Dr. Micah Salkind is the Deputy Director of The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. As part of his work, he collaborates with large non-profit cultural institutions as well as emerging artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs. He also serves on the boards of the Providence Public Library and Community MusicWorks and is an ongoing collaborator with dancers and scholars in Chicago’s Honey Pot Performance collective and Matthew Cumbie Projects’ “Growing Our Own Gardens” initiative.
A DJ, sound designer, and curator, he is the author of Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds for which these oral history interviews were collected. The work "historicizes house music, the rhythmically focused electronic dance sound born in the post-industrial maroon spaces of Chicago's queer, black, and Latino social dancers. Working from oral history interviews, archival research, and performance ethnography, it argues that the remediation and adaptation of house by multiple and overlapping crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that contemporary Chicago house music producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters re-remember and re-animate house as an archive indexing experiences of queer of colour congregation."
Currently, the audio files and biographical information are available; transcripts will be added when complete.
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Interview with Latham "the Lady Speedstick" Zearfoss
Micah Salkind
Latham Zearfoss works in Chicago, where they produce time-based images, objects and experiences about selfhood and otherness. Outside of the studio, they contribute to collective motions toward joy and reflection through social projects such as a queer dance party (Chances Dances), a critical space for white allyship (Make Yourself Useful), and an itinerant conference on socially-engaged art (Open Engagement). Latham graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2008 and the University of Illinois at Chicago with an MFA in 2011. They have exhibited their work, screened their videos, and DJed internationally and all over the U.S.
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Interview with Leslie McClellan and Sherry “Sweet” Barren
Micah Salkind
McClellan and Barren are a couple who came of age during the 1990s partying to Chicago house music. In this interview they recall venues like Kaboom that had an impact on their lives as queer women of color in Chicago.
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Interview with Lora “Lori” Branch
Micah Salkind
Lora “Lori” Branch grew up in a large, conservative household on Chicago’s South Side. It was a space suffused with jazz and pop music, and a love for the church. She remembers that before becoming a DJ, she had attended several Vertigo parties with her friend Jean-Pierre Campbell, and that she would also accompany him on record buying trips to Wax Trax!. Branch says that Vertigo founder Eric Bradshaw knew that Campbell had amassed a significant collection of 12” singles, and that she was not only a music lover, but would draw a crowd because she was attractive. At his direction, Branch went to work, learning how to mix and program disco punk music under the tutelage of Craig Loftis’ friend José Gomez. She has held residencies at CK’s/Auggies’s, Shelter, Trade N Flavor, The Union, Paris Dance, The Cotton Club, and Red Dog and also spun at Estelle’s, Berlin, and Avalon.
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Interview with Marea 'Black/Blessed Madonna' Stamper
Micah Salkind
Marea Stamper left high school at the age of sixteen to become an “adventure capitalist.” She spent her teens taking cheap flights to and from St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis and other cities around the South and Midwest to sell mixtapes by Chicago artists like Boo Williams, Terry Mullen, Paul Johnson, and Glenn Underground. Eventually Stamper settled for a while between Lexington and Louisville. An ecstatic dancer and omnivorous music lover, Stamper cultivated her ear as a DJ during these years, using a collection of vinyl from the ’70s and ’80s that she and her mother retrieved from a seller at an antique mall to practice her blends and tricks. When a former roommate left Dust Traxx records in Chicago to become Felix Da Housecat’s manager, label owner Radek Hawryszczuk invited her to come work for him. Stamper subsequently worked at the label/distributor for about five years on and off, making records in her spare time and DJing parties like the legendary Boom Boom Room. Eventually Stamper left Dust Traxx for a copy-editing job. When Nate Seider asked Stamper to apply to be the assistant talent buyer at Smart Bar, her world turned upside down. She spent a year under him before becoming the venerated venue’s first female talent buyer. Around that same time she released a series of hit underground records with local labels Stripped & Chewed and Argot, and began getting booked at Berlin’s Berghain/Panorama Bar. Today The Blessed Madonna (she officially changed her DJ handle in July 2020) is a global DJ in demand, jetting between her homes in Chicago and London and parties across the continental US and Europe. She continues to support and champion the underground scene that gave her wings