Tara Series: Powerful and Dangerous: Exploring the Impact of Audre Lorde’s Writing and Community (Online)

Powerful and Dangerous: Exploring the Impact of Audre Lorde’s Writing and Community

This virtual talk examines the life, work, and enduring influence of Audre Lorde—Black poet, writer, radical feminist, Womanist, lesbian, and human rights activist. Lorde lived on Staten Island with her partner, Frances Clayton, and her two children, spending 17 years in the Stapleton Heights neighborhood while teaching at Hunter College and producing some of her most significant writing.

Presenter Munro will highlight the Alice Austen House's 2020 exhibition, Powerful and Dangerous: The Images and Words of Audre Lorde, which celebrates Lorde’s groundbreaking work as a writer, activist, and poet. Developed collaboratively with some of Lorde’s closest friends, colleagues, and sister comrades, the exhibition offers an intimate look at her life and creative community.

Participants will view rarely seen photographs of Lorde and her circle, take a virtual tour of the exhibition, and engage in a conversation centered on friendship, collective care, and the powerful networks that shaped and sustained Lorde’s work.

Speaker

Victoria Munro, born in Wellington, New Zealand, is an artist, educator, writer, and curator whose multifaceted practice bridges sculpture, public art, and cultural leadership. Munro is the Executive Director and Curator of the Alice Austen House Museum, where she stewards a site of LGBTQ+ visibility and storytelling. She also serves as Board President of the Museums Council of New York City and sits on both the Executive Leadership Committee of the NYC Parks and Open Spaces Coalition and the National Trust’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios Program. As founder of the Queer Ecologies Garden Project at Alice Austen Park, Munro fuses environmental activism with queer theory, cultivating a living, evolving space that reimagines relationships between identity, land, and community. Her work—across sculpture, curation, and ecological practice—champions queer presence in both natural and institutional spaces.

Pictured: Audre reviews the final draft of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,

her biomythography in her Staten Island study. Photo by JEB 1981.

This lecture is part of the program In the Spirit of Tara: A Celebration of Five Women Who Left a Lasting Legacy – Dorothy Day, Audre Lorde, Frances Perkins, Pauli Murray and Alice Austen, funded by a NY City Council Discretionary Initiative.

Free with RSVP