Museum in Exile: Martin Wong and the Museum of American Graffiti

"Museum in Exile" presents a section of a dissertation chapter on
artist Martin Wong and his massive collection of NYC graffiti
writing art and materials. It considers the queer social and visual
economies of Orientalist kitsch and camp that orient Wong's prior
work through the 1970s with San Francisco drag performance
collective, The Angels of Light with the New York subway writing
movement and Nuyorican poetics of the 1980s. Douglas focuses
on Wong's short-lived Museum of American Graffiti in 1989, and
his foreclosed attempt to archive this most ephemeral of forms.
Emerging from the entwined devastations of urban renewal policy
and the AIDS crisis-what writer Lee Quiñones terms the "radical
deforestation" of the Lower Eastside where Wong resided through
these decades-this archive constellates diverse practices of care
embedded in such collective performances of inscription.

Dinner and refreshments will be served. Please make sure you RSVP to Maryann at maryann.murtagh@duke.edu