SAM RICHARDSON
The bicoastal nonprofit Dirty Looks announced that it has added seven new members to its board, expanding the total number to 11. Dirty Looks will also stage the upcoming fourth edition of “On Location,” its monthlong queer-film screening series, in Los Angeles for the first time next summer. The first three editions of the annual festival occurred in New York.
The new board members are Joshua Alvarenga, Rhys Ernst, Andrew Gould, Jamillah James, Harry Vaughn, John Polly, and Justine Suzanne Jones, who join Samuel Vasquez, Lauryn Siegel, KP Pepe, and Pati Hertling.
The new board members reflect the organization’s focus of the intersections between art, film, and the LGBTQ+ community. James is curator at the Institute of Contempoary Art Los Angeles. Ernst was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and is a producer and director on Amazon’s Transparent. Gould is director of development of ONE Archives Foundation, a nonprofit that supports ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries which recently co-organized the exhibition “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.” with the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Polly is an editor-at-large for NewNowNext.com, the editorial branch of Viacom’s Logo network, and works on the production of the reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Alvarenga works in development for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Jones is a film producer, and Vaughn is a film festival programmer who has worked with Sundance and the LGBTQ-focused festival Frameline.
Dirty Looks founder Bradford Nordeen said that the decision to stage the festival in L.A. will help to strengthen Dirty Looks’s roots in the city as well as in its film communities. “We’re usually seen within the context of art world, and these additions will help diversify the ways On Location’s spatial interventions can reach diverse communities,” Nordeen told ARTnews.
“On Location” presents various queer film programming every day for a month in the summer in various queer-oriented spaces from bars and clubs to LGBT centers to conventional art spaces. The programming aims to highlight a breadth of stories and voices of queerness work in various modes, including experimental, narrative, documentary. The full curatorial team for “On Location” and additional details will be announced early next year.