Unconventional Education:
Queerness as a Possibility
with Geraldine Barón and Naima Green, moderated Maria De Victoria
Géza, 306 Maujer
In conjunction with Amant’s exhibition On Education, this program considers how queer individuals have reimagined learning by resisting normative social structures and building collective modes of knowledge-sharing. Following a screening of Charmaine Poh’s What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world (2024), artists Geraldine Barón and Naima Green join artist Maria De Victoria in conversation. Together, they will reflect on three powerful moments of refusal and reinvention: Caroline Pratt’s founding of the progressive City and Country School in 1914, the creation of the Brooklyn Queer Parent email listserv in 2016, and Catherine Opie’s radical 1990 self-portrait series—Nursing, Cutting, and Pervert. Each of these acts offers a blueprint for queering education, parenting, and self-representation—proposing alternative, embodied ways of knowing and being.
All Amant programs are free and open to the public. For Unconventional Education: Queerness as a Possibility, we are pleased to offer free on-site licensed childcare for attendees. To use this service, advance registration is required by emailing curatorial@amant.org. Unfortunately, we will not be able to accept drop-ins for childcare without prior registration.
Doors open at 9:30 AM on Saturday, June 28, with childcare drop-off located at 306 Maujer Street. Seating for the event is first come, first served, with limited standing room available. RSVPs are strongly encouraged to help us plan and ensure a comfortable experience for all.
Geraldine Barón is an Argentinean visual artist and casting director living and working in NYC. Her work examines the relationship between image and text to explore the construct of family. Her practice draws from her background in cinema, and the unconventional methodologies from her casting work in film.
For sixteen years, she has been working on a series titled Rehearsal for a Family, comprising photographs and texts that explore family-making and its constitutive elements of intimacy, queerness, language, labor, and storytelling. Both a diary and a portal, the series chronicles the lives of her immediate family, partners, lovers, and friends over time. The research and interview processes from her work as a casting director acutely inform her relationship to image-making. This ongoing research generates source material for her work across disciplines, including a nomadic reading series under the same title currently taking place in NYC.
As a casting director, she’s known for her work on critically acclaimed films such as Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2024), Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Sundance 2020, winner of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale), Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama (Sundance 2023, BAFTA winner), Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (Sundance 2024), the Safdie brothers’ Good Time (Cannes Film Festival 2017), as well as the HBO’s tv show Euphoria, amongst many others.
She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and later moved to Los Angeles and New York City. Geraldine holds a BA from the University of Los Angeles, California and an MFA from Columbia University. She participated in art residencies in Buenos Aires, including Laboratorio de Cine at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and the artist program at Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas. She received the McNamara Creative Arts Grant for her work in photography and was nominated for a BIFA Award for her casting work.
Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, installation, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.
Green has two upcoming solo exhibitions at Astor Weeks and the International Center of Photography in New York. She has had solo shows at Baxter Street CCNY and Fotografiska, both NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at the Getty Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Mass MoCA, BRIC, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Houston Center for Photography, amongst others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Baxter Street CCNY, Bronx Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, MASS MoCA, Penumbra Foundation, Pocoapoco, Vermont Studio Center, and others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography Library, Museum of Modern Art Library, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.
Maria De Victoria is a filmmaker and performance artist and co-founded Artists & Mothers in 2024. She was born in 1980 in Lima, Peru, and immigrated to Miami in the early ’90s. Her work, which critiques politics and comments on the marginalized, primarily revolves around her own experiences of immigration, migration, and cultural differences. Through this personal lens and using conceptual projects and performances that often directly involve the audience, she addresses larger themes of migration, labor, and the conditions of contemporary art. She currently lives and works in New York City.