Femina Potens


                                           
"COMMUNITY AND STRENGTH RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES" HERBIVORE MAGAZINE

 
 
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QUEER COUTURE
 
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – August 7   , 2010   Femina Potens has gathered an impressive collection of artists for your discerning tastes this August.  We're excited to be able to present to you this sexy, fashion-forward, Queerest of Haute-Queer shows!  All month long we bring to you a stunningly off-center multimedia art show that combines the fashionably distinguished photography, couture designs, and textile installations by artists  Najva Sol, Molly Crabapple, Mev Luna, Jesse Trepper, Corey Gunter Brown & Cassidy Wright .   Come  Dress Your Inner Couture  with  Your Outer Queer  amongst these outrageous designs and explore what queer identity and alternative fashion are really about with those that know what  Taking it Off  and  Putting it On  really mean. 
 
Femina Potens is known for taking risks and exploring your options with up-and-coming designers of fashion-as-art & art-as-fashion!  We welcome you to the    O pening Reception & Artist Talk at 7pm  on the evening of   Saturday, August 7th, 2010 .  Partake in artistic insight, refreshments and libations during the opening reception and introduce yourself to the Artistic Underbelly of our Underworld.   And of course, j oin us all month long as we bring you an array of enticing workshops, performances and events .   Show runs through August 28, 2010.

'Queer Couture'
 
Visual Art Exhibit + Events
August 7-28, 2010
Opening Reception Saturday, August 7th, 7-10pm
Femina Potens Art Gallery
2199 Market St @ Sanchez
San Francisco, CA 94110

Hours: Thurs-Sun, Noon-6:00pm
415-864-1558 

All workshops are free to FP Members!

Find us on  Facebook  and  Twitter !
 
   
August  7 ,   ( Saturday ) ,   Opening Reception & Artists Talk  7-10pm      Celebrate with artists Navja Sol, Molly Crabapple, Jesse Trepper, Mev Luna, Corey Gunter Brown, and Cassidy Wright.   (FREE)  
 
August  8, (Sunday),  "Femme Cock: Harnessing Your Power" Harness Making & Decorating Workshop with Holly Holbrook  3 pm  Come get your custom harness fitted and decorated with the help an expert on sexy accessories. Cost includes instruction, all leather and all hardware. Dildos will not be available onsite for purchase. ($65)  Reserve your spot now.
   
August  14, (Saturday),
  "Unravel Me" Art of Restraint   8pm   Madison Young, Lochai, Fivestar, Danarama of Two Knotty Boys and some of the most skilled rope artists and bondage experts in the country gather to meld art and bondage, to intertwine submission and empowerment, in a dynamic exchange with performers and the luscious decadence that we offer to our audience. Doors open at 7:30 and lock at 8pm ($55 for members - $75 for non-members)  Reserve your spot today .
   
August  15, (Sunday),  Erotic Needle Point Workshop  3pm  Join the talented Amy Leonard for some sexy sewing! ($10)  Reserve your spot now .  
 
August  18, (Wednesday),   Talk with Katie "Megaphone" Diamond 7 pm  Katie Diamond is a graphic artist that will be talking about the illustrative process of creating a book that explores transgenderism, trans-sexuality and sex.  Diamond is one of the contributors for "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation." She drew the piece 'Transcension' with Johnny Blazes' text . ($10)   Purchase your tickets here .  
   
August  19, (Thursday),  Electro-Feminists  Nicky Click & Violent Vickie  7 pm  Come hear two of our favorite Electro-Feminist bands perform live music.  Fun electro pop merged with songs about queer femme identity, feminism, and heartbreak.  ($10)  Purchase your tickets today .  
   
August  20, (Friday),
  "Transformation" Double-Feature Movie Night Fundraiser  8 pm  We're showing Teen Wolf and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. All Proceeds benefit, Gender Check, a nonprofit organization helping to fund transgendered individuals in the legalities of gender transitioning. Doors open at 7:30. ($15-20)  Reserve your advance tickets now .  

 
August  21, (Saturday),
  Sizzle   8pm  Award Winning Literature Series. Featuring select authors from Michelle Tea's "It's So You: 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style" Anthology, including Sherilynn Connelly, Cindy Emch, and Samara Halperin
. ($10)   Purchase advance tickets here .
   
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Najva Sol  is Brooklyn & San Francisco based artist of all trades. Among her inspirations are glitter, adventure, scandal, and smut.  For fun, she co-runs an art collective in NYC called "The Lowbrow Society for the Arts" which hosts carefully curated down + dirty art parties, free swaps, and subway parades. The Lowbrow Society has been mused about in The Village Voice, NY Press, Time Out New York, Gothamist, Nerve.com, and others. Her work was most recently featured in the “Little Prints” show at the SF LGBT Center as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. Her photography can be found on  najvasol.carbonmade.com  and she keeps a randomly-updated blog najyisatrip.blogspot.com .
 
Molly Crabapple  is an award-winning artist, author, and the founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School Molly’s drawn for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Marvel Comics and DC Comics, and illustrated over a dozen books. She’s also turned her talents to giant theatrical backdrops, parade installations, burlesque posters, and gallery shows around the world. For two years, she’s been the resident Toulouse Lautrec of The Box, one of New York’s most exclusive nightclubs. Molly is also the creator of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, an international chain of alt. drawing salons that takes place in over a hundred cities on five continents.  A business case study and media darling, Dr. Sketchy’s has received hundreds of media profiles and changed the way life drawing is done.
   
Mev Luna  is a video artist working on a BFA at California College of Arts in Textiles and Media Arts, with a minor in Visual Studies. Luna has exhibited at the 2010 National Queer Arts Festival, SF Tranny Film Festival, San Francisco Fringe Festival, and The Marguiles Collection Warehouse in Miami. Luna recently curated a queer performance and video event  Feast of the Beast: Wurst, then Queer , at Artists’ Television Access.

Jesse Trepper  is a restless, genderqueer, Oakland-based artist who has trouble confining herself to any medium for too long.  She graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts with a BFA in drawing and textile arts in 2008 and has since performed and exhibited locally, including collaboration with the New Barbarians performance troupe and the Queer Arts Commission’s  2008 group show “Making Room for Wonder.”  Lately she’s been traveling around the United States and Mexico, and working music and writing into her stash of aesthetic aptitudes.

Holly Holbrook  is a New Jersey native, second generation leather-worker with rock n' roll roots who recently relocated to San Francisco and is coordinating the launch of a high-end leather accessories line this fall.  When she's not organizing and volunteering for local queer organizations, Holly spends her spare time leather-working, and working on outrageous embroidery and millinery projects.  Holly currently lives in San Francisco with her partner Jacob Vaughn and their super dog Thursday.
 
Danarama  grew up in a family of mountaineers including a naval officer. Dan has worked with rope and knots since the time he could walk, spending his youth hanging from cliffs, trees and rafters in self-suspensions. A rope bondage artist since 1992, Dan began tying models for world renown fetish photographers and Internet erotica pioneers. As one of the Two Knotty Boys, which he started with his friend and fellow rigger JD in 1999, Dan has been co-presenting rope bondage workshops and performances all over the US and Germany. He co-authored Two Knotty Boys' two top-selling bondage how-to books,  Showing You the Ropes  and  Back on the Ropes,  and produced a number of instructional videos. As a fetish photographer and rigger for other photographers, Dan continues to create innovative restraint-focused art. 
   
Amy Leonard  is an artist who has been working with fabric & embroidering one thing or another for 10 years; most recently her artwork has focused on fusing early 1900's-era redwork embroidery and cross-stitch with the shapes and textures of contemporary sex toys, particularly those used in BDSM scenes. Her artwork is influenced by the conceptual leanings of UC San Diego's Visual Arts department where she spent her undergraduate years earning a degree in Media, her experiences working in the adult industry, as well as her interest in historic and traditional textile design. When she's not making art or working on
her Etsy store, Amy can often be found drinking tea, attempting to chase pigeons, collecting interesting leaves and catching up on cancelled TV shows on DVD.
 
Katie "Megaphone" Diamond  is a radical queer comic artist who fuses art with politics, graphics with sex, and education with visuals as a method of altering societal norms and breaking down preconceived notions of gender and sexuality. Her work throughout New England, and across the country at large, has been called “imaginative,” “ambitious,” “fresh,” and “creative.” Her dogmatic approach to comics and art as a transformative experience sets her apart from other artists. 
 
Sherilyn Connelly  is a San Francisco-based writer.  Her work can be found in books by Manic D Press, Homofactus Press and Seal Press, and periodicals such as Morbid Curiosity and Instant City.  She recently completed  Bottomfeeder , her first memoir.  She also curates  Bad Movie Night  at The Dark Room.
 
Cindy Emch  is a queer accordion-playing poet based in Oakland. Cindy's writings have been been published in the  Can I Sit With You  project, LodeStar Quarterly, There Journal,  It's So You , and numerous chapbooks. She founded and hosted San Francisco's Queer Open Mic for many years and has performed at local legends like SFinX, K'vetch, Smack Dab and Writers with Drinks, and has hit stages all around Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles and more. She believes that art can create change in the world and that it's not so hard to be nice to people. She also thinks that dirt smells like magic and gets lost in the woods on purpose.
 
Samara Halperin  is a filmmaker and writer whose short films have been making audiences laugh, cry and scream in screenings from Australia to Saskatchewan since 1989. Samara is from New York City and lives in Oakland, CA where she makes movies and teaches film and video making. Samara is currently working on "Times Square Tumbleweed," the sequel to her film "Tumbleweed Town." Samara's work has been featured on LOGO Television's "The Click List, Best In Short Film."
   
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Femina Potens is a nationally recognized art gallery and performance space, established in 2001, and dedicated to the advancement of women and transgender artists.  

We are sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center, with support from the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Zellerbach Foundation, and Grants for the Arts. We also thank our Golden Rope Donors: Theresa Ikard, Jack Killough, Saxon MacLeod, James Mogul, Catherine Murty, Nancy Peach, John Pettite, and Carnal Nation. 

Femina Potens is a leading queer organization in San Francisco and has been featured on HBO’s  Real Sex , MTV Networks’ Logo channel, and the Q Television Network; in Bitch Bust , and  Spread  magazines and Brian Alexander's book  America Unzipped ; and locally, in the  San Francisco Bay Guardian  and the  San Francisco Chronicle ,  where Violet Blue called Femina Potens “the most happening art space in the city; a revolution in art and sex.”
2199 Market St | San Francisco, CA 94114 US





Call for Submissions for 2011 Exhibition season:

Femina Potens Art Gallery is currently taking submissions for our 2011 Visual Arts Exhibition season.  Femina Potens is a non-profit community art gallery and performance space dedicated to the advancement of women and transgendered artists. Femina Potens is located in the heart of San Francisco's Castro District.  We are looking for art works in all mediums painting, photography, mixed media, sculpture (although small sculptures and wall mounted sculpture is best due to space restriction), performance artists, video artists, installation and new media.

Femina Potens is also looking for works that relate to the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health of the queer community as well as site-specific installation artists that can create works around such subject matter for our window displays.

Visual Arts:

Please send all proposals to Femina Potens Visual Art Submissions Attn Madison Young c/o Femina Potens 2199 Market Street SF CA 94114. For more information, and the online application. Please visit here.

Please make sure the below materials are included in your proposal package:

 

· A filled out artists application (downloaded from our web site)

· A check made out to Femina Potens for $20.00 for our curatorial review fee. (Packages sent with out the $20.00 review fee will not be considered)

· An introductory letter of interest

· Artist resume, bio, statement

· 10 images of on CD and printed for review by our curatorial staff

 

All submitted art works would be considered for group shows. If your work doesn't fit into one of these shows please still submit works as these are only suggestions, and are subject to change.

 

2011 Potential themes:

· Iconography: The Imprinting of Queer Icons in our community

· The Intersections of Technology and Art

· A Right Choose: Visual Art exploring Women's Reproductive health and politics

· Young and the Restless - Queer Youth collaborate w/ artists to explore Safer Sex

· The Power of One: Art works exploring the pleasure and health benefits of self-love for National Masturbation Month

· Building a Different Community

· Queer women of color addressing racism within the queer community

· Redefining Masculinity: queers and transgender artists give new meaning to what is masculine

 

 

Please have all proposals submitted by November 1, 2010. Thank you and we look forward to reviewing your work.




 
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Become a Femina Potens Member Today!

It has never been a better time to become a Femina Potens Member.  By purchasing a Membership you are not only giving yourself a year full of perks and opportunities, but you are also giving back to the entire community. We are dedicated to sustaining and inspiring our queer and sex positive culture. And we love to spoil the people who support us! We have some exciting new members only events coming up: Starting with 'A Thin Line Between Art & Sex' an evening of explicit performances and art.  We will also adorn you with artists talks, private events, limited edition artwork, opportunities to meet artists, performers and VIP guests! Plus you will get into our all of our  Workshops, OpenEyes and Sizzle for FREE!  Gift a membership for your partner, your friend, or yourself today (100% tax-deductible) and we will give you some extra special attention!

Remember: Femina Potens is run by volunteers and supporters like you that donate funds to keep us going. We want 2010 to be our best year yet, and with your help we can continue to bring you events, artists, performers and workshops. Our three sassy levels of membership make it easy get involved.  Give a little and get a lot back by joining today!

Please visit Femina Potens Donors Page at Network for Good to sign up today!

Warmest regards,

Madison Young
Executive Director

More words from our artists:

"I think that the arts and visual representation movement in the bay area is one of the core elements in queer activism.  Femina Potens has provided a platform for visual dialogue.  Being a FP member allows me to contribute to the community that I care about. As well as be in touch with like-minded people"

-Shawn Tamaribuchi, Performance Artist

 

While I was visiting San Francisco from Los Angeles, I decided to do my first open mic ever at Femina Poten's: Sizzle. Art, Feminism and Queer activism has always been my passion.  It's nice to support a queer and feminist venue that has always supported and nurtured my artistic growth."

-Luna Maia, Recent SFAC Grant Award Recipient for literature

 

"Femina Potens is a constant source of inspiration... I love the ongoing live performance events in which I can share my arts with a strong, vibrant, radical, and progressive community of artists and audience members. I always feel liberated and supported to fully express, and as one who's always felt like an outsider in many ways, this is a precious high point for me. And of course... the hot, progressive, fresh gallery shows never cease to amaze, delight, and spur me on creatively."

-Bast/ Performance Artist/Writer

 

Satin

  • all members get into all Femina Potens monthly programmed events for free
  • all members are recognized on Femina Potens web site
  • discounts at our bondage art salon Art of Restraint $10 off
  • twice a year limited edition post cards printed works from FP artists
  • exclusive members and press only artist preview  and artist talks on our newest exhibited art works

Lace

  • The above plus limited edition prints twice a year from FP Artists
  • 10% off art boutique items
  • exclusive members and press only artist preview  and artist talks on our newest exhibited art works

Leather

  • The above plus once a year a small original art work  from  an FP Artists
  • 10% off art boutique items
  • 10% off exhibited art works
  • exclusive members and press only artist preview  and artist talks on our newest exhibited art works

Golden Rope

  • Mentioned on all promotional materials including posters and show cards
  • The above plus once a year a small original art work  from  an FP Artists
  • 10% off art boutique items
  • 10% off exhibited art works
  • exclusive members and press only artist preview  and artist talks on our newest exhibited art works
  • Have your name or your favorite woman or trans artist,writer, performer,activist, or hero, permanently plated on our Golden Rope Supporter glass installation proudly facing Castro's Market St.

Satin: $10 a month - $120 a year

Lace: $20 a month - $240 a year

Leather: $40 a month - $480 a year

Golden Rope: $50 a month - donations of $1000 or more a year

 

 
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Member of The Month!
Q: "How do you see Femina Potens as a positive force in the feminist community of performers and directors in the adult entertainment industry?" "Feminism in adult film emerged during the feminist ”sex wars” over pornography decades ago. At that time, a fledgling subculture called sex-positive feminism challenged the anti-porn, anti-sex feminists who believed that pornography incited violence against women. The pro-porn warriors of those days, Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen, Nina Hartley, Pat/Patrick Califia, and Gayle Rubin, to name a few, shaped a philosophy of female empowerment that is the creative heart of Femina Potens."
-Rich Moreland  
Member since 2009


Volunteer of The Month!
Q. "How has becoming a FP volunteer cultivated a difference in your life?" A: " Volunteering at FP has connected me to an amazing network of artists, friends, events and organizations that make little baby queers like me feel enriched, valued, and happy to be alive!  Two years ago I never would have had the balls to attend a bondage event or porn screening, but today I'm sitting in the front row!  Not only do I get to participate in all that FP has to offer, but as a volunteer I help to make FP an important place in other people's lives.  I thank FP for anchoring me in the San Francisco queer community."

-Farrell Topham
Marketing Assistant 
Volunteer since 2010

 

Upcoming Events

August 7 , (Saturday) Opening Reception & Artists Talk 7-10pm Celebrate with artists Navja Sol, Molly Crabapple, Jesse Trepper, Mev Luna, Corey Gunter Brown, and Cassidy Wright. (FREE)

August 8 , (Sunday) Femme Cock: Harnessing Your Power" Harness Making & Decorating Workshop with Holly Holbrook 3pm Come get your custom harness fitted and decorated with the help an expert on sexy accessories. ($65) Reserve your spot now.

August 14 (Saturday) "Unravel Me" Art of Restraint Madison Young, Lochai, Fivestar, Danarama of Two Knotty Boys and some of the most skilled rope artists and bondage experts in the country gather to meld art and bondage, to intertwine submission and empowerment, in a dynamic exchange with performers and the luscious decadence that we offer to our audience. Doors open at 7:30 and lock at 8pm ($55 for members - $75 for non-members) Reserve your spot today .

August 15 (Sunday) Erotic Needle Point Workshop 3pm Join the talented Amy Leonard for some sexy sewing! ($10) Reserve your spot now .

August 18 (Wednesday) Talk with Katie "Megaphone" Diamond 7pm Katie Diamond is a graphic artist that will be talking about the illustrative process of creating a book that explores transgenderism, trans-sexuality and sex. Purchase your tickets here .

August 19 (Thursday) Electro-Feminists Nicky Click & Violent Vickie 7pm Come hear two of our favorite Electro-Feminist bands perform live music.  Fun electro pop merged with songs about queer femme identity, feminism, and heartbreak.  ($10)  Purchase your tickets today  .

August 20 (Friday) "Transformation" Double-Feature Movie Night Fundraiser  8pm We're showing Teen Wolf and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. All Proceeds benefit, Gender Check, a nonprofit organization helping to fund transgendered individuals in the legalities of gender transitioning. Doors open at 7:30. ($15-20) Reserve your advance tickets now  .

August 21 (Saturday) Sizzle 8pm Award Winning Literature Series. Featuring select authors from Michelle Tea's "It's So You: 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style" Anthology, including Sherilynn Connelly, Cindy Emch, and Samara Halperin  Purchase advance tickets here  .


 

Thank you to our sponsor Edible Love Chocolates !

Volunteer With FP
Assistant to Executive Director
 

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