Sean Fader is back in town! This time leading a lecture and discussion on how art can be an unbelievable vehicle for driving awareness around the issues and the communities that we care most about.

Queer American Memorials places permanent memorials at sites across the United States where LGBTQ+ people were killed between 1999 and 2009, the decade Congress spent debating whether queer lives should be protected under the Federal Hate Crimes Act. We are building the archive that holds the stories of their lives, built with communities in each city where a memorial will stand. The project is led by artists Sean Fader and Maureen Towey and was developed inside MASS Design Group's Public Memory and Memorials Lab.

Queer American Memorials grew out of Sean Fader’s interest in knowing who was killed while Congress argued. He found a spreadsheet of names and did not recognize a single one, so he searched the first name. Nothing. The second. Nothing. He spent the next eighteen months with research librarians, searching every digital archive they could reach. That was a choice. Most of these stories only ever ran in local queer newspapers that no one digitized, and a story that is not online, for most of the country, never happened. In the summer of 2019 he drove 25,000 miles through 38 states and photographed the place where each of the forty people killed in 1999 and 2000 died, on a Sony Digital Mavica, a camera from 1999.

Learn more about Queer American Memorials here.