For what is likely to be our last event of 2025, you’re welcome to the launch of William J. Simmons’s book, Love and Degradation. Excessive Desire in Queer-Feminist Art – a collection of essays about love and language, desire and drama, and much more, that deals with Lana Del Rey, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola and many more…

For this presentation, William J. Simmons will be in conversation with curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud.

I want to say from the outset that this book is simply a record of what and whom I have loved, and an outline of a shift from one kind of language (that of art criticism and academia) into something that is not necessarily better nor worse, but that better suits how I want to relate to others, and to my work, and to the people I love, and used to love. I want this to be the last time that I rely so heavily on the words of others. I want to escape a language that never really belonged to me. That language continues to violently exclude. I want to leave one dream landscape and run wildly to another. How we can preserve ourselves when we bleed from heart to heart and place to place is the task at hand. 
—from the introduction, “Leaving Calabasas”

Love and Degradation. Excessive Desire in Queer-Feminist Art is published by Penn State University Press.

We may also receive soon some copies of Simmons’ concise and excellent 2021 essay, Queer Formalism: : The Return, published by Floating Opera Press.