TFAP@CAA 2026 Affiliated Society Session | FEMINIST, QUEER, AND TRANS ART ACTIVISTS IN ACTION!

TFAP@CAA 2026 Affiliated Society Session
Feminist, Queer, and Trans Art Activists in Action!
Chairs:
Connie Tell, The Feminist Art Project
Joanna Gardner-Huggett, DePaul University

Friday, February 20, 2026, 4:30-6:00pm
Williford C (3rd Floor), Hilton Chicago
*CAA Conference Registration Required.

College Art Association 114th Annual Conference | Chicago, February 18–21, 2026

For nearly twenty years, The Feminist Art Project has supported intersectional and intergenerational conversations regarding feminist, queer and trans activist art practices. Understanding the rich history of these collective tactics remains instrumental for continued organizing against political oppression and providing essential services to female-identifying individuals. For instance, in the 1970s, the arpilleristas produced embroidered narratives denouncing Chile’s totalitarian regime, while in the 1980s the Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp demanded an end to nuclear proliferation. In the 1990s, Chicago’s Sister Serpents engaged in guerrilla sticker and poster campaigns calling out misogyny and sexual violence and the Dyke Action Machine focused on lesbian agitprop in New York City. In 1999, the Dutch organization Women on Waves was founded to provide reproductive health services in regions where it is not safe or available, and in 2001, LaGender Inc. was established to support the trans health of women of color in the metro Atlanta area. As the voices of feminist, queer, and trans artists, activists, and scholars are being silenced in this political moment globally, this session seeks presentations by artists and scholars examining current or historical examples of activist art practices that offer models of protest and mutual aid, especially work overlooked in current art historical scholarship.

Panelists:
“Queer Archives from South Bend: Archiving as Protest and Preservation”
Jason Daniels and Grace Hamilton
In 1971, Gloria Frankel, a cab driver from New York City, established South Bend’s first drag bar, the Seahorse Cabaret. Her visionary leadership and mentorship profoundly shaped the growth of queer and drag spaces throughout the Michiana region. Exploration of drag history, both locally and internationally, reveals its socio-cultural significance and the urgent need to preserve the narratives of drag performers.
Recognizing the impact of drag performers on queer communities, archival work serves to safeguard and celebrate this vibrant cultural heritage. The archive functions as both a visual and narrative repository, capturing the evolution of drag and its broader implications for community identity, resilience, and visibility.
Beyond the glittering façade of sequins and performance, spaces such as the Seahorse have operated as stages where political activism and social resistance converge. Frankel created inclusive environments that enabled community members to engage safely and creatively, fostering a sense of belonging often absent in small-town contexts. Her story represents a necessary pillar of South Bend’s history, and preserving it counters the erasure of queer memory, particularly amid political attacks and cultural neglect targeting LGBTQ+ archives.
Through oral histories, artifact collection, and storytelling, this project positions archiving as both preservation and protest, emphasizing that queer memory is essential for sustaining future generations and supporting ongoing acts of cultural and political resilience.

“A Model of Mutual Aid within Protest: Betsy Damon, Alison Knowles and The Lesbian Art Show”
Christine A. Filippone, Millersville University
Lesbian, feminist artist Betsy Damon was among the eighteen artists included in The Lesbian Show (1978), one of the first exhibitions of lesbian art curated by Harmony Hammond at White Columns on Greene Street, New York City. Damon’s sculptural installation for the show was titled Ancestors, which, like her famed street performance 7,000 Year Old Woman, honored all the women who had come before her. Ancestors was comprised of a set of life-sized plaster body casts of her collaborators, her community, seated together on a bed of sand around a ring of colored bags filled with flour. Carrying the giant body casts into the gallery, Damon explained, was a process of “bringing the ancestors back.” In a performance organized for the show, Damon’s flesh and blood community performed in various poses amidst the plaster casts, among them her friend, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles. Enamoured with Betsy’s bags, Knowles proceeded to borrow them for years or her own works including Bean Bag, Printed Editions, 1978. This small act of mutual aid set within a groundbreaking activist exhibition organized, as Hammond wrote, to make “lesbian artists visible to each other as well as to the women’s community”, is a microcosm of the commitment to community Damon’s life and work has evidenced to this day. To honor this act and Knowles’s and Damon’s lifelong friendship, I will present this paper in collaboration with my friend art historian Hannah Higgins, the daughter of Alison Knowles.

“Text, Textile, and Action: Collective Strategies in Latin American Art”
Jacqueline R. Witkowski, Western Washington University
Textility, or the relationship of materials and the forces they embody, is a term useful for thinking about how textiles intersect with systems of thought (Ingold 2010). In its contemporary resurgence, fiber art has been increasingly understood in connection with “text,” highlighting its communicative force and operation as a form of language. Textiles, like writing, transmit meaning through material processes, embodied gestures, and collective memory.
The focus of this paper is on the practices of two artist collectives: Pontos de Luta from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Cooperativa Gráfica La Voz de la Mujer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both employ the interplay of fiber and writing to confront persistent restrictions on political, gendered, and identity-based freedoms in their national contexts. Their practices foreground marginalized and disappeared populations, positioning fiber and craft as central to struggles over visibility, testimony, and resistance. These initiatives engage with historical genealogies of clandestine and gendered media in the region, from the arpilleristas in Chile who denounced the dictatorship through their embroidery, and the early feminist print collective in Argentina, La Voz de la Mujer.
By situating these two collectives within a transnational history of politically engaged fiber and print, this paper asks: How might text and textile operate together as resistant forms of language? And how do women-centered collectives mobilize these mediums to generate shared vocabularies of protest and survival?

“The Aravani Art Project: Transgender Awareness Through Art in India”
Anindita Sengupta
The Aravani Art Project is a trans-women and cis-women led art collective that works on creating awareness about the transgender community and changing the way Indian society views the LGBTQIA+ community. In India, “transgender” often refers to the Hijra community, a traditional “third gender” group recognized by the government since 2014. The community faces severe and traumatic social stigma, discrimination, and marginalization. Many live in self-formed communities, excluded from mainstream occupations and society. This will be an extremely enlightening addition to discuss trans rights in the global south and how people there are addressing them through art.