (between 74th and 90th 7 train stops):

• Over the Moon for Guava Croissant - beautiful lamination, nicely filled.

• Merit Kebob - $7 Breakfast with choice of main, 4 different bread choices and amazing chai (I add a 2nd chai to my order for during the day)

• Urubamba - Peruvian, halal and great Sangria

And some more (N train):

• Rosario’s - regular pizza slice or pie in the back

• Rose & Joe’s - grandma slice in the back

Q: How can someone get involved?

Liz: Follow us on Instagram @connectedchef or visit our website to stay updated on events and more. Our Queens Community Food Hub is located at: 37-31 58th Street, Woodside, Queens 11377. You can also donate through our website.

Thank you Liz for the transformative work you do at Connected Chef!

Breaking Bread: Building Power is a blog and social media series by Brooklyn-based chef and writer Anaïs DerSimonian of Pom Pom Kitchen (Substack / Instagram) documenting grassroots feminist organizers in New York City who center food in their activism and community care practices. The series examines how cooking, feeding, and gathering function as radical tools—supporting political education, mutual aid, healing, and resistance.

LEARN MORE ABOUT QUEER APERITIVO

Q: Hi Ora! Before we get started unpacking your infamous party, tell us a little bit about YOU.

Ora: My name is Ora Wise and I am a chef, community organizer, event producer, and writer. I co-founded Queer Aperitivo with my dear friend and talented, fabulous, creative Jena Durman, who is also co founder of Solid Wiggles.

I joke that my gender is host. But it’s pretty much the truth – I was raised in a radical hospitality household, quite literally born into a gathering. Growing up, we were our parents’ garden assistants, prep cooks, and service team – peeling heads of garlic, picking green beans, serving and clearing the soup course, stirring the polenta, slicing the pickles, setting the table for epic feasts on a weekly basis.

We need social connection as much as physical nourishment — we need bread and roses. And we must also recognize that wellness and nourishment are not just chores to manage or individual acts, we deserve beautiful food and need a culture of collective nourishment. This is part of why “radical hospitality” feels, to me, like a deeper, more holistic, and more intellectually expansive framework than simply “food justice.”

Q: Speaking of radical hospitality, we’re here today to talk about your party, Queer Aperitivo. Give us the skinny.

Ora: The best way to summarize it is that Queer Aperitivo is Italian-inspired, locally sourced food and drink by, of and for queer folks. We collaborate with queer DJs and with community-oriented businesses, producers and bars, and we’re always building in mutual aid and fundraising for either local queer- and trans-led food sovereignty work, or Palestinian mutual aid and food sovereignty work.

Q: Incredible. So, aperitvo is an Italian thing. Where did you get the idea for ‘queer aperitivo’?

Ora: Well, the attempted short version of the story is, I started working as a chef in my adulthood, I spent more time in Italy, and was really struck by the healthy, beautiful, collective pause that aperitivo is in Italian society. It’s a super public, super egalitarian space that’s created where everyone just stops grinding and stops hustling BUT instead of then just rushing off to be in insular couples, nuclear families, or in a private domestic space, they gather to enjoy the kind of sweet spot between the productivity of day and the possibility of night.

The bubbly drinks and the bitter liqueurs are meant to kind of awaken your spirit and your appetite. The salty snacks are delicious, but it’s not a whole production. Aperitivo literally means opening.

It feels so radical in the face of the constant grind, hustle, and productivity mode that capitalist Western culture instills in us, especially here in New York City. So I was really struck by that, and I felt like it was intrinsically kind of anti-capitalist and something that I wanted here – but make it queer.

Q: That’s beautiful. Ok, so how did you make it happen?

Ora: So almost two years ago (April is our bday!), I approached my co-Founder Jena about starting this special event – part pop-up, part party. Little Egg – which is run by another dear friend and comrade – said that we could pop-up there. Since then, we’ve been pouring top shelf drinks, serving Italian-inspired locally-sourced bites, and creating that rare space where political resistance meets pure pleasure. We build an “oasis of yes” in increasingly hostile times because we insist on exceptional gatherings for exceptional queers. We’ve partnered with different bars with values-aligned operators throughout the city and also now in a few different spots in LA and Oakland and New Orleans.

“In this time, when our people are being attacked, are being disappeared, are being deliberately starved to death – from here to Palestine to Iran and beyond – it can feel really complicated to prioritize pleasure. However, there’s a reason why we’re doing this. It’s because we need to be able to fill each other’s cups and to fill our own cup. “

Q: Why is it so important for queer people to have community spaces that aren’t couples-based or nuclear-family based. Why is it so radical to center queer folks in hospitality?

Ora: I was drawn to sharing aperitivo from that part of my culture with my queer community, because it is sexy and life-affirming and collective, and it’s not pretentious and it’s not exclusive. So many of the folks in our queer and trans community are struggling with unemployment, with underemployment, with not making the living wage – including myself, honestly. And so for me, it’s important that there’s always complimentary chips and olives on the bar and affordably priced drinks. It’s a space to gather where you don’t have to spend anything – or very little – that’s also politically-aligned.

The goal is to have it feel like a safe space for folks, while also making room for some much needed flirtation and exploration or just leisure and enjoyment. I also love that starting at 6 p.m. allows for a flow of different folks who need different kinds of social space. We have our gays with babies coming from 6 to 8, we have people cozy up in a banquet and eat or just nibble and sip, and folks coming through after dinner to kick it with the DJ and turn up. It contributes to the delicious diversity that I really enjoy.

In this time, when our people are being attacked, are being disappeared, are being deliberately starved to death – from here to Palestine to Iran and beyond – it can feel really complicated to prioritize pleasure. However, there is a reason why we’re doing this. It’s because we need to be able to fill each other’s cups and to fill our own cup.

Q: I want to know more about the sourcing and the mutual aid side to QA.

Ora: As a producer, chef and curator of bar menus, I see every drink and every dish as an opportunity to either live into my principles or not, to apply my principles or not. And so I take the sourcing very seriously.

We’re using Queer Aperitivo as a living laboratory for creating spaces of queer joy and fine food and drink that are based in our principles. We donate $1 from every drink sold to food sovereignty and mutual aid projects that we partner with. And we are very, very deliberate about how we source the wine and spirits and foods that we work with. We prioritize queer and women distillers and winemakers, Palestinian, Black, and immigrant producers, and just in general, local producers.

For example, our favorite and main spirit partners is Pollinator Spirits, which is a queer woman run distillery using all regenerative practices in the Catskills. We use her delicious gin in both our Negroni and our martini. We also use her Amaro – which is all natural, with no dyes or additives – in our spritz as an alternative to mass produced Campari.

“I want to create a space where folks who are in the trenches, who are on the front lines, can come and unwind and feel not just safe but celebrated.”

Q: I’m curious, how do you see this project as an extension of – or in the tradition of – the queer activists who came before you.

Ora: I feel really hopeful that Queer Aperitivo can carry on the legacy of the queer women who were feeding and delighting their communities in the decades before us. Actually, a dear friend and someone we interviewed for the Queer Aperitivo newsletter, Karen Song, is making a documentary about Cafe Sundays at Cafe Tabak, which was a legendary dyke party in the East Village in the 90s that our friend Wanda Acosta – who’s a legend– used to throw. When I interviewed them, they talked about how it was so special and kind of cutting edge for queer women and the people who love them to gather and get to have stemware and really intentionally-selected music. So that’s one piece of my inspiration.

Another is the woman who ran Tin Pan Alley, a Times Square bar that hired former sex workers who wanted to get out of the business and wanted alternative careers. And then that space also became a place where Civil Rights, Black Liberation activists, and queer activists would gather.

I want to create a space where folks who are in the trenches, who are on the front lines, can come and unwind and feel not just safe but celebrated. I feel like I’m trying to be a part of a movement of queers who are reclaiming quality intentional, beautiful spaces and drinks and food for and by us.

“As a producer, chef and curator of bar menus, I see every drink and every dish as an opportunity to either live into my principles or not so I take the sourcing very seriously.”

Q: What’s next for Queer Aperitivo?

Ora: After a much needed winter hiatus, we’re getting back in the saddle. I’m really excited to do a fundraiser partnership with Ceiba Valley Farm, because partnership and collaboration is such an important part for me of what it means to be queer. Our resident DJ, Sunny Cheeba, is also a farmer and we’re helping fundraise for her project. Hopefully, we’ll be doing some fundraising with and for Rise and Root, which is an iconic lesbian-run farm, which has been at the forefront of food sovereignty work here in New York and throughout the country. We’re also raising funds for a chef and farmer delegation for the olive harvest in Palestine in the fall. And we also are excited to partner with Roni Selects – our fabulous queer wine top, as I like to call them – in LA, as well as DJ Ashley Younniä on some fun community events and an after party for Dyke Day there.

Of course, we will be working with DJ Ushka and her party with Rio Bamba called Chaotica. And just keeping it in the family, keeping it like queer – especially queer women-centered – and doing these cultural and culinary community events to help fill people’s cups.

Q: How can people learn more? How can they donate if they’re not able to attend the parties?

Ora: You can find us on evil Instagram at @queeraperitivonyc. From there, you can join our email list. We have a Queer Aperitivo newsletter on Substack, but we actually are excited to be expanding our multimedia production, so stay tuned on how that might grow.

As far as donating, we do have different partners for different parties so normally, during the lead up for each event, we’ll share the information about the organization or the project that we’re partnering with to raise funds that time.

Thank you for the incredible work you’re doing Ora, and see you all on April 15th at Rodeo in Crown Heights, Brooklyn!

Breaking Bread: Building Power is a blog and social media series by Brooklyn-based chef and writer Anaïs DerSimonian of Pom Pom Kitchen (Substack / Instagram) documenting grassroots feminist organizers in New York City who center food in their activism and community care practices. The series examines how cooking, feeding, and gathering function as radical tools—supporting political education, mutual aid, healing, and resistance.

LEARN MORE ABOUT WE THE PEOPLE NYC

Q: Hi Chris! Tell us about yourself and how you got involved with We the People

Chris: My name is Chris (they/them) and I have been organizing with We the People for just over 2 years. Professionally, I am the Community Wellness Coordinator at a public middle school in Brooklyn. There, I provide yoga and mindfulness education to students in special education settings, while also running and managing the library.

I am also a teaching artist, facilitating in-school and after-school programming in zine making and other methods of self-publication across New York City. All my work with young people centers around leveraging education as a tool for mutual liberation.

I became involved with We the People while looking for meaningful ways to build community-based systems of care following the George Floyd uprisings. After spending much of 2020 and 2021 in the streets protesting, I was hungry to not only call for the abolition of systems of harm, but also to begin to build the new world we were fighting for. I wanted to think about how we could care for each other so deeply, the government would become irrelevant. I knew some of the founders of We the People from those actions and was inspired by the work they were doing and continue to do to meet our community’s needs.

Q: Tell us about We the People – what kind of work do y’all do?

Chris: We the People NYC is an abolitionist collective of neighbors supporting neighbors - committed to fostering a safe, equitable, and loving culture, in Bed Stuy and Harlem that will serve as a catalyst for mutual aid efforts in surrounding communities. On Thursdays in Bedstuy and Saturdays in Harlem, WTP has a weekly food distribution. At these distros, there are typically 4 trays of meat, veggies, a starch based side, salad, pasta with no meat, and dessert. There is also an information table with resources on housing, employment, healthcare, education, and other resources. As well as a clothing table. Distro typically runs for 30min - 1 hour, until the food is gone. As an abolitionist- and reciprocally-based organization, there is no policing of who gets what, instead everyone is asked to act by the principle of take what you need and leave what you can.

The beauty of nonhierarchical mutual aid is that anyone can jump in and leverage their skills to serve the greater community. After seeing We the People’s work and attending a distro, I made a group chat with some friends who said they’d be down to cook once a week and we’ve been doing it ever since. Every week we make a group message of whoever is down to cook, we plan what dishes we will make based off of that week’s menu, then divide up buying ingredients. We typically can cover the cost of ingredients between our own contributions and by posting Instagram stories asking for people to contribute. As time has gone on we have more ways of getting resources. For example, my neighbor does food rescues from grocery stores across the city and I get produce from him to cook each week. Or another friend works at a bakery and brings the bread that would normally get tossed at the end of the day to distro.

Q: Tell us about a really memorable moment where you felt especially successful. How did it embody WTP’s larger mission and principals?

Chris: A really memorable moment with We the People is when we were hosting emergency distributions in Tompkins Square Park. This was when the state was dropping newcomers to the city and country in the park, in the dead of winter, with little to no resources. Because we were already organizing a weekly distro, only in Bedstuy at that time, we were able to call on our cooking team and research team and get a weekly distribution going to serve the folks in Tompkins. People were really cold and really hungry, so it was a bit chaotic at first, but once we got into a flow we were able to get everyone fed. So many community members walking by stopped and asked how they could help. I remember one week a girl stopping by and the next she came with sandwiches for folks while they waited in line for hot food. I think that’s something really special about community organizing – you can fill gaps where you see them. There is no red tape, no need for approval from “leadership”, just people gathering and meeting each other’s needs as best as we can.

Q: Ok, this question is about food and culture surrounding food: they say (well, Anthony Bourdain did once) that food is a reflection of history and identity. How does We the People relate to food, food practices and culture surrounding food (i.e. do you offer food distribution, and why is that important?

Chris: Food distribution is at the core of We the People’s work. However it does not stop there. We are not just feeding people, we are nurturing systems of care while building collective understanding of why people do not have what they need. We are building community and political consciousness. Charity is a band aid that relies on the cut for its utility. Mutual aid is a practice in communal solidarity and sovereignty.

In alignment with principles of mutual aid, the food we cook and serve is food the people eating it want. Often food distributions will be vegan or plant based and while any group that is feeding people is doing important work, organizing should be catered to the people it’s meant to engage. If the majority of the people at our distributions were vegan, we should certainly make mostly vegan meals. We used to have pork chops on the menu pretty frequently, but with an increasing amount of people at distro and people cooking not being comfortable with pork, for a myriad of reasons, we typically leave that off the menu.

Q: How does food tie in to your overall mission?

Chris: I think any organization that presents an idea for a different future without caring for the people now, where we are at, severely misses the mark. Imagining is so important, it allows us to remember we can create something new, something different from this world. However, we can go beyond imagining and start building. I like to think of mutual aid as a practice in spell casting. If you believe food should be free, create a reality where it is. Every Thursday on the corners of Nostrand and Fulton and every Saturday on Lexington between 124th and 125th, food is free. We have created that reality in two places, for one hour, every week. There have been several other food distros that have popped up in and around the city who have cross pollinated with us to share ideas, methods, and struggles. They are casting the spell too.

Q: Who are you sitting with at your dream table, breaking bread with? Why?

Chris: I would want to have dinner with a woman who managed to keep a family fed by rubbing together pennies. I would want to have dinner with the elder who saved the trees on my block from being bulldozed. I would want to have dinner with the gardener who turned an empty lot into a food forest. I would want to have dinner with my ancestors who saved seeds in their hair for a better life they never knew was coming but also never stopped believing in.

Q: We are all a part of those who came before us. How do you see your work at We the People as in tradition with the activists/comrades that came before you? Are you carrying the past or doing something radically new?

Chris: Communities filling in the gaps and caring for each other is a tale as old as time. That is how we have always survived. I am particularly inspired by the work of the Young Lords and the Black Panthers when it comes to meeting our community’s needs whilst pointing out the government’s failure to do so.

Q: What’s the best place to eat in New York City? Why?

Chris: Your local food distribution! You can talk to your neighbors, get connected with people who are already casting this spell. And you can meaningfully contribute your unique skills to the struggle. The thing you want to share with the world is exactly what the world needs.

Q: Anything else you’d like to share? Social handles, how to get involved, upcoming events, etc.?

Chris: Get involved in a food distribution in your neighborhood! If no one is doing it yet, you can start one. Even if it is once a month, be consistent and the people you need to make it sustainable will reveal themselves to you. If you want to get involved with We the People the instagram is @wethepeople_nyc there you can find posts about new member meetings to learn about all our teams and how you can bring your skills to the struggle.

Thank you Chris for the incredible work you do at WTP!

LEARN MORE ABOUT WE THE PEOPLE NYC

Happy Black History Month! At The Feminist Institute, we affirm Black feminist history not as a moment of recognition, but as an ongoing practice of preservation. Black feminist cultural production has too often been under-archived, under-resourced, and under-recognized.

This month, we are proud to announce the addition of eight literary works by Dindga McCannon to the TFI Digital Archive, expanding her Capsule Collection to include book design, illustration, and authorship.

Dindga McCannon, Peaches, 1974.
Copyright held by Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.
See record.

A canonical Black feminist artist born and raised in Harlem, McCannon has spent decades retelling the stories and histories of Black women through mixed-media fiber, visual art, and literary work. In the early 1960s, she joined the preeminent Weusi Artist Collective, a group dedicated to creating space for Black artists to express and exhibit their ideas freely. Alongside Faith Ringgold and Kay Brown, she later co-founded Where We At, creating community-based arts education for Black women artists.

Her literary contributions are an extension of this political work. Among these newly archived materials are four rare children’s books and two autobiographical novels that center Black girlhood and creativity; works that offered vital representation at a time when it was scarce. Additionally, McCannon designed book covers for Audre Lorde, creating a powerful connection between Black feminist visual and literary art.

Dindga McCannon and Edgar White, Children of Night, 1974.
Copyright held by Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.
See record.

These additions reflect the breadth of her cultural impact, not only as an artist but as a builder of Black feminist visual and literary worlds.

Queer Legacies Project with The American LGBTQ+ Museum and SAGE

Participants from our last Queer Legacies Project at Edie Windsor SAGE Center, 2025. Photos by Leandro Justen.

Queer Legacies Project (QLP) is an in-person workshop series developed by the American LGBTQ+ Museum in partnership with The Feminist Institute and SAGE, a service and advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ elders with centers in the Bronx, Harlem, Chelsea, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. QLP aims to illuminate the personal histories and ephemera of NYC’s LGBTQ+ elders through facilitated archiving workshops. The project will convene LGBTQ+ elders to emphasize the importance of their personal archives and stories within the greater narrative arc of LGBTQ+ history in the U.S. These workshops will help participants preserve their personal archives for future generations by cataloging the stories and ephemera that reflect the valuable histories of their lives.

The workshop will be held in person at the Harlem SAGE Center (220 W 143rd St New York, NY 10030) on March 11, March 18, and March 25, from 2-5 pm. For our interested 60+ readers, SAGE membership is highly encouraged for all archiving workshop participants. We will have staff on hand to help you sign up on-site if preferred.

Register for QLP

Register for SAGE

QLP Guest Archivists

keondra bills freemyn is a writer and archivist focusing on digital archives, social movements, and Black cultural production. She is Co Executive Director, Archives + Strategy at Black Lunch Table, an independent oral history archive centering visual artists, and founder of Black Women Writers Project, an archival initiative highlighting the contributions of Black women and gender expansive writers to the literary canon. keondra is a Society of American Archivists Digital Archives Specialist and has worked on archival projects centering marginalized communities with Project STAND, Library of Congress, Smithsonian, New York Public Library and DC Public Library. keondra is author of the poetry collection Things You Left Behind and has contributed to several anthologies, including Black Librarians in America: Reflections, Resistance, Reawakening and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of African American Women’s Writing. She is an alumna of Fordham University (BS), Columbia University (MPA), and University of Maryland College Park (MLIS) and holds a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Harvard University.

Steven G. Fullwood is an archivist, writer, and editor. He is the co-director of the Nomadic Archivists Project, an initiative that partners with organizations, institutions, and individuals to establish, preserve, and enhance collections that explore the African Diasporic experience. Fullwood also serves as the coordinator of Marking Time, Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood. He is the former assistant curator of the Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Fullwood’s published works include Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (co-edited with Charles Stephens, 2014) and Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (co-edited with Lisa C. Moore, 2007). His latest publication, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Writing (co-edited with Seph Rodney, 2025), features thirty-two chapters where writers share their insights, offering pathways for others to follow. They delve into how they balance multiple roles, the choices they made, the challenges they faced, and the successes they achieved.

Melissa Aslo de la Torre is a queer Midwestern Mexican transplant to New York City, where she is the librarian for Latin American, Caribbean, Spanish, and Portuguese Studies at NYU. She is also a memory worker and zine-maker interested in queer, cuir, trans, and lesbiana archiving practices, art, literature, and activism.

Upcoming Conference: How shall we do this? Shaping a feminist art resource centre

From February 26 to February 28, the Irish Museum of Art (IMMA) & NCAD present a Symposium that brings together a diverse range of feminist-led practices and voices, to think through the imperatives for a feminist-led art resource centre on the island of Ireland. TFI’s Archives + Programs Manager, Allison Elliott, will present her talk The Archive as Praxis: Feminist Ethics, Information Activism, and Collaborative Memory, which explores collaborative archiving as a form of feminist information activism, drawing on the Pop-Up Memory Lab program developed by TFI.

How shall we do this? aims to capture a series of propositions and findings – rooted in best practice – of what a feminist-informed arts resource centre could look like specific to the island of Ireland, and to create a network of international relationships with other like-minded initiatives, nationally and internationally. All talks will be recorded and made openly accessible on the Digital Repository of Ireland.

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30 Days of Feminist History is complete. Thank you for being with us. In 2026, collective care sustains collective memory—and your contribution helps keep feminist history accessible.

Week 4: Online
Plan C. Global Fund for Women. The Feminist Art Project. ANOTHER eXperiment by WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL (AXW). A week of showcasing feminist digital culture, online organizing, and the websites that shaped how feminism moved across the web.

Every object we shared came directly from the TFI Digital Archive, preserved in collaboration with record-holders who trusted us with their histories and stewarded through a feminist ethics of care. If you’ve been following along on Instagram, this is where we slow down, deepen the context, and invite you to help sustain the work behind the scenes.

TFI Instagram

Deep Dive: Preserving the Feminist Internet

This week, our deep dives draw from born-digital preservation under our program, Preserving the Feminist Internet (PTFI), created by Marie Williams Chant, digital archivist and strategist.

The digital landscape has provided a powerful platform for feminist voices to be heard, celebrated, and shared. Feminists have been utilizing the Internet to build innovative digital spaces and communities since the mid-1990s. These projects are critical to understanding the evolution of feminist movements and have served as essential documentation of gender and racial injustice worldwide.

Ultimately, TFI’s Preserving the Feminist Internet is a love letter to feminist culture, acknowledging that the work of those who have come before us is seen and feminist voices endure technological shifts.

The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) Twitter

Twitter — The Feminist Art Project (Rutgers), 2023. Preserved through a partnership between The Feminist Art Project and The Feminist Institute, 2023. See record.

Founded in 2005, The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) is an international, collaborative initiative dedicated to celebrating the Feminist Art Movement and the aesthetic, intellectual, and political impact of women on the visual arts. A strategic grassroots intervention against the ongoing erasure of women artists and arts professionals from the cultural record, TFAP has long served as a connective hub for feminist artists, curators, scholars, educators, and critics across generations and geographies.

This born-digital capture preserves TFAP’s Twitter activity during its former administrative home at Rutgers University, documenting how feminist discourse, organizing, and knowledge-sharing unfolded on social media prior to TFAP’s transition to the Women’s Caucus for Art in mid-2023.

By preserving this platform-based record, TFI ensures that the digital traces of feminist art advocacy, such as announcements, conversations, networks, and calls to action, remain accessible beyond institutional shifts and platform instability. TFAP is a caucus of the Women’s Caucus for Art and an Affiliated Society of the College Art Association, continuing its mission to amplify feminist art histories through programming, convenings, and public scholarship.

Global Fund for Women, Imagining Ourselves: A Global Generation of Women

Imagining Ourselves: A Global Generation of Women, 2006. Courtesy and copyright of Global Fund for Women; preserved through a partnership between Global Fund for Women and The Feminist Institute, 2023. See record.

In the early 2000s, the International Museum of Women (IMOW) made a bold shift from a planned physical museum to a pioneering digital-only model, expanding global access to feminist storytelling and human rights advocacy online. Today, IMOW’s digital exhibitions are hosted by Global Fund for Women, continuing their public life on the web.

The Feminist Institute partnered with Global Fund for Women to ensure this born-digital feminist history is preserved. Using web archiving tools, TFI captured interactive IMOW exhibitions and migrated media so these projects could live on inside the TFI Digital Archive: not as static screenshots, but as accessible research records.

The International Museum of Women curated Imagining Ourselves: A Global Generation of Women, an anthology and ambitious online project featuring personal stories, paintings, photographs, essays, and poems by hundreds of young women from more than 100 countries around the world. The women were asked to answer one general question: “What defines your generation of women?” In October 2007, Imagining Ourselves was awarded the Social Impact award from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

Want to learn more? Check out this blog post about the partnership by Marie Williams Chant.

ANOTHER eXperiment by WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL (AXW) Website

AXW/online / Another eXperiment by Women Film Festival website. Courtesy and copyright of Lili White; preserved through a partnership between Lili White and The Feminist Institute, 2023. See record.

Since 2010, Another Experiment by Women Film Festival (AXW) has insistently created space for women’s experimental film in New York City. These are works that rarely reach mainstream theaters and often live outside institutional visibility: films shaped by nonlinear storytelling, underrepresented perspectives, and the textured realities of women’s lives.

Experimental film remains largely invisible to the general public, most often confined to academic settings or film society circuits. AXW disrupted that pattern by presenting public screenings in Manhattan that treated experimental film not as an outlier, but as essential cultural work. Each program was carefully curated around a shared underlying theme, allowing audiences to experience the films as conversations rather than isolated pieces. Viewers regularly described these screenings as distinctive.

AXW was founded by Lili White, an artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and more than 100 moving-image works rooted in automatic techniques, collective memory, and dream states. White led AXW for a decade, ensuring that women’s experimental films were not only screened but contextualized, discussed, and thoughtfully archived. Program notes and blog posts became part of the project’s infrastructure, extending each screening beyond the room and into an ongoing public record.

This digital capture of the AXW website, preserved during TFI’s 2023 Pop-Up Memory Lab, holds curatorial writing, program histories, and documentation of screenings. A living record of feminist film culture, these web captures remain interactive inside the TFI Digital Archive, ensuring that AXW’s work continues to be searchable, accessible, and available for future audiences.

While 30 Days of Feminist History has wrapped, the archive stays in motion. Join us in 2026 as we expand feminist archiving across platforms and formats—from born-digital culture to physical collections—through new projects, events, and regular archive releases. Follow TFI on Instagram and Substack for the latest collection drops, feminist history highlights, and what’s coming next.

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And for those who want to go deeper, our paid subscribers will get access to extended materials each week: behind-the-scenes context, exclusive archival footage, and extra deep dives into the highlighted objects from our archive.

Paid subscriptions and donations help sustain TFI, just as museum memberships do. They’re mission-driven support that keeps feminist history preserved, accessible, and safe. Consider contributing today.

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Week 3: On the Page.
Michelle Handelman. Ntzoake Shange. Lola Pashalinski. Dindga McCannon. Ariel Dougherty. Claudia Weill. Yuri Shimojo. A week dedicated to feminist writers, filmmakers, and storytellers, the people who used language, image, and performance to rewrite the cultural record.

Every object we shared came directly from the TFI Digital Archive, preserved in collaboration with record-holders who trusted us with their histories and stewarded through a feminist ethics of care. If you’ve been following along on Instagram, this is where we slow down, deepen the context, and invite you to help sustain the work behind the scenes.

TFI Instagram

Deep Dive: Feminist Writers + Media-Makers

This week, our deep dives draw from two upcoming 2026 collections: the Lola Pashalinski Capsule Collection and the Michelle Handelman Capsule Collection. Both highlight queer and feminist media that challenged the status quo.

The Lola Pashalinski Capsule Collection is created in collaboration with the LGBTQ Artists Archive Project, beginning with TFI’s 2024 Pop-Up Memory Lab and continuing through one-on-one digitization sessions. The collection is a multimedia assemblage of photographs, ephemera, audio recordings, and video, illustrating Pashalinski’s expansive career in theatre.

The Michelle Handelman Capsule Collection is created in collaboration with Handelman and Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu, who have worked closely with TFI staff to create metadata through our collaborative cataloging model. The collection not only showcases Handelman’s work as a multidisciplinary artist, but also her inter-community cultural collaborations—organizing letters in protest of censorship, conducting interviews with Barbara Hammer and other artists about their work, and preserving ephemera from talks and public programs.

Lola Pashalinski

“Arts Feature: Lola Pashalinski Interviews Herself.” Dyke TV, created by Linda Chapman, Mary Patierno, and Ana María Simo, episode 53, Sangfroid LLT, June 7, 1994.

Award-winning actor and playwright. Founding member of the iconic Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Lola Pashalinski dedicated her life to bringing queer and feminist culture to the stage and screen.

This week, we featured an object from that collection: a DYKE TV Arts Segment hosted by Pamela Sneed, in which Pashalinski takes us to the original 1967 East Village home of the Ridiculous Theater—a queer theatre company where Pashalinski proudly dubbed herself the “house lesbian.” With humor and care, she describes the Ridiculous Theater as a “display case of costume camp.”

DYKE TV ran from 1993 to 2005 and was founded by Ana María Simo (playwright and co-founder of Lesbian Avengers), Mary Patierno (independent film and video maker), and Linda Chapman (theater director, producer, co-founder of the LGBTQ Artists Archive Project, and Pashalinski’s partner of 45 years). Guided by the mission Incite, Subvert, Provoke, Organize, DYKE TV expanded lesbian visibility by covering lesbian culture and political issues throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. At its height, the program was accessible in 61 cities.

Michelle Handelman

"BloodSisters" Michelle Handelman Director Headshot Photo Print #2, 1991. Images courtesy and copyright of Michelle Handelman. Digitized for Michelle Handelman during The Feminist Institute’s pop-up Memory Lab, 2024.

Filmmaker, visual artist, writer, performer, Michelle Handelman has spent four decades creating immersive, phantasmagoric worlds that push against the boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and mortality. Emerging through the AIDS crisis and the Culture Wars of the 1990s, Handelman has created a body of work that confronts what society teaches us to fear: desire, chaos, death, transgression, and queer life.

Draft Letter from Michelle Handelman to other artists attacked by American Family Association, 1997. Images courtesy and copyright of Michelle Handelman. Digitized for Michelle Handelman during The Feminist Institute’s pop-up Memory Lab, 2024.

This week, we featured objects from the upcoming collection, like: behind-the-scenes photographs of her shooting the groundbreaking work, “BLOODSISTERS: LEATHER, DYKES AND SADOMASOCHISM,” ephemera from the film, and a letter to fellow filmmakers, such as Barbara Hammer and Cheryl Dunye, about censorship attempts by the American Family Association.

These fragments tell a fuller story of an artist who refuses to look away. Handelman’s work creates spaces where queer identities can mutate, expand, and insist on their complexity. Her installations and films have been shown worldwide—from major museums to underground screenings—carrying the legacy of artists who document queer life.

Follow along on Instagram for Week 4: Preserving the Feminist Internet—a love letter to feminist digital culture, online organizing, and the websites that shaped how feminism moved across the web. New objects drop daily from the TFI Digital Archive.

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And for those who want to go deeper, our paid subscribers will get access to extended materials each week: behind-the-scenes context, exclusive archival footage, and extra deep dives into the highlighted objects from our archive.

This week, paid subscribers will enjoy a never-before-heard audio clip from The Feminist Institute’s interview with Dindga McCannon about her storybooks.

Paid subscriptions and donations help sustain TFI, just as museum memberships do. They’re mission-driven support that keeps feminist history preserved, accessible, and safe. Consider contributing today.

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Week 2: Archived.
Dindga McCannon. Carolee Schneemann. Valerie Maynard. Ana Mendieta. Mary Beth Edelson. A week dedicated to feminist artists who used image, ritual, performance, and material to reshape visual culture.

Every object we shared came directly from the TFI Digital Archive, preserved in collaboration with record-holders who trusted us with their histories and stewarded through a feminist ethics of care. If you’ve been following along on Instagram, this is where we slow down, deepen the context, and invite you to help sustain the work behind the scenes.

TFI Instagram

Deep Dive: Feminist Artists

Ana Mendieta & Howardena Pindell— Dialectics of Isolation: Third World Women Artists of the United States

Typewritten introduction to The Dialectics of Isolation: Third World Women Artists of the United States, 1980. Image courtesy and copyright of A.I.R. Gallery and New York University. Digitized as part of a partnership between A.I.R. Gallery and The Feminist Institute, 2022. See record.

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist who shaped some of the most urgent conversations about diaspora, embodiment, and belonging in late 20th-century art. Joining A.I.R. Gallery in 1978, Mendieta made necessary interventions through her own art and curatorial practices to interrogate the white-dominated art world.

Dialectics of Isolation: Third World Women Artists of the United States (A.I.R. Gallery, 1980), curated by Ana Mendieta, Zarina and Kazuko Miyamoto, does just this. The exhibition simultaneously affirms the power of aligning with the Unaligned Nations movement as Third World Women, and addresses the predominantly white feminist art movement.

In the introduction, Mendieta writes:

“This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’”

It’s a sentence that cuts cleanly through decades of partial inclusion and conditional acceptance. Mendieta understood that “visibility” wasn’t the end goal: self-determination was.

Photograph of Howardena Pindell’s Free, White, and 21 in Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States catalog, 1980. Image courtesy and copyright of A.I.R. Gallery and New York University. Digitized as part of a partnership between A.I.R. Gallery and The Feminist Institute, 2022. See record.

Howardena Pindell, co-founder of A.I.R., showed her groundbreaking film Free, White, and 21 (1980), in Dialectics of Isolation. In the film, Pindell appears both as herself—recounting true experiences of discrimination and violence from childhood onward—and as a caricature of a white 1950s woman who repeatedly dismisses her stories with the phrase: “I’m free, white, and 21.”

Howardena Pindell’s practice spans nearly every medium—abstract painting, collage, “video drawings,” process-based work, and fiercely political pieces addressing racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. Texture, color, structure, and the act of making itself form the core of her visual language.

Carolee Schneeman

Invitation to Carolee Schneemann’s performance Dirty Pictures, 1980. Image courtesy and copyright of A.I.R. Gallery and New York University. Digitized as part of a partnership between A.I.R. Gallery and The Feminist Institute, 2022. See record.

Carolee Schneemann was a visual experimental artist whose work insisted that women’s bodies were not objects to be framed, but agents of knowledge, pleasure, and revolt. She describes her work as being about intimacy and depictions of spontaneous pleasure. More specifically, she explores how women can redefine the parameters around pleasure and relationships outside the patriarchal inheritances that are reinforced through punishment.

Schneemann often incorporated performance into her work. Dirty Pictures was a kinetic theater performance of slides, text, and film. Schneemann collaged images of women’s bodies in blue ink across the invitation, turning even the ephemera around her work into a site of feminist re-visioning. Like so much of her practice, it blurred intimacy and critique, insisting that erotic expression belonged at the heart of feminist

Make sure to follow along on Instagram for all our Week 3 content, where we’ll be highlighting feminist writers + media-makers like Michelle Handelman, Ntozake Shange, Ariel Dougherty, Lola Pashalinski, and more — with new objects dropping daily from the TFI Digital Archive.

Follow TFI Instagram

And for those who want to go deeper, our paid subscribers will get access to extended materials each week: behind-the-scenes context, exclusive archival footage, and extra deep dives into the highlighted objects from our archive.

This week, paid subscribers will enjoy a never-before-seen conversation between Mary Beth Edelson and Carolee Schneemann— you don’t want to miss it.

Paid subscriptions and donations help sustain TFI, just as museum memberships do. They’re mission-driven support that keeps feminist history preserved, accessible, and safe. Consider contributing today.

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And on Giving Tuesday, it feels especially important to name the truth: archives survive because communities decide they’re worth sustaining. If this work moves you, honor the women in your life by helping us protect the histories that made your future possible.

Fund Feminist Archiving

The archive is activated: Week 1 of 30 Days of Feminist History is wrapped. Heresies. “Where We At” Black Women Artists, Inc. supersisters™. Stormé DeLarverie. A week of feminist resistance, art, organizing, and everyday guardianship.

Every object we shared comes directly from the TFI Digital Archive, built in collaboration with record-holders who trusted us with their histories, and stewarded with a feminist ethics of care.

Deep Dive: Feminist Change-Makers

Heresies Collective

Heresies Collective at Joan Snyder’s Farm for a weekend of planning and bonding, late 1970s. Image courtesy of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and Accola Griefen Fine Art. Preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2018. See record.

The Heresies Collective was founded in 1976 in New York City, by a group of feminist political artists. The group sought to, among other goals, examine art from a feminist and political perspective. In addition to a variety of actions and cultural output, the collective oversaw the publication of the journal Heresies: A feminist publication on art and politics, which ran from 1977 until 1993.

“Heresies was thoughtful, slow, and deliberate…it was a truly democratic organizational concept. Although we complained that the meetings were long, we heard everybody’s point of view until we got a solution…a consensus.”

Mary Beth Edelson, in conversation with Miriam Schapiro. (2002)

The object we highlighted this week speaks to that ethos: a photo that captures the collective structure that made Heresies so radical. And while radical, Heresies still operated in a predominantly white arts space. After the publication of their third issue, Lesbian Art and Artists (1977), the Collective was publicly called in for its lack of racial diversity. The issue was celebrated for creating a rare platform where lesbian artists could represent their desires and identities without censorship, but the Collective had also acknowledged in print that they were “all lesbians, white, college-educated, and mostly middle class.”

The Combahee River Collective wrote to Heresies, naming the exclusion directly. Their letter was published in the next issue (Women’s Traditional Arts), a gesture that didn’t resolve the problem but made the accountability public. In the years that followed, Heresies responded with issues explicitly centering race and global feminisms, including Third World Women (1979) and Racism Is the Issue (1982).

Digitizing Heresies ensures that this complex, evolving feminist discourse remains accessible, not as myth, but as the layered, imperfect, vital history it truly is.

Stormé DeLarverie

Stormé DeLarverie outside Henrietta Hudson. Image courtesy of Lisa Cannistraci; copyright of Addresses Project. All ephemera were digitized and collected by Gwen Shockey. Ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and Addresses Project, 2022. See record.

Some figures loom so large in queer history that their myth and their life become inseparable. Stormé DeLarverie is one of them. Born in 1920 in New Orleans, Stormé came of age navigating a world resistant to her biracial identity and androgynous expression. She became the only drag king in the Jewel Box Revue, an icon long before “icon” entered the lexicon.

And then, in 1969, outside the Stonewall Inn, she stood up to police violence — a moment many remember as the spark that ignited the uprising.

The image entered the TFI Digital Archive through the Addresses Project, created by artist Gwen Shockey in 2016. At a time when lesbian and queer spaces are disappearing across the U.S., Addresses documents this cultural landscape through oral histories, digital mapping, and the digitization of personal archives. In 2019, photographer Riya Lerner joined Shockey to create portraits of the community leaders Shockey interviewed. Their collaboration stitches together a fragmented queer cultural record, reclaiming the histories built in bars, on sidewalks, and in the social spaces that held generations of LGBTQ+ life.

By collaborating with Addresses Project, these critical histories become multiplied in their searchability. These stories become easier to find, harder to erase, and fully part of the public record.

Make sure to follow along on Instagram and LinkedIn for all our Week 2 content, where we’ll be highlighting feminist artists like Dindga McCannon, Carolee Schneemann, Valerie Maynard, Ana Mendieta, Mary Beth Edelson, and more — with new objects dropping daily from the TFI Digital Archive.

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And for those who want to go deeper, our paid subscribers will get access to extended materials each week: behind-the-scenes context, exclusive archival footage (including a never-before-seen video from Mary Beth Edelson’s archive), and extra deep dives into the highlighted objects from our archive.

Paid subscriptions and donations help sustain TFI just like museum memberships. They’re mission-driven support that keeps feminist history preserved, accessible, and safe. Consider contributing today.

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Ever wanted to learn more about feminist change-makers, radical collectives, artists, writers, and media-makers, and how to preserve the feminist internet? You’re in the right place!

Follow along:

On Instagram: Daily highlights from the TFI Digital Archive

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On LinkedIn: Weekly insights on feminist culture, digital preservation, information activism, and the future of the arts + tech sectors

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On Substack: Weekly deep dives into highlighted TFI Digital Archive objects with extended stories, archival context, and members-only content

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Who is The Feminist Institute?

In 2016, Kathleen Landy founded The Feminist Institute (TFI) to address educational inequities and make feminist primary source materials available online. When one’s work, voice, and story aren’t preserved and made accessible, they are forgotten, silenced, and made invisible. She was inspired by her difficulties locating feminist art history while writing her Master’s thesis at Villanova University, and by her dedication to championing women artists throughout her career.

Presently, TFI is a small, scrappy team of 3— our Archives + Program Manager, Allison Elliott, Strategic Development Consultant, Dena Muller, and our Founder, Kathleen Landy. We work to bring TFI’s mission to life: documenting and celebrating feminist contributions to culture by preserving materials for public access in our digital archive; and promoting information activism and gender equity by infilling the cultural record to reflect fuller truths.

To date, TFI has:

• Published 14 digital exhibitions.

• Hosted 43 public programs, including two Memory Labs at Pen+Brush, Queer Legacies Project with the American LGBTQ+ Museum and SAGE, Digitization Ethics Workshop with Archivists Roundtable and METRO, Artist Talks, Film Screenings, Panels, and more!

• Uploaded 1277 objects (photos, videos, correspondence, artworks, ephemera) to the TFI Digital Archive, along with 675 people/organizations, 39 locations, and 49 events that contextualize these materials.

• Digitized over 5,000 objects for the Digital Archive collections development and as a free public service during our Memory Labs across New York City.

Currently, TFI is:

• Working on 13 capsule collections1, totalling 1,650 objects2 across 10 content partners3.

• Developing our union catalog4.

• Launching Preserving the Feminist Internet5 in 2026.

The Feminist Institute builds on the mass dissemination that online search and technology offer us to advance the march of feminism and democratize access through digitization and preservation of born-digital materials. We need your support to continue this critical work— make a donation today to honor the women in your life.

Support TFI to Protect Feminist History

Curious about the terms TFI uses to describe our archival process and methods? Head to the footnotes for a deeper explanation!

Why is Preserving Feminist History Important?

Knowledge is Power.

As we endure a second Trump administration with increasingly violent attacks on marginalized communities and patriarchal censorship, it is more important than ever to revisit our feminist history. The existence of a feminist cultural record gives us the power by tapping into the legacy of our tenacious generations-long struggle. But if there aren’t independent memory organizations making this information accessible, how can we learn from feminists who came before us? That’s where TFI comes in: we’re preserving feminist histories to guarantee a feminist future.

Women’s Action Coalition protest, 1993. Image courtesy of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and David Lewis Gallery. Preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2018. See record.

In this photograph from the Mary Beth Edelson Collection, the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) takes to the streets to confront violence against women. Images like this remind us of the political power that rests in history, how vital feminist resistance has always been, and how easily it can be lost. By supporting TFI, you protect these urgent stories of feminist movements so they can continue to inspire present + future generations.

Preserving feminist history is urgent work, but taking a feminist approach to documentation is just as vital. When TFI steps into someone’s archive, we’re entering an affective ecosystem. This is why we follow a feminist ethics of care archival practice: radical empathy, mutual responsibility, and collaboration over extraction. We stand in a lineage of feminist information professionals, culture-workers, and activists who reimagined cultural production. For us, this is information activism: not only uncovering and making available hidden narratives, but also building strong relationships within our community while we do it.

30 Days of Feminist History Weekly Themes

Week 1: Feminist Change Makers

We’re opening the season with women and collectives who shifted culture on purpose. From Shirley Chisholm’s political courage to Heresies and Where We At Black Women Artists’ radical organizing, these stories remind us that feminist history moves because people do. During giving season, when so many of us are thinking about legacy, this week invites you to honor the women who fought so you could live with more possibility. Supporting TFI ensures their work doesn’t fade.

Week 2: Feminist Artists

Art has always been feminist infrastructure. This week, we highlight artists like Dindga McCannon, Carolee Schneemann, Howardena Pindell, and Mary Beth Edelson, who shifted culture through their creative endeavors. As the art world heats up for the holidays (and for Basel), it’s the perfect moment to champion women who shaped visual culture, many without institutional support. Your donation helps preserve their visions and make sure future generations can see themselves reflected in the archive.

Week 3: Feminist Writers + Media-Makers

In Week 3, we dive into the writers, filmmakers, playwrights, and media-makers who captured feminist ideas in motion: Ntozake Shange, Michelle Handelman, Lola Pashalinski, Claudia Weill, and more. These are the voices that changed public consciousness, created new language for identity, and helped construct the feminist canon. If you’re searching for a meaningful holiday gift, preserving a woman’s story is one of the most profound.

Week 4: Preserving the Feminist Internet

We end by looking forward: at feminist webpages, digital projects, and the future of information activism. This week is for the tech-minded, the futurists, and the internet culture-obsessed. Preserving the Feminist Internet is our next major initiative, and supporting TFI during giving season directly fuels the work of stewarding digital feminist culture. Think of it as a gift to the future.

Give the Gift of Preservation

Exclusive Content for Paid Subscribers

During 30 Days of Feminist History, paid subscribers get the good stuff: a weekly email featuring deep dives into standout objects from the TFI Digital Archive plus audiovisual materials from our vault that have never been seen. Think: exclusive sound bites pulled from our behind-the-scenes interviews with artists and activists, and video from our content partner’s personal archives. It’s intimate, smart, and feels like slipping into a private study room of feminist history.

And the experience doesn’t end when the 30 days do. In 2026, paid subscribers can look forward to:

• Monthly drops of curated archival deep dives, guest spotlights, behind-the-scenes peeks at digitization, or rare audio clips and interviews.

• Quarterly members-only experiences like webinars on archival practices, mini digital exhibitions, or artist collaborations.

• A yearly TFI swag bag, think branded bags, stickers, zines, or prints.

Paid subscriptions help sustain TFI just like museum memberships. They’re mission-driven support that keeps feminist history preserved, accessible, and safe. Join today to honor the women in your life.

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Archive Angel Gifts

As part of our 30 Days of Feminist History campaign, we’re offering gifts for our Archive Angels.

Become an Archive Angel Today

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Starting November 24th, we will be highlighting feminist individuals and collectives, straight from our open-access digital archive.

Explore TFI Digital Archive

These aren’t household names. These are the artists who were censored, the activists who were sidelined, the writers who were forgotten. Women who changed culture and then got erased from it.

Where to follow:

• Substack (here): Weekly deep-dives every Sunday with 5-7 stories

• Instagram: Daily visual stories with archive images

• LinkedIn: Weekly posts with context for cultural professionals

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This is also giving season. As we share these stories, we’ll be transparent about what it takes to preserve them—and how you can support this work if you choose.

First stories drop Monday, November 24th.

The Feminist Institute Team

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The film moves through the messy, beautiful work of rebuilding yourself after loss, a story about memory, art, and the body as a place of transformation. It’s a film that looks directly at pain and creativity as parts of the same current, and it feels deeply aligned with how we think about feminist storytelling and preservation.

Purchase Tickets Here

Partnering with NewFest, New York’s leading LGBTQ+ film festival, lets us celebrate queer and feminist voices through cinema. These stories don’t just represent, but challenge how we remember and imagine ourselves.

Use the promo code NF37FEMINST4TIX for $4 off any General Admission screening. Tickets and festival details are at newfest.org.

We hope you’ll join us this October: in the theater, in conversation, and in community.

— The Feminist Institute

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Below is a list of incredible organizations, archival collections, and cultural projects preserving LGBTQ+ history to explore, in addition to Pride Month selections from the TFI Digital Archive.

• Lesbian Herstory Archives

• Black Lesbian Archives

• Digital Transgender Archive

• Here Come The Dykes short documentary, The New Yorker

• NYPL Gay & Lesbian Collections

• NYC Trans Oral History Project

• Visual AIDS Archive and Artist Registry

• Heresies Archive

• ACT UP Oral History Project

• The Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony

• DYKE TV Collection

• In The Life Archive // In The Life Archive 2.0

TFI Digital Archive: Pride Month Selections

Gay Pride March, June 1986

Donna Binder, Gay Pride March, 1986.
Copyright held by Donna Binder; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2023.
See record.

This digital capture is a photograph taken by Donna Binder of friends at the 1986 Gay Pride March in New York City. Binder is a photojournalist with over 25 years of experience in creating, distributing, and fundraising for social justice and cultural projects. Much of her work documents critical activism across queer and feminist causes, including (but not limited to) HIV/AIDS, reproductive justice, and anti-war movements.

Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Reception and Reading Flyer

A.I.R. Gallery, Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Reception and Reading Flyer, 1991.
Copyright and image courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery and New York University. Digitized as part of a partnership between A.I.R. Gallery and The Feminist Institute, 2022.
See record.

This digital capture is a flyer from an A.I.R. Gallery fundraiser in support of the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, which provided financial support to LGBTQ+ authors. The fund has supported numerous feminist icons, including Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Cheryl Clarke, Eileen Myles, Jewelle Gomez, and others. This ephemera highlights how feminist artist collectives, like A.I.R. Gallery, were often building coalitions with LGBTQ+ organizations.

Salsa Soul Sisters Announcements

Salsa Soul Sisters, Announcements, exact date unknown.
Image courtesy of Cassandra Grant. Copyright held by Addresses Project, ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and Addresses Project, 2022.
See record.

This digital capture is a Salsa Soul Sisters announcement. It features upcoming events, including a talk by Barbara Smith, alongside social events and congratulatory messages for community members. The Salsa Soul Sisters is the oldest Black lesbian organization in the United States, operating in New York City from 1974 to 1993. To learn more about Salsa Soul Sisters, explore Cassandra Grant’s Oral History Transcript in the Addresses Project Collection1 in the TFI Digital Archive.

Patron outside Henrietta Hudson

Addresses Project, Patron outside Henrietta Hudson, exact date unknown.
Image courtesy of Lisa Cannistraci. Copyright held by Addresses Project, ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and Addresses Project, 2022.
See record.

This digital capture features a photograph of Henrietta Hudson, a historic lesbian bar in New York’s West Village. Displayed in the window is a bold message reading, “DYKE POWER / TAKE ACTION,” exemplifying the inherently political nature of lesbian communities and their deep intersections with feminist movements. Near the entrance, a flyer promotes an upcoming performance by Lea DeLaria, a longtime icon in the lesbian community. This image underscores the vital political and social roles that bars have played in the lives of LGBTQ+ people.

QUEER ARCHIVES: The Impact of Digital Technology and Creating Public Access

On June 5th, TFI co-hosted a roundtable discussion about increasing public access to queer archives using digital technology with the LGBTQ Artists Archive Project and The American LGBTQ+ Museum (ALM).

Vivian Stein’s and Allison Elliott’s presentation, QUEER ARCHIVES: The Impact of Digital Technology and Creating Public Access, 2025. Photo credit: Leandro Justen.

Allison Elliott and Vivian Stein shared their collaborative digitizing work for Lola Pashalinski’s collection and Pashalinski’s recently published PAL site. Allison also joined Suhaly Bautista-Carolina to discuss Queer Legacies Project2, a collaborative program between TFI, ALM, and SAGE, and its community-centered approach.

Steven Fullwood and Chris Stahling presented on the Nomadic Archivists Project, as well as the In the Life Archive (ITLA), originally known as the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive (BGLA) at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and its influence on the In The Life Archive 2.0, spearheaded by Stahling. Finally, Tanisha Jones and Alyce Dissett closed out our conversation by presenting on the LGBTQ Artists Archive Project and its efforts to preserve queer creative legacies.

The roundtable served as a powerful example of collaborative practice, highlighting how memory workers continually contribute to a broader archival ecosystem, one that helps fill the gaps in our cultural record to more accurately reflect the histories and lived experiences of marginalized communities.

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Initiated by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions, NEST is based on mutual support and learning, the exchange of feminist practices and methodologies, and aims to explore pressing questions surrounding structural issues such as funding and sustainability as well as resistance in hostile political contexts. This gathering opened with a closed door session on November 6 and concluded with A Story Called Joy at the Palais de Tokyo on November 7.

The gathering was exhilarating. It was powerful to hear about the critical work happening at the intersection of feminism and art around the world. Unmistakably, for those organizations coming from the United States, this gathering coincided with our country’s presidential election. Waking up to the result on November 6 before heading to the closed-door session to discuss feminist organizing and archival practice was heavy and surreal.

The full reality of what has since come for activism and archives since the beginning of the year had not quite been realized in the hours and days after the election. Instinctually, as we met and discussed our shared struggles, it was evident that it is more pressing than ever to proactively document and preserve feminist digital documentation, as done through our partnerships and, in particular, our Preserving the Feminist Internet program.

At A Story Called Joy, I was asked to respond to a question about everyday urgency and its relationship with time and archival actions. Below you will find an excerpt from this talk with accompanying images. In light of recent attacks on education and information work, this everyday urgency has shifted into an immediate emergency. As websites and other digital information are actively removed from public view and destroyed, preserving digital documentation is even more urgent and critical.

We encourage you to advocate for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), especially in light of recent actions which have placed the agency’s staff on administrative leave and the future of awarded grants uncertain. We also encourage you to review key resources from mission-aligned organizations, such as OpenArchive and WITNESS, to securely document any abuses of power. You can also review the critical work of the End of Term Web Archive team to monitor how government websites have changed since the beginning of the year.

Primary source documentation is more critical than ever. We hope you’ll join us as we fight to accurately preserve this moment in history.

How does our everyday urgency relate to time? How do you find persistence in time with archival acts or matters?

It’s important to place persistence, urgency, and time within the context and history of feminist gatherings and networks such as NEST. Pictured here is a pamphlet from the Conference on Women in the Visual Arts, held from April 20 to 22, 1972.

Co-organized by artists Mary Beth Edelson, Josephine Withers, Barbara Frank, Yvonne Wulf, Cynthia Bickley-Green, Susan Sollins, and Enid Sanford, the event was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and was seen as a national forum to create connections, exchange ideas, and to promote further engagement among the participants and beyond.

In her post-conference write-up, Edelson discussed leaderless and fluid sessions that took hours to decide the simplest of things. She noted that the urgency and profundity of the moment stood in direct opposition with the brief amount of time they had, stating “perhaps there is never time to [exchange ideas] at leisure with individuals from around the country. Perhaps … it was only wishful thinking on our part. But when [it was all over] we wanted to carry on … and it was too late. I sensed that many felt this way–when it was time to end we were just beginning.”

We are lucky to have this booklet and Edelson’s postmortem thanks to the primary source documentation from the planning of this event that Edelson saved. The Feminist Institute worked to preserve her studio archive in 2018. As a result of this work, selected materials are available publicly on our website and the physical documentation lives at Fales Library at New York University.

As such, as I thought about the nature of the question, it brought me back to Edelson’s quote about time. Archivists are often not afforded the luxury of time, even in well-funded institutional settings. Most of Edelson’s records were analog and stored in impeccably organized file cabinets. However, she had boxes of deteriorating audiovisual materials, of which the most recent formats that were shot in the early to mid-2000s were in the worst condition. She also left multiple hard drives that were no longer usable or readable in the state in which they were left.

Documents and printed photographs if left in a shoebox in normal environmental conditions can last for generations. Working with analog materials in that sense has a certain passive persistence. But I worry about the digital documentation developed by feminist artists and activist groups and how their work and struggles could be lost not only to time but to misinformation, cyber attacks, and rapidly shifting technology.

Archivists are information activists who aim to make sure that people’s efforts and stories persist in the face of multiple forms of opposition and resistance to truth telling. I am one person amongst a series of people before and after me who aim to ensure that information is freely available. That said, ensuring persistence with digital documentation is a trust exercise in which we hope that the next generation will continue documenting and maintaining these critical primary source materials. In the face of this uncertain persistence, leaning into that trust is an inherently feminist act.

TFI is dedicated to preserving and making feminist history accessible to all. Click the button below to support our work and ensure future generations can learn from the powerful feminists who came before us.

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TFI Digital Archive: Women’s History Month Weekly Selections

Combat Zone: Campaign HQ Against Domestic Violence

Mary Beth Edelson, Combat Zone: Campaign HQ Against Domestic Violence, 1994.
Copyright held by the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson; preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute. Image courtesy of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and Accola Griefen Fine Art.
See record.

Combat Zone: Campaign HQ Against Domestic Violence (1994) was a participatory art project by Mary Beth Edelson, housed at Creative Time. Created in response to the “war zone” that abused women endure, the installation was designed to inspire action. It offered counseling, self-defense workshops, lectures, a hotline, and media resources, making it both an artistic and activist space.

Edelson, known for integrating performance and activism into her work, naturally extended these elements into Combat Zone, which challenged the viewer to confront domestic abuse rather than passively observe. This blend of artistic practice and feminist activism was also evident in her Story Gathering Boxes project, which collected and shared women’s personal narratives.

Polaroid from No Day Like Sunday at Café Tabac

Addresses Project, Polaroid from No Day Like Sunday at Café Tabac, 1990s.
Copyright held by Addresses Project. Ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and Addresses Project, 2022. Image courtesy of Wanda Acosta.
See record.

This ephemera, digitized and collected by Gwen Shockey, is from the Addresses Project which is an organization that investigates lesbian and queer space and memory in New York City from the early 1900s to the present day. This scan in particular is a Polaroid taken at a lesbian party thrown by Wanda Acosta and Sharee Nash called “No Day Like Sunday.” Acosta, a nightlife icon, creator of parties like Indulgence at Casa La Femme, Pleasure at Bar d’O, Kitty Glitter at Liquids, and so many more, owned many lesbian bars that pushed lesbian culture into “visible and glamorous” spaces. It allowed queer women to see each other and themselves with “respect and adoration.” By creating a queer and lesbian multidisciplinary platform through intergenerational community building and place-based heritage, Gwen Shockey uses the memory and portraiture components to document and archive lesbain and queer moments in NYC’s history.

Selection and description by Spring 2025 CUNY Cultural Intern, Journey Ford.

Pro-Choice Demonstration

Donna Binder, Pro-Choice Demonstration, 1988.
Copyright held by Donna Binder; digitized during The Feminist Institute’s pop-up Memory Lab, 2023.
See record.

This photo captures a pro-choice rally countering Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group founded in 1986 that had blocked the entrance to a women’s health clinic in Queens, New York. Feminist activists, clinic defenders, and reproductive rights groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) rallied in large numbers to fiercely defend reproductive rights. This action was part of a national resistance against Operation Rescue, contributing to the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act in 1994, which made it illegal to block clinic access. This photo was taken by Donna Binder, a photojournalist and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in creating, distributing, and fundraising for social justice and cultural projects.

"An Alternate View of Women's Imagery: The Artist as an Individual" Panel Cassette

Phyillis Krim, "An Alternate View of Women's Imagery: The Artist as an Individual," cassette, 1976.
Copyright held by and image courtesy of the Estate of Phyllis Krim. Ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and the Estate of Phyllis Krim, 2024.
See record.

Part of the Estate of Phyilis Krim includes a cassette holding the recording of “An Alternate View of Women’s Imagery: The Artist as an Individual” of a panel discussion Krim organized. Phyllis Krim was best known for her allegorical paintings of classic cars symbolizing power, beauty, and strength during the 60s and 70s. During the screening of her documentary, “Driving Passion (1975),” and her solar exhibition, “Classic Cars and Other Machines(1976),” this discussion was moderated and held at NYU’s Loeb Student Center(1976) by Louise Bourgeois, with speakers including Phyllis Krim, Bruce Barton, Ernest Briggs, Corinne Robins, and Deborah Remington.

Listen to the full panel recording

Her works being prized, as well as being broadcasted on Manhattan Cable Television, Krim opened a space for her signature artistic style and was the first and only woman invited to be a charter member of the Automotive Fine Arts Society in 1986 for her creative outlook of the beauty in mechanical objects.

Selection and description by Spring 2025 CUNY Cultural Intern, Journey Ford.

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Women’s History Month (WHM) traces its origins to the 1978 “Women’s History Week,” organized by the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women. This event in Santa Rosa coincided with International Women's Day on March 8th. Since 1987, Women’s History Month has been nationally recognized— and it’s here to stay.

WHM offers us the opportunity to reflect on women’s contributions to culture, and to continue fighting for gender equity worldwide.

TFI is dedicated to preserving and making feminist history accessible to all. Click the button below to support our work and ensure future generations can learn from the powerful feminists who came before us.

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TFI Digital Archive: Women’s History Month Weekly Selections

Healing Ritual for Carolee Schneemann, Artist Book and Photographs

In December 1987, Mary Beth Edelson, Gloria Orenstein, Clive Philpot, Elinor Gadon, Hank Gile, and Maura Sheehan performed a healing ritual for Carolee Schneemann at Mary Beth Edelson’s studio on 110 Mercer Street, New York, NY.

As a feminist artist, Edelson often staged her performance art in nature, incorporating goddess imagery to connect to women’s empowerment and feminine energy. She and Schneemann were part of a cohort known as, “first generation feminist-artists.”

Mary Beth Edelson, "Healing Ritual for Carolee Schneemann Artists' Book", 1987.
Copyright held by the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson; preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute. Image courtesy of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and David Lewis Gallery.
See record.

This ritual exemplifies the embodiment of feminist art and performance as a medium. It began with Schneemann changing her clothes and meditating alone, while the others discussed the ritual steps, such as noise-making, and practiced.

During the ritual, the group read from Descent to the Goddess, by Sylvia Perera, a text that explores women’s freedom and moving away from male domination.

“Ereshkigal (Edelson note: goddess of the underworld) is caught in and embodies an ordained process: “that all life death doth end,” that birth and death are intimates in the history of women, that change and pain are inevitable. She reminds us that many of the great goddesses suffer…They do not avoid suffering, but face into it, and express its reality,” (Perera, 36).

Following the reading, the group performed a collective wounding to explore loss and darkness as a means to release.

Mary Beth Edelson, "Healing Ritual for Carolee Schneemann", 1987.
Copyright held by the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson; preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute. Image courtesy of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and David Lewis Gallery.
See record.

After the collective wounding, the group covered Schneemann and let her speak on loss as she needed to, whether this was telling her story, crying, or screaming. When she was done, the group washed her wounds, and their own, using soap that “opened channels.” They then wore wound bracelets to symbolize the gradual fading of hurt. To close out, the group cut-off Schneeman’s black clothes to reveal a new “skin” (set of clothes, seen above) to embody rebirth.

To learn more about Mary Beth Edelson, her decades-long multi-media art career, and feminist activism, explore her collection in the TFI Digital Archive.

Enjoying the TFI Digital Archive highlights? Stay tuned— we’ll send out Women’s History Month archival selections weekly for all of March.

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But in a time of DEI rollbacks, rising conservativism, and widespread misinformation, the feminist historical record is at risk of being erased. Independent feminist archives are the antidote.

Support TFI by clicking the button below to ensure future generations can learn from the powerful feminists who came before us.

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TFI Digital Archive: International Women’s Day Selections

Sisterfire 1987 Festival: A Two-Day Open-Air Festival of Women's Culture" programs booklet

Sisterfire, “Sisterfire 1987 Festival: A Two-Day Open-Air Festival of Women's Culture" programs booklet, 1987.
Copyright held by Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2023.
See record.

This piece of ephemera is from Dindga McCannon’s Capsule Collection. McCannon recalls Sisterfire as one of the most welcoming spaces to sell her art and clothing. At the time, it was one of the only festivals by women and for women, with the lesbian community playing a large role in its organization. The program’s booklet spans 20 pages of performer line-ups, event details, and advertisements from aligned organizations.

WAC IS HERE, SOME ARE QUEER

WAC IS HERE, SOME ARE QUEER, 1992.
Image courtesy of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and David Lewis Gallery. Preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2018.
See record.

This photograph, from the Mary Beth Edelson Collection, captures the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) marching in the 1992 New York City Pride March, the same year the group was founded. WAC took inspiration from ACT UP and Women’s Health Action Mobilization for their sit-ins, educational campaigns, and direct actions. The group utilized art to amplify their message and to challenge the misogyny, racism, and homophobia of the mainstream art world.

Enjoying the TFI Digital Archive highlights? Stay tuned— we’ll send out Women’s History Month archival selections weekly for all of March.

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Selling Fast— Queer Legacies Project with The American LGBTQ+ Museum and SAGE, Oral History with StoryCorps

Ephemera courtesy of Cassandra Grant, Lisa Cannistraci, and Wanda Acosta. The Addresses Project is a New York City-based archive of lesbian and queer space and memory, created by Gwen Shockey in collaboration with Riya Lerner.
See Addresses Project collection

Queer Legacies Project (QLP) is an in-person workshop series developed by the American LGBTQ+ Museum in partnership with The Feminist Institute and SAGE, a service and advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ elders with centers in the Bronx, Harlem, Chelsea, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. The project will convene LGBTQ+ elders to emphasize the importance of their personal archives and stories.

The March 10th and March 17th workshops are SOLD OUT, but there are still limited slots available on March 24 and March 31, from 1-4pm. Click the button below to register and learn more about the guest archivists here.

Register for QLP

Register for SAGE

Oral History with StoryCorps

During the March 24 session, participants have an opportunity to record a conversation with a friend, family member, or StoryCorps facilitator about what queer history and culture mean to you. There is an upcoming information session on Wednesday, March 12 at 5:00pm ET.

Schedule your recording

As a participant, you have the option to archive your story at the Library of Congress. You will have 40 minutes to record a conversation with a partner and topic of your choosing. You decide whether to share your recording or keep it private. Participation is free and open to all!

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Happy Black History Month from TFI! As an organization documenting and uplifting feminist culture, highlighting contributions from Black feminists is essential to infilling and creating an accurate, inclusive cultural record. Below is a thoughtfully curated list of incredible organizations, archival collections, and cultural projects preserving Black feminist history to explore, in addition to Black History Month selections from the TFI Digital Archive.

• Black Woman Radicals

• Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA), UMass Amherst

• Black Lesbian Archives

• Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture

• Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)

• Black Women Oral History Project

• Black Lunch Table

• Weeksville Heritage Society

• Black Feminist Collective

TFI Digital Archive: Black History Month Selections

Dindga McCannon Capsule Collection

Dindga McCannon, A Week in the Life of A Black Woman Artist, 2000s.
Copyright held by Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2023.
See record.

The Dindga McCannon Capsule Collection includes ephemera, photographs, and artworks from the artist’s decades-long career and activism. McCannon was born and raised in Harlem, New York City. She retells the stories and histories of Black women through her mixed-media fiber practice. In the early 1960s, she participated in several activist groups, leading her to join the preeminent Weusi Artist Collective, a group that supported and gave voice to Black artists, allowing them to express and exhibit their ideas freely. Together with Faith Ringgold and Kay Brown, McCannon later formed Where We At, pioneering a new form of community-based arts education.

Salsa Soul Sisters

Salsa Soul Sisters Card, exact date unknown.
Image courtesy of Cassandra Grant. Copyright held Addresses Project; ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and Addresses Project, 2022
See record.

The Salsa Soul Sisters is the oldest Black lesbian organization in the United States, operating in New York City from 1974 to 1993. The group emerged from the Gay Activists Alliance, where members formed the Black Lesbian Caucus. The Caucus reconfigured itself as Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc. During its active years, the group participated in protests, demonstrations, and community organizing, while meeting weekly to discuss political and social issues. The group regularly hosted guest speakers, such as Audre Lorde, Betty Powell, Pat Parker, and Barbara Smith. To learn more about Salsa Soul Sisters, check out Cassandra Grant’s Oral History Transcript in the Addresses Project Collection in the TFI Digital Archive.

Queer Legacies Project with The American LGBTQ+ Museum and SAGE

Ephemera courtesy of Cassandra Grant, Lisa Cannistraci, and Wanda Acosta. The Addresses Project is New York City-based archive of lesbian and queer space and memory, created by Gwen Shockey in collaboration with Riya Lerner.
See Addresses Project collection

Queer Legacies Project (QLP) is an in-person workshop series developed by the American LGBTQ+ Museum in partnership with The Feminist Institute and SAGE, a service and advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ elders with centers in the Bronx, Harlem, Chelsea, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. QLP aims to illuminate the personal histories and ephemera of NYC’s LGBTQ+ elders through facilitated archiving workshops. The project will convene LGBTQ+ elders to emphasize the importance of their personal archives and stories within the greater narrative arc of LGBTQ+ history in the U.S. These workshops will help participants preserve their personal archives for future generations by cataloging the stories and ephemera that reflect the valuable histories of their lives.

The workshop will be held in person at the Edie Windsor SAGE Center on March 10, March 17, March 24, and March 31 from 1-4 pm. For our interested 60+ readers, SAGE membership is highly encouraged for all archiving workshop participants. We will have staff on hand to help you sign up on-site if preferred.

Register for QLP

Register for SAGE

Queer Legacies Project Guest Archivists

Stephanie Alvarado (they/she) is a queer disabled antidisciplinary archivist, artist, poet, and creator of Fotos y Recuerdos, a community photo archive workshop and collective memory experience hosted on public parkland and virtual spaces founded in The Bronx, NY. Alvarado currently serves on the board of The Literary Freedom Project, is a co-curator and archivist for The Kathleen Cleaver Family Archive and leads the Disability Artistry Initiative at BRIC Arts Media Center.

Jessica C. Neal (Jes–they/them) is a millennial archivist, curator, and oral historian from Mobile, AL, whose work centers on preserving and documenting Black and brown histories through Vanguard Archives Consulting. Passionate about documenting Black life and culture, especially in the arts, literature, LGBTQ+ communities, the U.S. South, and social movements, Jes contributes to various archives and arts initiatives, spanning from community archives to institutional collections. Committed to equity and collaboration, they advocate for post-custodial models to ensure marginalized voices are historically represented. Recognizing the power of archives and storytelling for self-documentation, intergenerational communication, and legacy-making, Jes’ work currently focuses on the development and sustainability of community, personal, family, and organizational archives.

Christopher Stahling. I am a witness. Harlem, native, visual artist, life coach, chef, and a passionate advocate for all things Black and queer. Christopher comes from a legacy of community workers who fiercely protect, share, and illuminate Black life. Christopher is a graduate of City College, CUNY, with a degree in Psychology and minor in Studio Art. With his extensive background as an employee and volunteer of the Schomburg Center, Christopher has honed his skills and continues to do archiving work with his oral history archive project; Everybody Needs A Witness: In The Life Archive 2.0. As a mental health professional, Christopher empowers people to consistently ask probing questions about how and why, in order to gain deeper insight. Christopher is committed to contributing to the legacy of archiving Black LGBTQ folks because he believes that there must be evidence of how we lived, loved, and found joy so that our stories won’t be reduced to a footnote. If in this life, we don’t bear witness to each other’s light, then who will.

Steven G. Fullwood is an archivist, writer, and editor. He is the co-director of the Nomadic Archivists Project, an initiative that partners with organizations, institutions, and individuals to establish, preserve, and enhance collections that explore the African Diasporic experience. Fullwood also serves as the coordinator of Marking Time, Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood. He is the former assistant curator of the Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Fullwood’s published works include Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call (co-edited with Charles Stephens, 2014) and Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (co-edited with Lisa C. Moore, 2007). His latest publication, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Writing (co-edited with Seph Rodney, 2025), features thirty-two chapters where writers share their insights, offering pathways for others to follow. They delve into how they balance multiple roles, the choices they made, the challenges they faced, and the successes they achieved.

Allison Elliott is an archivist and queer historian with a deep commitment to exploring the archive as a dynamic source of creative material and a platform for information activism. She currently serves as the Archives and Programs Manager at The Feminist Institute, where she oversees content partnerships, curates digital collections, and spearheads TFI’s annual Pop-Up Memory Lab. To date, the Memory Lab has digitized over 2,500 materials, supporting nearly 75 feminist artists, activists, and media-makers. Within this initiative, Allison has organized four workshops on topics ranging from personal digital archiving and tape digitization to the ethics of digitization and building feminist legacies. The 2024 Memory Lab introduced a new Creative Archival Works Showcase, featuring four short films that incorporated archival materials into their narratives. In addition, Allison has contributed to the re-presentation of The Dyke Show with Joan E. Biren, conducting essential release work. Allison’s research interests span feminist and queer information networks and activism, feminist citationality, HIV/AIDS activism, and community archives.

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TFI Drop-In Memory Lab Hours at City Lore

We’re thrilled to host drop-in Memory Lab hours at City Lore, in collaboration with the current exhibition, “What Did It Feel Like to Be There?: 12 Portraits from The Addresses Project.” At our annual Pop-Up Memory Lab, the public can schedule archival consultations to digitize their materials. For our City Lore Drop-In Memory Lab hours, participants can visit without an appointment and digitize paper materials up to 8.5” x 11” on Saturday, June 22, from 2-5pm.

This open session welcomes anyone interested in archiving. Participants can contribute their newly digitized materials to the existing Addresses Project Collection in the TFI Digital Archive. 

Stormé DeLarverie outside of Henrietta Hudson, photo courtesy of Lisa Cannistraci.
In copyright; Ingested into the TFI Digital Archive through a partnership between The Feminist Institute and Addresses Project, 2022.
See record.

What did it feel like to be there?: 12 Portraits from The Addresses Project presents twelve portraits by photographer Riya Lerner, selected from a larger multi-disciplinary project entitled The Addresses Project, created by Gwen Shockey with Riya Lerner, featuring lesbian and queer individuals who have dedicated their lives to creating and holding space in New York City from the 1950s to today. The individuals included in the series represent a diverse network of community builders engaged with social and political organizing, mental health advocacy, nightlife, music, journalism, visual art, literature, poetry, performance, research, safer sex and kink practices. Each portrait includes a photograph taken in a significant location for the sitter, along with segments from their oral history interview and selected ephemera from their life and work.

Ethical Digitization Considerations Workshop with ART + METRO

On June 10th, TFI hosted an Ethical Digitization Considerations workshop at Pen+Brush in collaboration with Aviva Silverman, Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. (ART), and Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). It was an incredible day of collaboration and discussion among information workers.

Ethical Digitization Considerations Workshop, Pen+Brush, New York, NY, 2024.

Participants explored the complexities of digitizing personal cultural materials and oral histories, examining necessary releases, collaborative cataloging models, and the role of relationship-building through a feminist ethics of care framework. We discussed ways to de-professionalize institutional roles, aiming for greater access to recording and preserving marginalized histories. Hands-on activities included grappling with ethical dilemmas in digitization, engaging in oral history exercises, and fostering compassionate listening.

Memory Lab 2024 Collection

The 2024 Pop-Up Memory Lab at Pen+Brush exceeded all expectations with over 2000 materials digitized! We're thrilled to announce that our team is hard at work curating the 2024 Memory Lab Capsule Collection. Stay tuned to see the fascinating array of materials we've preserved digitally.

While you eagerly await the unveiling of our latest collection, why not explore our 2023 Memory Lab Capsule Collection? Dive into a treasure trove of stories, images, and memories that capture the essence of our diverse community.

Join us on this journey of discovery and preservation — watch this space for updates and a glimpse into the heart of our archival efforts!

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TFI Pop-Up Memory Lab Workshops & Events

This year, our Memory Lab Programming Series focused on creative and alternative archival approaches that preserve and present marginalized histories + futures. Among these initiatives was a workshop dedicated to digitizing VHS, Hi8, and MiniDV tapes to empower individuals to preserve their personal legacies.

Event Photo; TFI Pop-Up Memory lab Showcase Evening: Creative Archival Works, 2024. In Memory / For Alvin, Arlette Hernandez.

For our closing event, we hosted our sold-out TFI Pop-Up Memory Lab Showcase Evening: Creative Archival Works, where we screened four short films that use archival materials to retell stories of the past and their communities. Archives remain largely untapped creative sources, and we wanted to change that by offering a platform that celebrates, supports, and showcases works that draw inspiration from and utilize archives in their audiovisual creations. We extend our gratitude to Arlette Hernandez (In Memory / For Alvin), Adriane McCray (MVMTLS), Drew de Pinto (Compton’s ‘22), Katie Heiserman & Elana Meyers (Survival Without Rent) for their participation and for sharing their incredible films with us.

Digitized at the Memory Lab!

This year, we had 40 incredible participants, digitized 2,000 materials, and did over 2,500 scans. This year’s Memory Lab materials span feminist art, zines, videos, photos, interviews, correspondence, flyers, drawings, and other kinds of ephemera. Our media inventory reflects the multimedia nature of TFI’s Digital Archive.

35mm mounted slides: 830

Paper materials: 700

Photographs: 272

Negatives: 173

VHS tapes: 38

Audiocassettes: 3

MiniDV tapes: 7

Optical media (CD-R/DVD-R): 22

Websites: 1

We collaborated with numerous inspiring artists, media makers, and activists. In the following months, TFI will expand existing collections and release new ones featuring Dindga McCannon, Donna Binder, the Estate of Judy Siegel, Women’s Studio Workshop, Cathy de la Cruz, Desireé Rucker, Alida Wilkinson, and others. Stay tuned for the Memory Lab 2024 collection.

Many thanks to our incredible hosts and partners, Pen + Brush, for their invaluable support to the Memory Lab.

Osa Atoe, Shotgun Seamstress, 2006.
Item from Cathy de la Cruz’ upcoming collection featuring zines, records, and other riot grrl paraphernalia. Digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

Dindga McCannon and Edgar White, Children of the Night, 1974.
Upcoming addition of children’s books to Dinda MdcCannon’s TFI Collection. Copyright held by Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

We also thank New York City Councilmember Keith Powers and The Lawrence B. and Elyse Benenson Charitarian Foundation for making this event possible.

Virtual Program with Art+Feminism— Attention Collectors: Wikimedia Commons Needs You

TFI is thrilled to announce our upcoming virtual program with Art+Feminism — Attention Collectors: Wikimedia Commons Needs You on May 15th at 1:00 PM ET. Archives, special collections, and individuals who collect primary sources typically aren’t rushing to upload their materials on Wikimedia Commons, but we argue that they absolutely should. This virtual event brings together The Feminist Institute and Art+Feminism to discuss how everybody wins when primary sources are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP

TFI will illustrate the importance of open access practices in archives of making by highlighting their work with Dindga McCannon, a feminist fiber artist, muralist, teacher, illustrator, and co-founder of the collective Where We At, Black Women Artists.

Following the presentation, A+F regional ambassador Alison Baitz will lead a brief training on uploading primary sources (and other materials) to Wikimedia Commons. The presentation will cover both the philosophical and technical aspects of uploading. We’ll consider questions like: What does contributing to the Commons mean? How is this part of information activism? Participants will have the opportunity and are encouraged to upload their own materials. Primary source materials, courtesy of Dindga McCannon, will also be provided.

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For our closing event, we’re hosting a Pop-Up Memory Lab Showcase Evening: Creative Archival Works to highlight how artists and media-makers utilize archives to retell the past and activate the present.

Reserve Tickets

Archives are a largely untapped creative source, and we want to change that by offering a space that celebrates, supports, and presents works that use archives as inspiration and material in their audiovisual works. We hope you can join us at Pen and Brush on April 19th from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. There will be a short Q+A and reception following the screening.

Screening Line-Up:

In Memory / For Alvin, Arlette Hernandez, MVMTLS, Adriane McCray, Compton’s ‘22, Drew de Pinto, Survival Without Rent, Katie Heiserman & Elana Meyers.

In Memory / For Alvin, Arlette Hernandez

In Memory / For Alvin creates a portrait of New York’s West Side piers by remixing contemporary footage of the site with archival materials from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The project includes excerpts from sources disparate as podcasts and oral history recordings to documentary photography, home movies, and adult film. In addition to illustrating the site’s change, the film also serves as an homage to photographer Alvin Baltrop and the hundreds of people who lived, died, and loved at the piers.

MVMTLS, Adriane McCray

This film is an excavation of a Black collective memory with South Dallas starring as a supporting character. The film’s sonic landscape is shaped around interviews that took place in the quarantine lockdown of 2020, tracing the memories of various Dallas residents on the subject of their childhoods. Its use of collected archival footage, present-day photography, home videos, and aged photographs creates a tapestry that travels from moment to moment in stark contrast to the environment where these conversations took place. It is a candid peak at the power of collective memory–one that yields a fragile truth and sacredness of the Black community.

Compton’s ‘22, Drew de Pinto

Three years before Stonewall, on an unknown date in August 1966, trans sex workers and drag queens rioted against police violence at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. There was no news coverage, and the arrest records no longer exist. Decades later, trans historian Susan Stryker unearthed the history of the riot and interviewed the surviving Compton’s Queens. Compton’s ’22 creates an intergenerational conversation between these oral histories and trans artists today, using performance to imagine an interpretive archive that stands in for the absence of visual documentation. The film aims to counter the erasure and deradicalization of our history and underscore the crucial role of intergenerational knowledge and solidarity in the ongoing struggle for queer liberation.

Survival Without Rent, Katie Heiserman & Elana Meyers

Survival Without Rent is a short archival documentary that follows a community of politically motivated New York squatters who rehabilitated abandoned city-owned properties in the 1980s and formed a vibrant community of artists and activists. Told with news clips, home videos, and oral histories, Survival Without Rent traces the history of the squatters’ movement from the 1970s, when a financial crisis in New York triggered a wave of building abandonment, to the mid-1990s when the Giuliani Administration launched an aggressive attack on lower Manhattan’s squats.

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