Jeannine Tang’s book, Living Legends: The Art and Care of Queer and Transgender History, will examine how contemporary artists care for the work, legacies, and lives of queer and transgender elders—using music, theatre, literature and film. This project positions art of the past fifteen years within the recovery and sustenance of ideals and practices of gay liberation and prison abolition movements, and in the context of queer and transgender critiques of the military, prison, and nonprofit industrial complexes. Each chapter will focus on events surrounding a single work of art, describing encounters between younger queer and transgender artists with elders, and the ways that collaboration and care have extended their legacy and lives.
Jeannine Tang is an art historian from Singapore who writes about contemporary art, queer and trans visual culture, and about curatorial and exhibition histories in the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia. As Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at The New School, she teaches courses on contemporary art and exhibition history, privileging queer and transfeminist, ecological, decolonial, and postcolonial perspectives. She has published in Artforum, Art Journal, GLQ, journal of visual culture, and Theory, Culture & Society in addition to numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies, including Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (New Museum and MIT Press, 2017). In 2018, with Lia Gangitano and Ann Butler, Tang co-curated the exhibition “The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004)” at the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard, and co-edited the accompanying book. Her writing and research has been supported by the Whitney Museum, the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Smithsonian, and the National Endowment for the Arts.