Events
Salon Series 49: A Seat at the Table: Queer*+ Intersections
with Eve Scarborough, Jada Simone Haynes, Mikhail of Hearts
To celebrate Pride month, the Archive features a selection of work by Queer*+ designers, curated by members of the Collections Team.
- Date
- Time
To celebrate Pride month and the ongoing struggles for equity, this salon will showcase insights and perspectives of Eve Scarborough, Jada Simone Haynes, and Mikhail of Hearts as stewards of the Letterform Archive’s Permanent Collection through the acts of physical care, documentation, and audience activation.
They will explore the Archive’s Queer*+ intersections from a contemporary lens by considering their lived queer experiences, personal art practices, and how intersectional Queer*+ identities and experiences have historically been represented or overlooked in visual culture. They seek to establish A Seat at the Table, inviting dialogue and reflection around the following questions:
- Where do we see ourselves?
- How do we confront the colonial origins of archives in the work that we do?
- How can we honor and invite Queer*+ artists, designers, educators, and practitioners to pull up a chair and share their stories, across our past, present, and future?
The spread will include objects that engage both explicitly and implicitly with queerness, through an intersectional, expansive, and cross-disciplinary lens. The selection will also include objects that resonate personally, exploring queerness through structure, content, and language. A Seat at the Table is a call to action to challenge dominant narratives present in institutions and strive for inclusive storytelling in art and design.
Eve Scarborough
Eve Scarborough (she/her) is a writer and book artist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Mills College with a minor in Book Art. Presently, she works in the Collections department at Letterform Archive, concurrently balancing cataloging and digitization projects. Scarborough’s artistic work focuses on the tension between structure and content, memory and language loss, grief, and information decay, particularly as it applies to conservation and archives. She aims to create work that subverts the traditional role of artist / viewer and implicates the viewer as an active participant—reader, researcher, witness—in the narrative. Her current practice is grounded in daily writing and bookmaking, letterpress printing, and hand papermaking.
Jada Simone Haynes
Jada Simone Haynes (they/m) is a Black non-binary archivist and post-disciplinary artist deeply engaged in exploring the nuanced aspects of Black queer existence, resistance, and resilience. In their creative practice, they are particularly drawn to abstracted language, images and the transformative potential of knotted and knit fibers to serve as conduits for the density of personal and collective grief, ambiguous loss, memory, security, and desire. These vessels that weave fibers, verses, and vision create a constellation of experiences that delve into the textures of these themes and their futures.
Haynes graduated with honors from the University of California, Davis with a BA in Art Studio and a BA in Design. They are based in Northern California and the Bay Area where they also contribute to the field as a Collections Associate at the Letterform Archive. In this role, they merge their interests in art and memory caring for and organizing the collection, focusing on how archives can serve as better preservers of all bodies, objects, and experiences.
Mikhail of Hearts
Mikhail of Hearts (he/they) is a transsexual artist and curator of Tamil and Bengali origin. He graduated with a BFA from California College of the Arts and Crafts in 2021, and will be receiving his MA in Museum Studies from University of San Francisco in 2025. His work is an ongoing meditation on language, presentation, familiarity, and loss, manifesting in the physical plane via printmaking, writing, and multi-media installation. Language is a central part of his work and research; he views his artist practice as both a vessel as well as a co-conspirator, holding a personal lexicon which is in a constant state of rebirth and decay. They are always revisiting their personal archives, be it old Spotify playlists or WhatsApp conversations circa 2016; these older versions of himself are ever present within and in conversation with their current artistic and curatorial practice.
He carries this framework with him in his pedagogical efforts at Letterform Archive, where he works as a Collections Programming Associate. He is focused on building a bridge between preservation and access by activating the permanent collection through public programming and engaging in dialogue with the public.
He thinks of his grandmother daily.
