Victor Yates
Place is an important aspect of my work as a digital media artist, performance artist, storyteller, documentarian, poet, and writer. As a Black queer artist, my work centers on history, Black identity, Black queer representation, and the politics of sexuality. I am interested in creating artist-based ecosystems built through collaboration and not capitalism.
My latest multimedia video performance, Death Sentence, is a direct response to police brutality against Black bodies. I interwove the last words of Black people murdered by the police into an original spoken word poem. As a visual poem, Death Sentence works as a collage using African fabrics and symbols of rituals (such as transforming pumice into amethyst and burning sage) as well as crystal bowl sound therapy to facilitate healing from collective trauma.
The Tom of Finland Arts Festival commissioned a poem and video performance in October 2020. It kicked off the poetry panel for the festival.
My video performance, Death Sentence, received grants from the cities of Glendale and West Hollywood in 2021 and 2020. I was also awarded a grant from West Hollywood to shoot a documentary recording narratives of older gay men to preserve for younger generations. I am the winner of the 2020 George Floyd Honorarium for Poetry from the Los Angeles Press. I won the 2017 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers and the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Debut Fiction for my book, A Love Like Blood. My essay titled, The Three Picture I.D. Rule was published in the anthology, “Unheard Voices,” by IAP Press in March 2021.
