Sean Fader receives grant from Skau Music & Art Fund

The Newcomb College Institute's Skau Music & Art Fund awarded a grant to Professor of Practice Sean Fader to support a documentary photographic art project. Fader's description of the project follows. 

With the assistance of a grant from the Skau Music and Art Fund, I will spend eight weeks this summer crisscrossing the country, driving to all of the locations where queer people were murdered in 1999 and 2000. I will be photographing the locations with a Sony Digital Mavica, the first digital camera that was available at the time, to create a photographic archive of all the recorded queer murders. There is an immediacy to this project: It was exactly 20 years ago that the Matthew Shepard and the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was presented to Congress, expanding the definition of federal hate crime laws to include queer people.  It was eventually signed by President Barack Obama 10 years ago. Additionally, it is exactly 50 years since the Stonewall riots. However, the current administration is changing laws that have protected queer people. The trans ban in the military, the bathroom ban, and the religious rights movement all play a part in institutionalizing queer hate. According to LAMBDA’s Website, “the National Coalition of  Anti-Violence Programs’ ‘Crisis of Hate’ report [states that] 2017 was the deadliest year in recent history for LGBTQ+ people in the United States.” Queer people are still being murdered at horrific rates.