Cities of Night

Ricardo Montez is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Chair of Liberal Arts in the Bachelors Program/Schools of Public Engagement. His book Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire (Duke University Press, 2020) considers the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Keith Haring’s art, exploring the artist’s cross-racial desire and its relationship to the Black and Latinx artists with whom he collaborated. Montez has contributed essays to museum publications, including Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines (National Gallery of Victoria 2019), Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum, 2020), and Marx Collection: 40 Works (Nationalgalerie-Staatliche Museum Berlin, 2019).  His writing also appeared in ASAP/Journal, Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought, GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay studies, Social Text, and Theatre Journal.

Montez is working on a second book project titled, Cities of Night: Queer Structures of Feeling and Experiments in Form. Taking its title from John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night, the project thinks through Rechy’s conjuring of night as a structure of feeling—a field of sexual practices, geographies, and affects in solution that will later come to cohere under, and be obscured by, post-Stonewall definitions of gay subculture, a subculture defined by fixed terms of political visibility and equally static conceptions of space. Examining the work of contemporary artists who manipulate the evidence of queer life, the project thinks through Rechy’s aesthetic sensibility and how his illumination of night resonates with the ways artists not only reveal structures of feeling but also potentially restore documentary material to a state of solution, performatively conjuring the emergent quality of cultural formation through unsettling fields of emotion.