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Voluminous Arts

@voluminousarts

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Mission: To foreground, nurture, and advance the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities.

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Our new collaborative series with the @leslielohmanmuseum launches April 14, with Context Clues—a set of workshops led by @devynnemory & @vitreous_lustre, @flautawitch & @cyberwitch666, and @aristilding & instinctathinc

RSVP link in bio. ❤

Launching Saturday April 14, Voluminous Arts’ Context Clues series invites attendees to think through the relationships the objects in the exhibition have to cultural communities, and collectively imagine shifts in awareness towards practices that nurture creativity and people.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is the only dedicated LGBTQIA+ art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQIA+ art and foster the artists who create it.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art provides a platform for artistic exploration through multi-faceted queer perspectives. The museum embraces the power of the arts to inspire, explore, and foster understanding of the rich diversity of LGBTQIA+ experiences.

Context Clues is curated by Voluminous Arts Founding Director and Lead Curator Gavilán Rayna Russom. by @voluminousarts

Voluminous Arts is transitioning. (We’ve become much more than a record label.)

We are in the midst of a massive expansion from our beginnings as a label to our future vision of becoming a cultural organization nurturing and advancing the creative culture of trans people.

We have observed that when trans and non-binary people are given the space to create expansively we experience power and agency in ways that are still not possible in our daily lives.

We want to do more community programs in our offices, make more space for trans people to create expansively and in connection with community.

We want to build a community arts center for trans people and trans culture to thrive, because we need it.

You can help us make this transition by supporting our fundraising campaign via withfriends.co today!

Follow the link in our bio to learn more. by @voluminousarts

After a beautiful six weeks, our residency at @cara_the_org comes to an end with the closing of our Traces exhibition this weekend. Traces is on view and open-to-the-public through September 4th.

Over the last 6 weeks, our residency at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances became a temporary cultural center and commons where Voluminous Arts residents immersed themselves in artistic research, curated public programs focused on highlighting forward-pointing performance work by experimental artists, participated in workshops with deeply engaged guest faculty recognized in cultural studies and the arts, and shared their work through the “Traces” exhibition, featuring material and sonic remnants from the research, performance and conversations that took place in the space.

Curated and conceived by Voluminous Arts founding director Gavilán Rayna Russom, and co-developed with the CARA team, the Voluminous Arts studio & study program nurtured the practices of six artists from the label's roster: Mercury Symbol, Anka Raczynska, Omari Love, Rat Porridge, Ris Gumpert, and Yvonne LeBien. The study program aimed to facilitate intimate and regenerative encounters with art and scholarship. Each artist was encouraged to re-imagine their creative practices through interactions with guest faculty visitors Victoria Cruz, Anaïs Duplan, devynn emory, Silvia Federici, Che Gossett, Isadora Neves Marques, S.J Norman, and McKenzie Wark, through one on one and group sessions with Rayna, as well as individual research, and informal conversations. Structured activities were intentionally complemented by generative open time, building upon what Rayna calls “drift continuities”: situations where meaning and structure are created improvisationally in the passage from one pre-planned event to another, without scripting the transition time or planning for how transitions might occur.

If you’d like to join us for a last hurrah, come to CARA this Saturday at 3PM for a guided walkthrough led by Gavilán Rayna Russom. by @voluminousarts

In 2025 Voluminous Arts launched two radio residencies: Hole Vision with @flautawitch and @sodomahigomorra on @thelotradio and Spirit Time with Rat Porridge and @mercurysymbol on @mutantradiotbilisi.

We collaborated with two giants of internet radio: The Lot Radio in Brooklyn and Mutant Radio in Tbilisi to present two residencies. Spirit Time with hosts Rat Porridge and Mercury Symbol aired as a limited series, with archives available to listen to here. Hole Vision with hosts Crystal Peñalosa and Sodomahigomorra continues into 2026. All the past episodes are archived online. by @voluminousarts

WHAT WE’RE BUILDING ON: From museum collabs to degenerate club functions and so much more, 2025 was a packed year of programming at Voluminous Arts.

ELECTRONIC WORKSHOPS AT THE MET: In June, we headed uptown to present a set of workshops on experimental approaches to analog synthesis and DJing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As part of our ongoing work collaborating with arts institutions and expanding their possibilities, values, and archives through the perspectives of trans* creators and thinkers we presented an evening of workshops at The Met. These workshops, led by Jazmine (JT) Green and Crystal Peñalosa with assistance from María Rivera Felizardo and Rico St Rico took place in the musical instrument wing of the museum. by @voluminousarts

This is our first update in a while. Since wrapping up our T4Tuesdays and CROSSFADE community programs last fall we here at Voluminous Arts have been engaged in group and individual reflective work, looking back on the first five years of the organization, around at what the present asks of us, and forward to our organization’s future. We’ve also been deepening our partnerships with many NYC cultural organizations and institutions through site visits and conversational exchanges. Reflective pauses and structures have been a core part of Voluminous Arts’ ethos and culture since the organization’s inception. It’s how we build sustainably.

In her 2009 “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” the brilliant Eve Tuck writes the following:

“One alternative to damage-centered research is to craft our research to capture desire instead of damage. I submit that a desire-based framework is an antidote to damage-centered research. An antidote stops and counteracts the effects of a poison, and the poison I am referring to here is not the supposed damage of Native communities, urban communities, or other disenfranchised communities but the frameworks that position these communities as damaged.”

Tuck’s work forms a crucial component of Voluminous Arts’ 2024 theoretical framework and planning document, and remains central to how we are moving and talking about how we move at this time. by @voluminousarts

CROSSFADE IS NOW @DEFRAGMENT.MP3! We’re overjoyed that the T4T Open Decks events (fka CROSSFADE) that we incubated with @cmdjazmine are now part of of her DEFRAGMENT series.

Since May, Jazmine (JT) Green has been hosting CROSSFADE: A T4T Open Decks night at Wonderville in Brooklyn through Voluminous Arts. Jazmine is an audio documentarian by trade and artist by practice. She is the founder of Molten Heart, a duPont-Columbia award-winning creative and commercial studio focused on the texture of sound. Molten Heart’s collaborators include The Met, Stitcher Studios, and Audible.

Her practice explores the spiritual qualities of improvisation, the convergence of technology and the human body, and the intersection of gender and race through visual, performance, and sound art. She writes and produces electronic music as CMD+JAZMINE. Her projects and performances have been exhibited at The University of Chicago and ICU VCA, received recognition such as the 2021 Third Coast Award for Best Documentary Short, and featured at festivals such as On Air and RESONATE.

Earlier this year Jazmine joined the team here at Voluminous Arts and in addition to working together on the organization, we began incubating CROSSFADE with her. Now we’re proud to announce that the series is taking on a life of its own beyond Voluminous Arts as part of her DEFRAGMENT series of parties, radio streams, and events dedicated to the expansion of waveforms and gender.

Make sure to follow @cmdjazmine and @defragment.mp3 for all the details on the next Open Decks event at Wonderville on September 9th. by @voluminousarts

THANK YOU FOR AN AMAZING T4TUESDAYS JOURNEY!!! 🥹❤️

Earlier this month our monthly T4Tuesdays series came to a close with a packed screening of Bloodsisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism followed by a trans community discussion of the film.
At the final T4Tuesdays last week, over 30 trans people gathered together to watch Michelle Handelman’s 1995 documentary Bloodsisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism and participate in a round table discussion. Unpacking the film through the lens of its connections to the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities led to a needed and moving free-form conversation that touched on visibility, opacity, terminology, categorization, knowledge creation, safety, and so much more. It was a fitting conclusion for the series, brining the themes and threads that formed the core intentions of its creation to the surface.

Back in July of 2024 we started T4Tuesdays after losing our physical space. The idea was to make the kind of programming we had been offering at our space more publicly available, and to provide a glimpse into what it could be like if we had the cultural community center we dream of. A dream that continues to guide our vision and our work here at Voluminous Arts.

Over its year-long life, T4Tuesdays brought trans people together in physical space with a focus on our cultural life, rather than our individual identities or what we produce. Each month trans DJs, practitioners, knowledge keepers, artists, and organizers donated their time and talent to make this bonding experience possible. And none of us here on the organizing committee are the same after. T4Tuesdays was transformative, catalyzing, eye-opening, sexy, and joyful. We are excited to take stock of what we learned and to plan our next steps in the reverberations of what we shared.

A huge thank you to everyone who came and participated in this series. Thank you to The Bush for saying yes when we proposed it and hosting us for its first six events. Thank you to Mad Tropical (RIP) for being our home since then.

Thank you to the DJs, presenters, panelists, and speakers who donated their time and talent each month. by @voluminousarts

I get it… so let’s meet at @wondervillenyc tonight, August 11th, for @voluminousarts’ open decks from 8pm-1am ✨ we’re raising money for @waterbbx_ and slots are 15-30 minutes depending on attendance. Bring ur rekordbox sticks and see you tonight! by @voluminousarts

This week, we are fundraising for our dear @waterbbx_ ❤️ With each edition of CROSSFADE, we raise funds to benefit a trans community member in need. Hellen, a dear member of our community that has been facing housing insecurity over the last year.

Want to support Hellen but can’t make it to CROSSFADE? You can donate directly to her Gofundme at the link in bio. 🫶

Voluminous Arts is back with our open decks series for anyone self-identifying as transgender who is a DJ, aspiring DJ, or curious about DJing! It’s CROSSFADE: a T4T Open Decks, on Monday August 11th 8pm - 2am hosted by CMD+JAZMINE at Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11221. Based on the understanding that DJing plays an increasingly important role in the lives of many trans artists, Voluminous Arts is launching this series to provide access to DJ equipment in a club environment to self identified trans and non-binary people. Trans people interested in learning to DJ, upcoming or accomplished Trans DJs, and Trans folks curious about DJing are invited to sign up for a slot, bring their Rekordbox formatted USB and play! by @voluminousarts

NEXT TUESDAY!!! On August 12, come hang out with us at T4Tuesdays at @madtropical. At this month’s event we’re screening @michellehandelman 1995 film Bloodsisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism and chatting about it from trans perspectives. Later night we’ve got selections from @colorblock_films in the back and selections from our radio residencies playing in the front. And of course jigsaw puzzles in the middle room.

Before the party gets revved up, come meet us at open office hours starting at 6 where you can learn about the work we are doing and get involved. Office hours is also a great time to co-work and/or organize with fellow trans people. Office hours is followed by skill shares, workshops, panels, and activities at 8 where you can make friends, meet people and get ready to dance to the DJs of the expanding Voluminous Arts community.

On August 12th we’re yielding to the slowness and heat of late summer with a sultry edition of T4Tuesdays. We’re going to do a special T4T screening of Bloodsisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism by Michelle Handelman. Afterwards we’ll make space to talk about how the film connects to the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities. This is an open forum conversation for trans people rather than a formal panel.

After the film and conversation, we’re cultivating a trans-led social and cultural space with films from ColorBlock Films and a selection of recordings from Hole Vision with @sodomahigomorra and @flautawitch and Spirit Time with Rat Porridge and @mercurysymbol.

All night we’ll have jigsaw puzzles in the middle room for a lower stimulus alternative to the dance floor. It’s also a v cute way to meet people if you’re shy.

Toolbox Collective will be joining us all night to distribute free harm reduction and safer sex supplies as well as KN95 masks. Photos by @zippeee by @voluminousarts

ONE WEEK AWAY! GET READY FOR OUR T4T OPEN DECKS AT @wonderville! RSVP & Gfm link in bio ❤️

Voluminous Arts is back with our open decks series for anyone self-identifying as transgender who is a DJ, aspiring DJ, or curious about DJing! It’s CROSSFADE: a T4T Open Decks, on Monday August 11th 8pm - 1am hosted by @cmdjazmine at Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11221. Based on the understanding that DJing plays an increasingly important role in the lives of many trans artists, Voluminous Arts is launching this series to provide access to DJ equipment in a club environment to self identified trans and non-binary people. Trans people interested in learning to DJ, upcoming or accomplished Trans DJs, and Trans folks curious about DJing are invited to sign up for a slot, bring their Rekordbox formatted USB and play!

Each edition of CROSSFADE raises funds to benefit a trans community member in need. In August we’ll be raising funds to support Hellen, a queer native New Yorker and service industry worker who is facing housing insecurity while caring for an undocumented family member.

Voluminous Arts is a cultural organization with a vision to build a community center for trans people in New York City. by @voluminousarts