In this episode, FQT director Che Gossett speaks with Charles Gaines about his artistic practice, his interest in systems thinking and unthinking, and how Gaines takes up questions about seriality and discreteness, difference and repetition in relation to race, materiality and infrastructure. They discuss Gaines's pathbreaking 1993 exhibition with Catherine Lord at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of California, Irvine, titled "The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,” as well as his 2022 monumental kinetic sculpture Moving Chains commissioned by Creative Time at Governor's Island, and his new 2025 work Hanging Tree, commissioned by the Equal Justice Initiative and installed in Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama.

Gaines’s work is included in prominent public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), and the Tate (London).

Audio Credit: Moving Chains audio, Creative Time, Governor's Island, New York

In this episode, FQT podcast host Che speaks with their sister, the artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist, Tourmaline. Tourmaline's practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible. In the episode they discuss Tourmaline's books, the national best seller Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, published by Reparations Books at Random House in 2025, and her children’s book One Day in June published by Penguin Press, as well as her films Happy Birthday Marsha, Salacia and recently, Pollinator, which won the 2022 Baloise Art Prize and was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and her portraits, which are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tourmaline’s work is also part of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Freedom Dreams.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett continues their conversation with Professor Susan Stryker about the 1966 Compton's cafeteria uprising and its afterlives, and the history and future of trans studies.

Professor Stryker's forthcoming book Changing Gender (FSG, 2026) will be published in August. Stryker takes an autotheoretical approach in the text, as well as offering a pathbreaking account of the historicity of gender as a category, transforming the ways in which it is conceptualized.

Music: "We Can Be Together" by Jefferson Airplane