This day-long celebration of the exhibition And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art, and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore explores the sustained resonance of Cahun and Moore’s personal, creative, and activist partnership. The program’s title comes from a line in Cahun’s 1930 surrealist autobiography Aveux non Avenus (“Disavowed Confessions”): “Behind this mask is another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” In this spirit, join a lineup of artists and writers in celebrating the ways Cahun and Moore used language, visual art, and personal expression to explore self-presentation.
The celebration builds on a morning Play Date that explores the theme “My Many Selves” with mask-making and an all-ages performance. The afternoon will begin with a poem by writer Elizabeth Hoover and live excerpts of new artistic works addressing Cahun and Moore’s life. Next, actor, writer, director, and singer John Cameron Mitchell will share his interest in Cahun and Moore, as well as read excerpts from his forthcoming play inspired by their lives, LSM. The day concludes with a conversation between writer, educator, and art historian Jennifer Shaw and exhibition co-curators Dean Daderko and Svetlana Kitto, along with Hoover and Mitchell.
Registration is encouraged; click here to sign up.
Accessibility Notes
- To request an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter for this event, please contact programs@camstl.org with as much prior notice as possible to ensure availability.
About the Contributors
Elizabeth Hoover is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize, and the recipient of the Pat Holt Prize for Critical Art Writing from Lambda Literary. Her writing about art, pop culture, and books has appeared in Kenyon Review, Paper, The Art Newspaper and the Washington Post, and she has published creative nonfiction in the North American Review, the Southeast Review, and StoryQuarterly. This year, Hoover is releasing a book-length poem about Cahun and Moore. She is an assistant professor of English at Webster University.
John Cameron Mitchell wrote, directed and starred in the musical/film Hedwig and the Angry Inch for which he won two Tony Awards, Best Director at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor. He directed the films Shortbus (2006); Rabbit Hole (2010, Best Actress Oscar nomination for Nicole Kidman); and How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017) starring Kidman and Elle Fanning. On TV he’s acted in Girls, Shrill, The Good Fight, The Sandman, Yellowjackets, City on Fire, and in Joe Vs Carole as Joe Exotic the “Tiger King”. His two fictional podcast series are: Anthem: Homunculus starring Glenn Close and Cynthia Erivo and Cancellation Island starring Holly Hunter. He is developing two feature films based on the lives of poet Allen Ginsberg and AIDS activist Peter Staley, as well as a new play LSM, based on Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s life.
Jennifer L. Shaw is Professor of Art History Emerita at Sonoma State University. She received an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, a PhD in art history from University of California, Berkeley, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Stanford University, and, recently, an MFA in Fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Shaw is author of many academic articles and three books: Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism and the Fantasy of France (Yale University Press), Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals (Ashgate/Routledge) and Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun (Reaktion Books, London) which received praise in Choice, Women’s Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, The Cut, and The Gay and Lesbian Review. Shaw’s work on Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore has been featured on the podcasts History is Gay and BBC Radio 4’s recently released History’s Secret Heroes. She just finished writing her second novel, The Butterfly Artist, based on the life of the 17th century artist and entomologist, Maria Sibylla Merian.