20S x AFP | American Faggot Party Artist Panel

$20 Suggested Donation

Join us for a dynamic artist panel spotlighting the bold voices shaping contemporary visual culture. Presented by AFP, this conversation brings together five artists—Slava Mogutin, Drake Carr, Myles Loftin, Oscar yi Hou, and curator Quil Lemons—whose practices explore identity, queerness, race, beauty, and the politics of representation across photography, painting, performance, and more.

The discussion will be moderated by artist Giselle Byrd, whose insightful guidance will frame an evening of reflection, resistance, and creative exchange.

Join us for a dynamic artist panel spotlighting the bold voices shaping contemporary visual culture. Presented by AFP, this conversation brings together five artists—Slava Mogutin, Drake Carr, Myles Loftin, Oscar yi Hou, and curator Quil Lemons—whose practices explore identity, queerness, race, beauty, and the politics of representation across photography, painting, performance, and more.

The discussion will be moderated by artist Giselle Byrd, whose insightful guidance will frame an evening of reflection, resistance, and creative exchange.

Giselle Byrd is the Executive Director of The Theater Offensive, located in Boston, MA, making her the first Black trans woman to lead a regional theatre company in the United States, where she is passionately continuing and amplifying the theater’s mission for uplifting and elevating the work of queer and transgender artists of color and LGBTQIA2S+ youth and their allies. She was recently appointed to the Massachusetts Commission on The Status of Women, making her the first trans woman of color to serve on the commission. where she plans to continue their mission to advance women and girls toward full equity in all areas of life and to promote rights and opportunities for all women and girls, ensuring that trans women and girls are not an afterthought. As a producer, she holds the honor of being the first transgender woman to be accepted into Through Her Lens: The Tribeca and Chanel Women's Filmmaker Program. In November 2024, Boston’s 25th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance Committee awarded her the inaugural Boston Trans Art & Culture Trendsetter Award, following the announcement that her efforts in conjunction with The Theater Offensive caused Boston’s City Council to officially commemorate Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Quil Lemons (b. 1997, South Philadelphia) is a New York-based artist and photographer whose work tenderly reimagines the intersections of Blackness, queerness, masculinity, and kinship. His practice is deeply rooted in personal mythology, using the camera to build worlds where softness is a form of resistance and beauty becomes a site of liberation. His images oscillate between the intimate and the iconic, drawing from familial archives, fashion fantasy, and queer futurity to forge a visual language that is at once poetic, political, and defiantly tender.

Slava Mogutin is a New York-based Russian-American multimedia artist and author exiled from Russia for his outspoken writing and activism. Informed by his bicultural dissident and refugee experience, Mogutin’s work examines the notions of displacement and identity, pride and shame, devotion and disaffection, love and hate.

Oscar yi Hou is an artist and writer based in New York. He was born and raised in Liverpool, England. He received his B.A in Visual Art from Columbia University. He has also studied at the L’École des Arts de la Sorbonne. His work is anchored in personhood, pulling together a syncretic field of iconography that describes complex layers of identity and relation. Alongside his solo exhibition East of sun, west of moon at the Brooklyn Museum, yi Hou is recipient of the third annual UOVO Prize in 2022. In 2021 he presented A sky-licker relation and A dozen poem-pictures at James Fuentes, New York and JamesFuentes.Online, respectively. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Royal Academy, UK; Asia Society, New York; T293 Gallery, Rome, Italy; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; and Sprüth Magers Online.

Myles Loftin is an artist, storyteller, and creative collaborator based in Brooklyn but very much on the world’s radar. Brands like Calvin Klein, Converse, GCDS, Nike, and Under Armour commission him for ad campaigns, and publications like Paper, The Cut, Garage, i-D, and The Fader turn to him for editorials that resonate with discerning audiences.

Myles’ work, known for an often playful sensibility and an intimacy that unite viewer and subject, is driven by his desire to show up for underrepresented and misrepresented groups—because as a queer Black man, he knows the power of visibility. “We look to the media for ideas of what our future can be,” says Myles, “and if you don’t see yourself represented, it’s very hard for you to imagine a future for yourself.”

Drake Carr was born in 1993 in Flint, MI, and currently lives and works in New York City, NY. The artist received a BA in Graphic Design from Eastern Michigan University in 2015. Attuned to the diverse contexts in which he creates, Carr employs drawing, painting, and collage, approaching his practice with a versatility that encompasses commissioned portraits drawn in the intimate settings of subjects’ homes, paintings that oscillate between fine art and decoration in the gritty and communal atmosphere of a Bushwick dive bar, and immersive live drawing residencies spanning multiple weeks. Inspired by the fashion illustrators of the 1970s and ’80s like Antonio Lopez, he works with his subjects to style and pose them in dynamic ways. In all of his work, Carr paints a portrait of the communities he moves through that is simultaneously humorous and earnest, exaggerated and true-to-life.

Host or Publisher Twenty Summers