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Honoring Jim Hubbard, Tourmaline, and James Wentzy

June 3, 6pm-9pm

VAVA hits the big screen

Grab your popcorn and a cocktail (or two) and join us in honoring the achievements and impact of Jim Hubbard, Tourmaline, and James Wentzy as VAVA steps into the theatre for an evening of screenings and celebration. Hosted by the incomparable Viva Ruiz.

More information, tickets and donations here.

JIM HUBBARD has been making films since 1974. He made United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a feature length documentary on ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, which won Best Documentary at MIX Milano and Reel Q Pittsburgh LGBT Film Festival and has played at over 150 museums, universities and film festivals worldwide.

Sarah Schulman and he completed 187 interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project. He, along with James Wentzy, created a 9-part cable access television series based on the Project.

He co-founded MIX - the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, he created the AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library.

Full bio and more information here

TOURMALINE: A Guggenheim Fellow and TIME 100 Honoree, Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work spans high art and pop culture. Tourmaline’s art is in the permanent collections of The Met, MoMA, Tate, and the Whitney, among other museums. Her influence in contemporary art has also been showcased in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Tourmaline’s award-winning films — including the critically acclaimed Happy Birthday, Marsha!; Salacia; Atlantic is a Sea of Bones; and Mary of Ill Fame — have been widely recognized for their unique blend of historical narrative and speculative futurism.

Tourmaline’s commercial film projects have premiered at the MTV Video Music Awards, and she has led the creative for brand campaigns with Fortune 500 companies, such as a film series presented by Unilever on the topic of LGBTQ+ communities in rural America.

Tourmaline’s portfolio also extends to fashion: her trans-inclusive swimwear line with Chromat debuted at New York Fashion Week with glowing praise from Vogue.

Tourmaline’s forthcoming book MARSHA (May 2025) is the first definitive biography of the revolutionary Black trans activist Marsha P. Johnson. It received a Starred Review by Publishers Weekly and was selected by The New York Times for inclusion in the Nonfiction Spring Book Preview.

The recipient of the BlackStar Luminary Award, Stonewall Visionary Award, HBO Queer Art Prize, and the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel, Tourmaline crafts worlds across a variety of media that center pleasure, possibility, and transformation. She is a sought-after speaker at institutions like Princeton, Yale, MoMA, The Met, UC Berkeley, Smith College, and Outfest, and has been frequently featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Artforum, and TIME Magazine.

A former leader of the Trans Health Campaign at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Tourmaline has built a career rooted in community organizing and trans liberation, and is a transformative voice in movements for racial, economic, and gender justice.

Tourmaline is a graduate of Columbia University and lives in Miami with her partner Cameron and their cat Jean.

JAMES WENTZY was born in 1952 in Brookings, South Dakota. While studying at Southern Illinois University (at Carbondale), he worked at the local PBS station producing [16mm filmed] episodes for the weekly series Spotlight on Southern Illinois; after graduating in an interdisciplinary degree program [of visual arts] in 1976, he then moved to New York City.

Early on in his New York life, Wentzy lived in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill where one of his neighbors was noted gay porn filmmaker Arch Brown, who needed help with [16mm camera] cinematography for two of his films, so of course he agreed—it was the neighborly thing to do. In 1979, he and Bronx-born artist Darrel Ellis applied and was awarded an artist studio at PS-1 [before it became MoMA PS1] and lived there (ever-so discreetly) until early 1982. By that time, Wentzy had been working part-time printing [B+Ws] in the darkroom for The SoHo Photographer, D. James Dee, who allowed Wentzy’s homesteading the basement [from 1982—2013] of his recently acquired building. After formally testing positive for HIV in 1990, he joined ACT UP and began video-documenting the societal and cultural responses to the AIDS Crisis.

From 1991, he began producing programs for Public Access Television; and by January 5,1993, inaugurated the weekly series AIDS Community Television. Along with fostering and helping-out crewing on the other weekly series ACT UP Live Call-In, Wentzy had produced and edited ~140 half-hour AIDS Community Television programs documenting ACT UP and AIDS activism, representation of People Living With AIDS, and the fight against AIDS as a Political Crisis. He webmastered the comprehensive on-line archive of documents and activist history on actupny.org. In total, he was principal in amassing more than 600-hours of camera-original [Hi8] documentary footage; cumulating as the video archivist for the Estate Project's AIDS Activist Video Preservation Project for the New York Public Library.

In 2002 he made the feature-length documentary Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP, with screenings at the Berlinale; Tribeca; and many other Film Festivals worldwide; most recently, throughout the 2024 Venice Arte Biennale in their Disobedience Exhibition. He was the principal cinematographer for the ACT UP Oral History Project. His dear friend Ho Tam made a feature-length film about him, his video work and his hand-drawn art books called Books of James. His video work, notes, and catalogues are preserved in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.